On Monday night, I had the good fortune to attend the Manhattan Institute’s Hamilton Awards celebration in New York City. I was especially fortunate because one of the award recipients was Sen. Tom Cotton. If you want a quick definition of “patriot,” read his bio. (And amazingly, he escaped Harvard Law School with his mental acuity still intact).

Sen. Cotton gave a dynamite acceptance speech. Because it covers important ground in the battle against crime, and is not widely available (oddly, the NYT didn’t cover it), I want to quote a number of excepts from it:

When I was a kid on the farm, my father and I had to bush-hog the fields each summer. A bush-hog, if you don’t know, is a large mower pulled behind a tractor. While my dad bush-hogged, I cleared the fence rows that he couldn’t reach. This was dirty, unpleasant work. You might ask, “Why cut the grass that your cattle grazed on? Why not turn it into hay?” The answer is, we weren’t cutting the grass, we were cutting the new growth of bushes and saplings. Because, you see, the jungle always wants to grow back.

And the jungle will always grow back without intervention. That’s what we see happening in too many of America’s cities as progressive politicians elevate their warped ideology over tried-and-true policing and prosecutorial methods. George Soros-backed prosecutors simply refuse to enforce the law, or even see a depraved criminal as their actual client, instead of the law-abiding public.