Hot on the heels of Christopher Dorner's twisted odyssey of murder and revenge, how early on the Progressive news apparatus picked up and ran the headline-grabbing subtext that he was a rogue cop out for vengeance against a system that had stacked the deck against him. Although it was reported ad nauseum that Dorner had crafted an extensive manifesto that had opened a window into the mind of one wholly obsessed with settling scores, nothing was mentioned in the media organs about Dorner's admiration of Progressive cultural and political figures. He even included an ironic take on the issue of gun control. I culled this quote from Mediaite.com's Andrew Kirell:

Dorner attacked National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre, calling him a "vile and inhumane piece of shit" who "never even showed 30 seconds of empathy for the children, teachers, and families of Sandy Hook." For that, the accused cop-killer wrote, "May all of your immediate and distant family die horrific deaths in front of you."

In light of the warped passion that Dorner has expended as an apologist for the inconceivable, my mind was again refocused on the causal link between worldview, ideology, political identification, and the commission of crime: a theme that I have touched on in similar articles. Since convicted felons do not typically vote, it is difficult to extrapolate analytical data to either prove or disprove such a thesis; and the realm of social science lacks the precision of physics or chemistry to draw definitive conclusions, since humans are not molecules determined by material forces. Moreover, such conclusions are treated as radioactive in the academy and media because they pull back the curtain on the cultural causal components of crime and reveal the nakedness of the popular notion that poverty and not values is the key to understanding social dysfunction. Indeed, it is the unspoken spawn of these liberal values that have led us to the straits we are currently in.

But the Creator has granted us reason and the capacity for wisdom; and wisdom is the ability to generalize from the specific to the general and to draw enduring maxims from anecdotal information. So first of all, can it be denied that the vast bulk of violent crime and murder occurs in large urban cities in states that are commonly referred to as Blue? Additionally, even in the so called Red States, the large population centers that exhibit inordinate amounts of crime trend liberal. Finally, these cities are coincidentally governed by ideologies that favor liberal policies of debased entitlement which are detrimental to self-sufficiency and the cohesiveness of the traditional American family. Such cities breed and attract these dysfunctional behaviors because they have provided the perverse incentives for actions that were once categorized as: immoral, antithetical to healthy human flourishing and inconsistent with harmony and true human happiness.

These liberal urban cultures are America's incubators of social pathology. Having been provided safe haven and a value-neutral acceptance of all modes of behavior without the repercussions instituted by nature and consequence, boys and girls either grow up in a semi-feral state ripe for their initiation into gangs or ingrained with a potent blend of entitlement and learned helplessness that makes the American dream a distant fable and a wager for fools. Soaking up the tenets of Progressive "wisdom," youth are indoctrinated in the myth that the primordial zeitgeist of America is animated by a racist, predatory core. Believing this to be true, they learn that if they are to survive, they must either grab what they can by any means necessary or in fact take down the "Dark Tower" as a prelude to utopia.

Whether wealthy or poor, one generally finds within the jaundiced folds of the Marxian/liberal worldview the same existential and materialist narrative that divides America into irreconcilable camps. In tossing aside the traditional moral structure of America past, Postmodern values are carried every which way the prevailing winds of fashion blow. Without an unwavering moral center, the bleating of media organs, the lures of popular culture, Hollywood, advertising, political pandering, and a secular situational ethic that is saturated in the omnipresent "I" are near irresistible. A hauntingly materialist worldview that interprets man as an accidental organism which winks at the normalization of drugs and the pursuit of undifferentiated sexual pleasures become the soured fruit of this Progressive ethos.

Although video games are of themselves neither liberal nor conservative, a twisted amoral escapism encompasses the solipsistic fantasy world where one can fill a stadium full of virtual coffins and in the bargain desensitize the mind to boundaries that would have once shocked us. In fact, it is the hours upon hours that children and adults spend in hypnotic fealty to an unbounded process of moral detachment that indoctrinates gamers to the value of utilizing human ingenuity in affecting a cool and calculated slaughter. Combined with our society's proclivity towards narcissism, the effect of unabated violence on young minds with an ill-defined and undeveloped ethical structure cannot be conducive to mental well-being.

Can it be doubted that the occupants of our jails and prison system, even if not cognizant of an informed political doctrine, harbor the detritus of liberalism's worldview pulsating through their veins? Having all their lives swum like fish in a proverbial aquarium filled with Progressive moral assumptions, offenders are for the greater part unaware of the toxic slurry that has poisoned their perspective on life as free moral beings. If nearly 90% of the Black American population and a majority of Hispanics assent to liberalism's hollow moral core in society writ large, should not these numbers prove even greater in our country's sequestered warehouses of broken humanity? One way or another, a vast majority of those who have been caged for our safety are there because they are children of the Progressive dawn.

It would be foolish to declare that by either supporting a licentious morality or in favoring the expansionist state, men and women are inexorably fated to be criminals. Moreover, many a person who had once portrayed himself as a stalwart beacon of moral order or who self-identified as a Christian is now languishing in a cell. But truly transformed human beings are loath to commit crimes -- whether they live in a state of need or not. It is the damnable secular therapeutic worldview that leads to material reductionism and informs popular culture that poverty is the wellspring of crime. Popular author and radio host Dennis Prager has offered the inverse conclusion. It is our values that predetermine whether we will: consume drugs, rob a market, abandon a family, become self-sufficient, cheat in business, or blame others for our condition. It is Progressive folly when we seek to expunge our own accountability by falling back on "root causes" and cruel economic necessity to ultimately explain behavior. It is this indictment that Progressives dodge so uncomfortably. Having sought to detach man from objective value and truth, they have unwittingly sacrificed moral worth and purpose for a free-floating situational ethic where existential beings are sons of the state; and praise and blame are more dependent on politically correct orthodoxy than the commandments of the Decalogue.

As the Progressive worldview discounts spiritual essence for the tangible and material, it will forever deny culpability for the rotten fruit of its prescriptive policies caused by its twisted view of rights and embracing short term expedience over principle. Thus, the millions of babies that cannot be seen or experienced are not deemed fully human and therefore subject to the whim of the mother who alone grants it value. Similarly, instead of addressing the moral rot that degrades the human soul through the liberal legislative fiat of subsidizing and encouraging social pathologies, how much simpler to curb the aggregate possession of firearms so that all will be safe and under the protective cover of the therapeutic state. Because managerial liberalism is no longer able to rightly discern good from evil, such a banal ideology is content with suppressing human freedom -- as if a determined predator could not make war upon humanity as was done in the millennia before Sam Colt equalized force and therein expanded freedom.

They say a fanatic is one who redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his original aim. The liberal worldview, having informed American children for generations that they have no objective purpose and are merely clever beasts who have lost their claws, is reaping the results of a cultural curriculum that breeds narcissism and emotional angst like a factory turns out widgets. Of the spate of mass shooters we have witnessed in America as of late: Virginia Tech, Columbine, The Joker in Colorado, and in Connecticut, many were mere young men immersed in the worldview of liberalism: lashing out in amorphous rage and devoid of any inkling of spiritual transcendence or of a competing voice to counter the abyss of anarchy within. They are explosions awaiting a fatal trigger. A thread running through many of their grievances was a thoroughgoing disenchantment with life: manifesting itself through a culture's carefully crafted dissatisfaction with Conservatism and its overt aversion to all things Christian.

As America sheds its Judeo-Christian foundations for a Progressive elixir that excels in generating self-absorbed, morally tentative beings, will not each successive cohort of children act out with more fury -- having grown uncontrollable in their raptures and inconsolable in their yearnings for something more spiritually satisfying than the Progressive's blighted stock in trade?

Glenn Fairman writes from Southern California and blogs as the Eloquent Professor at http://www.palookavillepost.com/and can be contacted for beauty tips at arete5000@dslextreme.com.