Decline Is a Choice, and Democrats Are Making It
The article discusses a perceived shift in societal attitudes towards crime and punishment over the past several decades. It highlights instances where individuals with extensive criminal histories have received lenient sentences, raising concerns about public safety. The author argues that this trend reflects a broader liberal inclination to empathize with criminals rather than prioritize the protection of law-abiding citizens.
- ▪There has been a significant reversal in attitudes towards crime, moving from strict punishment to leniency for offenders.
- ▪Recent cases in Michigan and North Carolina illustrate the consequences of allowing repeat offenders to remain free.
- ▪The author suggests that liberal ideologies may prioritize empathy for criminals over the safety of the public.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Hot Air |
| Canonical URL | https://hotair.com/david-strom/2026/05/22/decline-is-a-choice-and-democrats-are-making-it-n3815199 |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 10:00:11 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T14:02:02.404Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T14:02:02.404Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | jW5MfJiXygb3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Decline Is a Choice, and Democrats Are Making It David Strom 10:00 AM | May 22, 2026 AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File One of the most bizarre trends over the past 60 years or so is the sudden reversal of attitudes among Westerners on the issue of crime. I'm no social historian, so I can't pinpoint the exact time this reversal happened, and recognize that there is a substantial fraction of people who are as perplexed by this trend as I am, but as a society writ large, we went from "lock 'em up and throw away the key" to "that poor guy, he had a hard life and deserves a break." Advertisement googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display("div-gpt-300x250_4"); //googletag.pubads().refresh([gptAdSlot["div-gpt-300x250_4"]]) }); Oakland County, MI, where I live.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hot Air.
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