A Disease of the Mind

What does a liberal Baltimore tech CEO have in common with an environmental activist in New York City? They were both killed in the last week or so in ways that make them seem like victims of the lifestyles and political convictions they held.

Their deaths are tragic, but there are important lessons here of the kind many Americans are learning the hard and sad way.

Ignoring them imperils lives like it did Pava LaPere’s.

LaPere was a 26-year-old rising star in the startup scene who believed technological innovation could serve as a vehicle for social justice. She co-founded EcoMap Technologies in Baltimore under that conviction. And it was there that LaPere would be brutally murdered by a 32-year-old black man named Jason Dean Billingsley.

It is hard to imagine a starker contrast between the victim and the alleged  pepetrator. Billingsley is a convicted sex offender with a decades-long rap sheet that includes robbery, assault, false imprisonment, weapons charges and more.

Billingsley had been following LaPere to her apartment one Friday night. When she entered the building, Billingsley waved at her through the glass as if he had misplaced his keys or something of that sort. LaPere let him into the lobby. After a brief conversation, they hopped in the elevator together.

About 40 minutes later, Billingsley was seen hurrying to leave the building, wiping his hands on his clothes.

LaPere’s strangled and beaten body would be found days later on the rooftop.

After Billingsley was arrested, it was revealed that he had also been wanted in connection to an incident involving rape and arson that occurred the week before LaPere’s death. The Baltimore Police Department failed to notify the community that a dangerous suspect was on the loose.

But Billingsley should never have been walking the streets the night he killed LaPere.

In 2015, Billingsley received a 30-year sentence after being convicted of a sex offense with a litany of priors. He ended up serving just nine years and was released last October, not on parole but “on mandatory supervision,” according to a statement from Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services to The New York Times.

Shortly after Billingsley was apprehended, Ryan Thoresen Carson, a 31-year-old Brooklyn man, met a similar fate as LaPere. Ironically, just like LaPere, he was a social justice warrior.

Carson was walking home with his girlfriend, Claudia Morales, around 4 am in Bedford-Stuyvesant when they crossed paths with a suspect that police have identified as Brian Dowling, an 18-year-old black teen. Right before their encounter, he had been thrashing random objects on the street and acting erratically.

“What the f–k are you looking at?” he asked Carson as they neared each other.

Carson stepped between him and Morales.

“I’ll kill you!” the teen yelled.

Carson tried to de-escalate as his assailant charged and produced a knife. But he panicked and turned to flee, only to trip over a bench and fall hard on the ground, where he was stabbed several times.

The teen spit on Morales, kicked a mortally wounded Carson, and took off. She held him in her arms before medics arrived to take him to King’s County Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Police say Dowling was issued three summonses, including for disorderly conduct, in 2022. He reportedly works at a high school in Clinton Hill. The killing appears to have been completely random.

Carson and Morales became close over their shared experiences of losing friends to drugs. In fact, Carson walked more than 150 miles across New York to raise awareness for overdose prevention centers after a close friend of his died from an overdose in 2021. He also created the “No OD NY” advocacy group to that end. He and Morales were on their way back from a wedding when they were attacked, and it seems Carson may have had marital designs of his own.

The Daily Mirror reported that Morales found a note on his phone in which he pledged to himself to “love Claudia more than she’s ever been loved, which is frankly all she’s ever deserved.” She sorrowfully shared it on Twitter. “He did, he did, he did,” she wrote.

LaPere’s social media posts show that she was a staunch supporter of Black Lives Matter and adjacent causes and had completely internalized the canard of white guilt.

Likewise, Carson was a dyed-in-the-wool social justice advocate. Morales also expressed support on social media for Black Lives Matter and holds anti-police views. Carson’s friends even said he would want his death to be used to advance – rather than retreat from – Left-wing policies. “I know he would have wanted people to use his death as a means to talk about structural wrongs in the city,” New York State Assembly Member Emily Gallagher told The Gothamist.

How are we to feel about this? It’s easy to feel that LaPere and Carson reaped what they sowed. It’s a dark feeling made all the more seductive, because these policies affect not only their unlucky advocates but many others who do not support them. “It’s difficult to feel sympathy for someone who advocated for policies that put me & my child, and every other NYC resident, in the path of ‘acceptance’ that this man was slain on,” tweeted conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair, who added that the incident left her conflicted.

When people complained that this kind of commentary was callous, others pointed out that Carson had apparently celebrated the death of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Twitter.

I think the debate over policy and decorum misses a more important discussion about modern liberalism.

Why did LaPere let Billingsley into the building? Why did she get into an elevator with him? There had to have been red flags in her mind, a feeling that something was wrong. And if there were, they were likely suppressed by a misguided sense of altruism or perhaps a fear of appearing racist.

Similarly, why didn’t Carson do everything he could to avoid that fatal encounter? Security camera footage shows that he saw how bizarre and menacing his killer’s behavior was right before the incident.

Yet Carson did not turn around or cross the street with Morales. Instead, he tried to talk down a violent and clearly unstable person. He seemed to have gone out of his way to do that, against all reasonable caution and maybe for the same reasons as LaPere. That’s not social courage; it’s suicide.

This is ultimately what modern liberalism does; it disarms people of their instincts and intuition.

It teaches that the scratching you feel in the back of your mind, telling you that criminals belong in prison, that it would be better to keep the door closed rather than open it, or to cross the street instead of being a White Knight, is wrong and should be suppressed. And it is tragic because it takes the best impulses in people – charity, grace, mercy – and distorts and perverts them in a way that is harmful to society at large.

What’s the solution? Sometimes, but not always, the only cure is a shocking confrontation with the consequences of the mind disease that is modern liberalism. “A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality,” wrote Irving Kristol, a disaffected Trotskyist himself.

“A neoliberal is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality but has refused to press charges.”

Let’s hope more people start pressing charges.