The Day

Wild ‘Kia Boys’ represent Connecticu­t’s grim future

- By CHRIS POWELL Chris Powell has written about Connecticu­t government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.

WWhat the Kia Boys and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is parents. But no one in authority in Connecticu­t dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particular­ly to fathers, and why.

hat may prove to be Connecticu­t’s best journalism for many years was a 44-minute video documentar­y of sorts posted last week on YouTube by freelancer Andrew Callaghan and brought to the state’s attention by CTCapitolR­eport. com.

Callaghan gained the confidence of three teenage gangsters from Bridgeport and video-recorded them on their daily rampages — breaking into and stealing cars day and night throughout the state, speeding away wildly along highways and residentia­l streets, risking death and the death of others, defeating police pursuit, and boasting that no one can catch them.

Of course the young gangsters might be caught, insofar as Callaghan repeatedly located them and even joined them at a government housing project in Bridgeport, where, he found, stolen cars are regularly being “sold” to other young gangsters for a mere hundred dollars or so, the contents of the cars having more value than the cars themselves, which are soon abandoned since they can’t be acquired legally.

Apparently the Bridgeport police were not yet aware of or interested in the use of the housing project as a stolen car market. Nor, apparently, was Mayor Joe Ganim, though his recent re-election campaign was noted for soliciting absentee ballots from public housing residents who may have feared that keeping their apartments required such cooperatio­n with the regime.

Despite the harm they were doing, the kids seemed more lost and nihilistic than evil, glad that someone from another world was paying attention to them. As they sat on the roof of a small abandoned house, taking a break from their mayhem, Callaghan even got them to reflect briefly on their lack of parenting and particular­ly their lack of fathers.

The young gangsters call themselves the Connecticu­t Kia Boys, since most of their target vehicles are Kias, which became notorious for the ease of bypassing their ignition systems with a screwdrive­r and USB cable.

It is hard not to see the Kia Boys as the country’s future — the vanguard of the ever-growing urban underclass, products of the family-destroying welfare system; of schools that pay their employees well but fail to educate because they can’t educate when their primary policy is social promotion and parents are no help; and of a criminal justice system that pretends that social work actually works and is preferable to imprisonin­g young repeat offenders, giving them what feckless state legislator­s call “the help they need” without ever defining or delivering it.

What the Kia Boys and the hundreds of thousands like them around the country need most is parents. But no one in authority in Connecticu­t dares to inquire into what has happened to parents and particular­ly to fathers, and why. That’s because such an inquiry might distress the many government employees and others who make their livings doing what doesn’t work or even makes things worse.

Anyone daring to inquire into the collapse of the family would also risk accusation­s of racism, since fatherless­ness and poverty are racially disproport­ionate.

So the country’s nearly comprehens­ive abandonmen­t of behavioral standards continues, worsened by the crushing pressure imposed recently on schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and government budgets by the Biden administra­tion’s admission of millions of illegal immigrants.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the social scientist who became a great U.S. senator, saw it all coming in the famous 1965 report that bears his name.

Moynihan wrote: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakab­le lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationsh­ip to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectatio­ns about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder — most particular­ly the furious, unrestrain­ed lashing out at the whole social structure — that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved.”

Six decades later Moynihan’s prophecy is still ignored even as new horrors fulfill it almost every day.

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