A young woman in New York recently admitted she refused to cooperate with prosecutors after being assaulted on the subway because she did not want to “put another black man in jail." The same suspect is now accused of killing a 76-year-old man by shoving him down subway stairs.
The woman later expressed regret. But the revealing part was not the regret. It was the moral logic that produced the original decision.
The suspect was not hypothetical. He was not an abstraction. He was not a misunderstood sociological data point. By her own description, he was violent, frightening, aggressive, and dangerous. Police had intervened immediately after the assault. Yet even after personally experiencing the attack, she still felt a stronger obligation to protect the attacker from consequences than to protect future victims from the attacker.
That is not compassion. It is moral inversion.
Increasingly, large parts of the modern left operate according to a kind of suicidal empathy in which the immediate suffering of innocent people becomes secondary to protecting favored categories of offenders, migrants, addicts, activists, or ideologically sanctified groups from accountability, stigma, enforcement, or exclusion.
The result is a political culture that repeatedly sacrifices actual human beings on the altar of abstract moral performance.
A nation cannot function this way.
- Imagine seeing smoke pouring from a residential building but refusing to pull the fire alarm because the owner might get fined for code violations.
- Imagine watching a drunk driver speed through a school zone but declining to report him because you thought he looked dark-skinned and prison statistics are racially disproportionate.
- Imagine refusing to restrain a violent psychiatric patient because physical intervention might feel oppressive.
At some point, moral seriousness requires recognizing that failing to stop dangerous behavior is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Yet this pattern now permeates much of progressives’ thinking and progressive governance.
Violent repeat offenders cycle endlessly through soft-on-crime systems because incarceration itself is treated as the greater evil. Illegal immigration enforcement collapsed under Biden because enforcing borders was - and still is - portrayed as cruelty while the downstream victims of cartel violence, trafficking, fentanyl, wage suppression, overwhelmed schools, strained hospitals, and neighborhood disorder become politically invisible.
And beneath much of the rhetoric sits an open political incentive few are willing to discuss honestly.
For years, Democrats and progressive activists have increasingly treated mass illegal immigration not merely as a humanitarian issue but as a long-term demographic and electoral project. The assumption - sometimes spoken quietly, sometimes nearly openly - is that importing millions of economically dependent migrants from countries with strong statist political cultures will eventually translate into future political power.
That incentive structure helps explain the astonishing resistance to enforcement even amid unprecedented border chaos. It also helps explain the constant push to normalize noncitizen participation in civic life, including efforts in some jurisdictions to permit noncitizens to vote in local elections, weaken voter-verification standards even for federal elections, or politically stigmatize basic citizenship enforcement itself as xenophobic.
The message becomes clear: immediate social costs are acceptable because the long-term political arithmetic is considered favorable.
But ordinary Americans absorb the consequences in real time.
Working-class citizens compete with illegal aliens for for housing, wages, emergency-room access, school resources, and public services. Communities absorb cartel distribution networks, trafficking operations, gang activity, and fentanyl pipelines. Women and children become vulnerable to predatory systems that operated across once porous borders. Cities struggle under enormous fiscal strain. Yet raising these concerns is often treated not as civic responsibility but as moral deviance.
Again, the public is asked to sacrifice.
Sacrifice safety. Sacrifice cohesion. Sacrifice social trust. Sacrifice functioning institutions. Sacrifice the meaning of citizenship itself.
All in service of preserving an ideological narrative about compassion, inclusion, anti-racism, and demographic destiny.
Even language itself gets morally inverted.
Enforcing laws becomes “criminalization." Public order becomes “oppression." Borders become “violence." Expecting civilized behavior becomes “systemic bias." Citizens demanding safety become accused of cruelty while predators are reframed as victims of structures.
The result is not compassion. It is civilizational exhaustion.
The elderly man shoved to his death in the subway was not sacrificed intentionally, of course. No activist gathered in a candlelit ritual and consciously offered him up. That is precisely what makes this mentality so dangerous. Modern ideological sacrifice does not look like ancient pagan altars. It hides itself behind therapeutic language, sociological jargon, and moral self-congratulation.
But the underlying mechanism is similar. Innocent people become acceptable collateral damage in service of preserving a larger moral narrative.
We see it everywhere.
- Women forced to surrender private spaces, sports opportunities, scholarships, and safety concerns because acknowledging biological reality might emotionally wound a man who identifies differently.
- Citizens told to absorb rising crime, disorder, and instability because enforcement might create “inequities."
- Jewish students harassed while elite institutions rationalize extremism through the language of anti-oppression.
- Entire Western cities slowly degrading while leaders reassure the public that compassion requires tolerance of dysfunction.
The public is repeatedly told to endure danger, instability, discomfort, coercion, and even death so that a preferred ideological story can remain emotionally intact.
And increasingly, all so the left can defeat the right.
That is the political permission structure underneath much of the madness. If conservatives, Republicans, border hawks, police defenders, parents’ rights activists, and ordinary citizens who refuse progressive dogma can be cast as Nazi-esque threats to democracy itself, then almost anything becomes justifiable in the name of defeating them. The rules can be bent. Borders can be dissolved. Prosecutors can look away. Institutions can be weaponized. Crime can be minimized. Citizens can be told to endure disorder, danger, and fear because the alternative - the other side winning - has been defined as fascism.
Once politics becomes existential theater, sacrifice becomes easier to rationalize. The innocent people harmed by these policies are not denied exactly. They are merely absorbed into the cost of doing business. Desperate times, desperate measures. Yes, some law-abiding citizens may suffer. Some neighborhoods may collapse. Some victims may be created by preventable leniency. Some women may be endangered. Some children may be exposed to chaos. Some elderly commuter may die. But if all of this helps protect “democracy" from the alleged monsters on the right, then the altar remains open for business.
And increasingly, ordinary people are beginning to recognize the pattern.
A healthy civilization balances compassion with responsibility. Mercy with order. Empathy with truth. But empathy detached from reality becomes predatory in its own way because the costs do not disappear. They merely get transferred onto innocent people.
Every society eventually answers a fundamental question: who are we willing to sacrifice, and for what?
The modern left increasingly answers: sacrifice the stable, the law-abiding, the productive, the ordinary commuter, the frightened woman, the elderly victim, the child exposed to predators, the citizen who simply wants public order - all so the ideological self-image of moral compassion remains undisturbed, and all so the left can continue to imagine itself saving democracy from the people it despises.
That is not justice.
It is a cult of human sacrifice wearing the mask of virtue.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli marriage therapist, trainer of therapists, lecturer, and author. His articles have appeared in Israel National News, Jewish News Syndicate, The Jerusalem Post, Breitbart, and elsewhere.