Everyone paying attention knows now that the Parkland massacre by a severely troubled and dangerous young man was the result of a failure of a host of government institutions.  The FBI received several specific warnings and ignored them.  The Broward County sheriff's department also ignored countless notifications, as did the local police.  Much of the inefficiency was probably due to sheer incompetence, people not doing the jobs they were meant to do. 

But much was the result of a truly ridiculous program invented by the Obama administration, the Promise policy.  Jack Cashill has written about this in depth, as the same program was also the reason Trayvon Martin was roaming the streets when he was killed.   The Obama administration wanted to end the racial disparity in the prison population and so bribed school districts and local law enforcement to simply not arrest minority kids in their schools, no matter how criminal their behavior.  This was meant to stop the "pipeline to prison" that  had been endemic among school-age minority kids. As a result, criminally-inclined kids became emboldened to escalate their illegal activity.  Nikolas Cruz bought ten guns and passed every background check because no one reported his accelerating criminality to the Feds.  And because of this nonsensical program, seventeen young people are dead.

Mount Tamalpais High School students at a memorial for Parkland shooting victims. // Credit: Fabrice Florin  CC BY-SA 2.0

For those who have not read Lawrence Wright's outstanding book, The Looming Tower, tune into the series based on it now airing on Hulu.  It tells the story of how the terrorist attack of 9/11/01 was virtually allowed to happen thanks to a similarly catastrophic policy that banned intelligence agencies from communicating with one another.  The story bears much in common with the systemic failures that led to the Florida school murders.   In the days before 9/11, a "wall" of long standing was made higher and thicker that "prevented communication between intelligence agents and criminal investigators."  This meant that the CIA could not, and would not, share information with the FBI.  It was Jamie Gorelick, Deputy Attorney General in 1995, who drafted a memo that made the existing law even more restrictive.  The original wall was built by Democrats who loathed the FBI and created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. 

After the WTC bombing in 1993, there was an obvious need for more cooperation between agencies.  Gorelick's memo did exactly the opposite.  Counter-intelligence investigations were to be separate and distinct from criminal probes.  So whatever was uncovered by the CIA could not be shared or combined with the fruit of FBI investigations.  It was all about "appearances."  That and the fact that the left at the time loathed the FBI; then-Director Louis Freeh was investigating the already long list of Clinton campaign crimes of raising money from numerous foreign sources.   How things change.  Today's FBI has willingly sabotaged itself in service of the left, to protect the corruptions of the Obama administration and to cover up the decades of nefarious activities of the Clintons.

It seems clear that in both cases, and most likely thousands of others unknown to the public at large, the ever-growing power and reach of government plans and policies implemented under the cover of darkness, (the Gorelick memo only came to light during the 9/11 Commission) and often for purely political purposes have put millions of law-abiding citizens at great risk.  Such power, imperiously put into effect and stupidly abused, led to 9/11 and the three thousand plus deaths that occurred that day and those that came after among the first responders.  And such power is reliably responsible for the seventeen deaths in Parkland.   Big government is failing us, which most likely explains Trump's victory in 2016. 

Eight years of the Obama administration's fundamental transformation of our country left a majority of us depressed and branded as "deplorable."  The left does not suffer opposing views, it criminalizes them.  While the primacy of the race/class/gender meme has long prevailed as de rigueur on university campuses,  it now rules nearly every aspect of America life, from restroom edicts to making race and gender a matter of choice.  Black Lives Matter and the LGBT movements now have more power than our churches, businesses, and all other traditional institutions.  The rest of us are expected to cower and submit before the leftist dictates of the new American culture and to dispense with the values once held dear. 

Victimhood rules.  If one is not a victim, then he or she is an oppressor.  That is how it is.  That is how Nicolas Cruz was able to buy ten guns.  That is how the Saudi terrorists were able to take down the WTC.  Consequences be damned.