WHEN ROBBERY VICTIMS BLAME — THEMSELVES: In the New York Post, Karol Markowicz explores what happens when urban “Progressives” internalize their fellow leftists’ “Check Your Privilege” sophistry:

But writer Chaya Babu cranked the guilty gut-check to 11 last week when, reflecting back on being the victim of a crime last year at a cafe in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, she made excuses for the man who stole her laptop at gunpoint.

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In the weeks following the robbery, she and her friends worked on “finding space to take into consideration the broader social and economic circumstances surrounding the incident” and “cultivated our sense of compassion toward the robber, whom we imagined must have been acting out of dire need.”

Babu quotes another writer who was robbed that night as saying, “I didn’t ultimately think that person posed a threat. I didn’t feel afraid of the person; I felt more just afraid of the weapon.”

Welcome to the bizarro world of gentrification guilt, where the man with the gun pointed at you isn’t allowed to be “scary” but a weapon with no motive of its own is.

The kicker comes when Babu notes that “many of us in the group agreed that in some respects we identified more with our robber than with the characters we were portrayed to be” in media stories about the crime.

In the future, every leftist will be Robert Fisk for 15 minutes.