violent crime BS
primary on 2024 election hype biden border crime wave
promote 2nd on 2022 midterm BS hype
see MIGRANT CRIME BS
PRETEXT FOR EMERGENCY STATE OF EXCEPT MARTIAL LAW
SEE BLUE CTIES/ STATES
merri ok
see border bs 2024 biden border bloodbath xeno
i'm including nonviolent (esp if used as propaganda)
see hype fear --> fascism
see racism, reductionism
see prog DA
see fox pirro
disambig from crimes that tend to be white collar politicos
see also "law and order" racist dog whistle, authoritarian
see hype fear
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aha, gop has trad "genetic" mythic advantage on military, crime and economy, all manly, strict fr;
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AN 10 26
On Wednesday, it was revealed that under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the FBI has embraced a novel solution to making it appear as if its violent crime arrests are up: “juice the stats.” This is according to a new report by MS NOW, which found that the crime numbers touted by FBI Director Kash Patel are padded with arrests made by state and local law enforcement rather than the bureau.
“With fewer agents and a strained budget, the FBI under its director, Kash Patel, has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations,” reports MS NOW, citing a review of Justice Department data. “The findings rebut Patel’s repeated claims that he has led a crackdown on violent crime. Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90 percent increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.” And as the FBI itself acknowledged, many were not FBI cases.
In fact, data shows that the FBI has referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during Trump’s second term than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15 percent fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.
According to MS NOW, “There were nearly 3,800 fewer people charged federally with violent crimes during the first part of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period — the opposite of what Patel says. That figure includes cases referred from all federal agencies, not just the FBI.” The report is based on public DOJ data obtained and shared by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ and FBI employees who have accused the administration of weaponizing the department to pursue Trump’s political ends.
The drop in criminal cases has corresponded with a “huge” increase in focus on immigration crimes per Patel’s demand. According to MS NOW, “Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI’s priority mission has been stopping terrorism. The bureau is also devoted to hunting foreign spies, ferreting out political corruption and white collar fraud, and disrupting complex criminal schemes and organized crime.” The shift to emphasizing immigration enforcement along with the juiced stats represents a major change in the FBI’s function and transparency.
“Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative,” said Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official and MS NOW contributor. “We are seeing a historic institution reduced to a metrics game, where the FBI is poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments. This artificial inflation of the stats is a deliberate smoke screen designed to mask internal chaos and the mass exodus of experienced talent by manufacturing an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground.”
In a statement to MS NOW, the FBI did not dispute the data showing a reduction in criminal referrals, but it pointed to the declining rate of violent crime. But as MS NOW explains, “That decline has been a nationwide trend for several years after crime briefly spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. It’s been steadily declining ever since.” And while Patel has claimed a 90 percent increase in “violent crime arrests” by the FBI, this ignores crucial context: “that Patel is taking credit for the work of other agencies.”
“By Patel newly including state and local arrests, as well as arrests by other federal agencies, his FBI progress report radically changes the way the FBI counts its cases to include work the FBI did not do,” MS NOW elaborates. “The FBI has not previously counted other agency arrests as part of its caseload, according to internal DOJ data and the accounts of current and former officials. There is no way to say how many of the local police arrests — which Patel now claims credit for — would have been made regardless of the FBI’s presence.” The FBI asserts that the numbers have always been tallied that way, but that is false, multiple former FBI officials told MS NOW. Former FBI agent Daniel Brunner said the FBI previously always resisted counting state and local arrests as FBI achievements. “It’s never been done,” he said. “And when agents attempted to do it, it was always pushed back on at the local division. Headquarters did not want false numbers, they wanted the truth from the field.”
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note DC IS BLUE CITY, VIOLENCE JUSTIFIES MILITARIZATION [2026 MIDTERM]: ONLY I CAN KEEP YOU SAFE
an 3 26
President Donald Trump held his first Cabinet meeting since starting the war in Iran. He began with several of his top officials speaking. After Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth talked about how the people of the United States should be praying for him, Trump began talking about crime in Chicago and the recent shooting death of the daughter of one of his staffers' friends.
"It's a young lady who — whose life would be saved if we had — if we did what we did. As an example, in Washington D.C, which is now a safe city, all the time people come up to me in the building, people who work here, they say, 'Thank you so much.' I know immediately what they're talking about," said Trump, talking about the crime rate in the nation's capital.
According to the Council on Criminal Justice data, Washington, D.C. saw an increase in drug crimes in 2025 over 2024, despite the efforts of the federal agents. Cases of sexual assaults remained even. Homicides were down by 21 percent, and 9 percent fewer aggravated assaults, 2 percent fewer domestic violence incidents, while robberies fell by 23 percent, and carjackings (which are included in robbery) fell by 43 percent. While carjackings had been on the rise in 2020, the trend reversed in 2024 and began going down. There were 27 percent fewer motor vehicle thefts in 2025 than in 2024.
Trump's deployment of the National Guard to D.C. happened in the last five months of 2025 and is estimated to cost about $1 million per day after an initial cost of about $1.8 million per day. Trump heralded the Guard soldiers, who he said were "opening doors" for people and "picking up trash." So far, the cost has totaled about $330 million as of the start of February, WTOP said, citing data from the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Trump cheered the Guard because citizens are "able to walk to work, they walk to work. You all walk to work."
Then Trump dropped the bombshell that his Cabinet officials had been robbed.
"Some of you were mugged. I know you told me stories. Some of you were mugged. One person in particular was viciously mugged in the group right here," he pointed to the people across the table from him. "It's not happening anymore. You have a safe city."
Those sitting across the table from him in the meeting included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner. Internet searches found no reports of any of those individuals being mugged in Washington, D.C. Vance's home in Ohio was vandalized and broken into, however, in May 2025.
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TRUMP SOTU 2 26 BLUE DEM FAIL THIS WE WILL QUICKLY CLEAN IT UP, AS SAFE AS dc?
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MMA
02/26/26
February 26, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): Well, we interviewed a police officer yesterday and he said all we want to hear is you have our backs. That's what leadership needs to tell us, we have your backs. We're out there putting our lives on the line to keep our communities safe. Just have our back. What if you worked for someone who never had your back? Would you stay on the job that long? No, you wouldn't. And that's what is happening in New York. Police officers are leaving in droves. They're going down to Florida where they can retire there, where they're supported and they can get a bonus if they join some of the departments in Florida. So they're leaving because they don't feel supported we're going to get to a point - New York City back to the place where we were before.
LAWRENCE JONES (CO-HOST): That's it, Game of Thrones where everyone is just robbing everyone, taking their purse. I'm just telling you this, it start's with this, it starts with the snowball comparison, and it's just going to expand. So, if you don't nip it in the bud right now, it's just going to spiral. And it looks like this mayor, as you said, just wants to smile.
//
- ### Right-wing media hyped a supposed “shovel” attack against ICE. Prosecutors just dropped the charges.
02/13/26 2:03 PM EST
02/11/26 11:59 AM EST
02/09/26
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THREAT JAIL PRITZkER CHIC MAYOR
AN 10 25
'Wannabe dictator': Governor dares 'unhinged' Trump to carry out threat to jail him
//
an 10 25
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker issued a new warning on Wednesday about President Donald Trump’s efforts to deploy the American military in US cities against the wishes of local elected officials.
Hours after Trump called for Pritzker’s imprisonment in a Wednesday morning Truth Social post, the Illinois governor claimed in an interview with MSNBC that the president’s ultimate goal with sending troops into US cities was to control the outcomes of future elections.
”He wants to militarize major cities across the United States, especially blue cities in blue states, because he wants us to get used to the idea of military on the streets,” he said. “2026 elections, I believe he’s going to post people outside ballot boxes and polling places, and, if he needs to in order to control those elections, he’ll assume control of the ballot boxes and count the votes himself.”
Pritzker pointed out that Trump considered ordering the military to seize ballot boxes after he lost the 2020 presidential election, but he was met with resistance from officials in his own administration.
However, Pritzker said that “I believe he would do it in 2026” to help Republicans maintain control of Congress.
Pritzker also struck a defiant tone when asked about Trump’s call to imprison him.
”This guy’s a convicted felon who’s threatening to jail me!” he exclaimed. “This guy is unhinged. He’s insecure. He’s a wannabe dictator. And there’s one thing I really want to say to Donald Trump: If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me.”
Pritzker’s remarks come as Trump and his administration have deployed Texas National Guard soldiers to Chicago over the objections of both Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. The state and city are challenging the deployment in court.
Federal immigration officials have been employing increasingly aggressive and violent tactics in the Chicago area in recent weeks, including attacking a journalist and a protesting priest with pepper balls outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility; slamming a congressional candidate to the ground; dragging US citizens, including children, out of their homes during a raid in the middle of the night; and fatally shooting a man during a traffic stop.
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MMA
October 8, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Chris Plante: The Right Squad
MERCEDES SCHLAPP (CO-HOST): Virginia, I saw this number and I was just in complete shock.
VIRGINIA ALLEN (CO-HOST): Yeah, you know, I wish I could say I was in shock, but for so long we've been hearing that Chicago is just the worst of the worst. The stories out of Chicago and the extreme gang violence, this isn't new, but the situation right now has escalated. And the bizarre thing to me, when we're seeing these protests outside ICE detention facilities, I think you essentially have two camps of people that are protesting outside these facilities that want these illegals back on the streets. You have the no borders people, the people that think, oh, we should just let everyone in. People can go wherever they want. And then we have people, I think in some ways, like Pritzker, that have bought into this lie of these are these poor, suffering people. We should let them into our country. We should keep giving them handouts. I'm not quite sure between those two camps which is worse, but I am so thankful that we finally have a president who's instituting real law and order.
SCHLAPP: Antifa is not poor and suffering. Let me just make that very clear. But, Chris, okay, we talk about this all the time with Jason here when he's like, oh, the shootings are 36% lower. OK, this year alone, 1,200 shootings in Chicago, 360 homicides. That means people are dying. People are getting shot. Right?
CHRIS PLANTE (HOST): And it's more dangerous than Afghanistan was at the peak of the war. And they say it's pretty good. We killed 900 last year. We're only going to kill 700 this year. And they think that's good. Look at our record. We're making progress.
*Also, since JB Pritzker said, come and get me, put me in cuffs, it should be pointed out that Donald Trump himself pardoned a former Illinois governor who was in prison for more crimes that he had committed. It was Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat. And Blagojevich was from Illinois, one of five recent Illinois governors who ended up in prison. So, let's go ahead and put JB Pritzker on the list. Why not? It's a time-honored tradition in Illinois.
//
On Newsmax, Benny Johnson claims Portland “has been conquered by antifa”
10/08/25 9:24 AM EDT
10/07/25 10:16 AM EDT
10/03/25
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mma
On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/12/25
Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.
Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.
Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”
Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.
“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.
“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”
“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”
Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.
There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.
Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties
It is not true, as Eric Trump and
both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.”
It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.
The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attackon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.
It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.
After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.
Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”
For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.
Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.
Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.
Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.
If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.
- ### MAGA wants “the Left” to be “crushed with the power of the state”
While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.
“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”
Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”
MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”
Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”
Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.
Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”
Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”
Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.
- ### The elephant in the room
It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.
On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.
Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.
In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.
But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”
Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”
On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”
Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”
“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.
That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.
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an 8 25
During his long writing career, journalist/author Radley Balko has focused heavily on civil liberties and criminal justice. Balko has been a scathing critic of the War on Drugs, detailing many examples of police overreach in his 2013 book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces." And a recurring theme of his work is that too many Americans are willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of safety and security.
That theme is evident in an article republished by Mother Jones (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/trump-white-house-claims-lies-dc-crime-ice-national-guard/) on August 28. Balko gives a blistering analysis of President Donald Trump's militarized takeover of Washington, D.C., arguing that the Trump (https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump) Administration is blatantly distorting crime statistics to justify its overreach.
"Donald Trump's 'takeover' of Washington, DC, is authoritarian thuggery," Balko argues. "It's a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it's been in the works for more than a year. That said, I think it's still important to point out when they're lying. And everything they're claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to D.C. is a lie."
READ MORE: 'Let me just stop you there': Wallace cuts off guest who calls for 'nuance' on Trump move (https://www.alternet.org/wallace-trump-guest/)
Balko continues, "In defense of President Trump's decision to deploy National Guard troops in the nation's capital, the White House has put out a 'fact sheet' of scary statistics on crime in Washington, D.C (https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/08/fact-yes-d-c-crime-is-out-of-control/). It's about what you'd expect: a bunch of brazen, lazy, easily disproven garbage. Which, of course, isn't surprising. What's surprising is that they’ve actually linked to the sources that disprove their lies."
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The 50-year-old Gen-X journalist goes on to debunk the Trump White House's "fact sheet," published on August 11.
"Trump has also claimed that homicides in D.C. in 2023 were the 'highest ever,'" Balko explains. "Not even close. The city's murder rate topped 80 per 100,000 in 1991. As of April, D.C.'s murder rate this year ranked not fourth highest, but 19th. It ranked behind red state cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Tulsa."
The journalist/author adds, "Again, the whole point of the study the White House itself cited was to compare year-over-year homicide stats — to see which cities improved from 2023 to 2024. And here, D.C. comes out very well. Of the 23 cities the study surveyed, D.C. had the fourth-highest drop in its homicide rate from 2023 to 2024."
READ MORE: 'Blatant and deplorable': Trump admin employees say they're forced to watch 'propaganda' (https://www.alternet.org/propaganda-interior-department/)
Balko stresses that Trump's actions promote less stability, not more, in U.S. cities.
"A surge of heavily armed troops is not going to fix any of D.C.'s problems — and it certainly won't make residents more trustful of law enforcement," Balko warns. "I'm fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the (Trump) Administration's claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in D.C. I'll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause."
READ MORE: 'It’s a real gut punch': Rural voters 'stunned' by Trump’s damage (https://www.alternet.org/trump-rural-voters/)
*Radley Balko's full article is available at this Mother Jones link (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/trump-white-house-claims-lies-dc-crime-ice-national-guard/).
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last wd lawrence no dep cos ever spoke longer than vp 8 25
an 8 25
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller lashed out at Washington, D.C. residents protesting President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department and his deployment of more than a thousand federal agents — including FBI, DEA, DHS, ATF, and ICE — to patrol the Capital’s streets. In striking remarks, Miller cast the demonstrators as white and the victims of crime as Black. His charges conflict with a new survey just released that shows the vast majority of D.C. residents oppose the Trump administration’s takeover and feel safe in their neighborhoods.
Miller told reporters that the people protesting the Trump administration’s federal takeover of the city’s streets are “elderly white hippies,” “stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” and, “crazy communists” who “have no roots, they have no connections to the city, they have no families they are raising in this city, they have no one that they are sending to school in this city, they have no jobs in this city, they have no connections to this community at all.”
Those people, Miller alleged, are “the ones who’ve been advocating for the one percent: the criminals, the killers, the rapists, the drug dealers.”
READ MORE: Trump’s Border Wall to Get $500M+ ‘Hot’ Makeover Experts Say Won’t Work
Whereas, Miller claimed, “residents who lived in Washington, D.C. their entire lives, their parents lived here, their grandparents lived here, and they have lived for generations in intolerable conditions of crime and decay.”
“There are hundreds of residents of this city who are shot in street violence every single year, making [it] one the most violent cities on planet Earth,” he claimed, which is not supported by evidence.
“And by the way, most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C are Black,” Miller alleged, inaccurately. About 43 percent of D.C.’s residents are Black.
“This is not a city that has had any safety for its Black citizens, for generations,” he claimed. “And President Trump is the one who is fixing that with the support of the Metropolitan Police Department to support the National Guard and our federal law enforcement officers.”
“So we’re going to ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re going to get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.,” Miller said.
READ MORE: ‘They Want Control’: Pirro Slammed for Ending D.C. Rifle Law Enforcement
A damning Washington Post poll released Wednesday, however, found 79 percent of D.C. residents oppose Trump’s decision to take over the Metropolitan Police, and to deploy National Guard troops and federal law enforcement agents onto D.C. city streets.
“On Monday, Trump said Washington had been ‘the most unsafe place anywhere,’ but 78 percent of residents say they feel very or somewhat safe in their neighborhoods,” the Post reported.
Watch the video below or at this link.
---
---
// kirk yesterday teen crime?
mma
From the August 7, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Will Cain Show
WILL CAIN (HOST): First, let's follow up on a story that we brought you yesterday, the rise in youth violence across America. We brought you these jaw-dropping stats showing juvenile offenders and crimes against other people surging over the last five years. Now, we use a lot of euphemisms in pleasant conversation and in the media. Those euphemisms often hide the truth. We refer to inner-city when talking about minorities, and juvenile crime is the problem, but the question is how much is race a part of the problem in juvenile crime?
Well, the FBI doesn't break down juvenile offenders by race, but it does for adults. Over the last five years, overall there were more white offenders than Black offenders in total crimes against persons, but there are more white people than Black people in America. The only stat that really matters is per capita and those numbers are much higher for Black Americans. We could advance this and go into more serious crimes, like homicides, that show more Black offenders than white offenders, again this is according to FBI data. But that is the total number, as well. Again, it doesn't adjust for per capita, where Black Americans make up about 11% of the population.
But the point of this conversation isn't to malign one particular race. It's not to place society's ills and blames on one group versus another. But you cannot fix a problem unless you first recognize a problem. You can't use euphemisms to paper over something that is a truth.
So, if those are the numbers for adults, do they not correlate the same among young offenders? That's certainly what we seem to see in some of the videos coming out of Washington D.C. or Cincinnati. And why doesn't the FBI provide that data when it comes to juveniles?
Let's have the conversation now and bring in the civil rights activist and founder of the Woodson Center, Bob Woodson. Bob, it's great to have you on the show, I always appreciate the candid conversation. Bob, I don't think we do anyone a service by using euphemisms or dancing around subjects. The question is whether or not we have a problem of crime among Black youth? When you see what happened in Cincinnati or Washington, D.C., that seems to be the anecdotal suggestion. And it does suggest there is also data to back it up and we can't solve that unless we first acknowledge it and have the conversation.
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===
AN 8 25
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that violent crime was out of control under former President Joe Biden, and that his "law-and-order" policies are making the United States much safer than it was during Biden's four years in the White House. But according to an FBI report released on Tuesday, August 5, violent crime decreased when Biden was in office.
The Guardian's Richard Luscombe explains, "The bureau's annual Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics report reflects a 4.5 percent year-on-year decrease in all violent crime nationally in 2024, with murder and non-negligent manslaughter falling 14.5 percent from the 2023 figure. Reported rapes were down 5.2 percent from the year before, while aggravated assaults and robberies declined 3 percent and 8.9 percent respectively."
The new FBI figures, according to Luscombe, "belie Trump's oft-repeated fear-mongering during the election campaign that 'soft-on-crime' Democrats had fueled surging crime rates, particularly in major cities under their control."
READ MORE: 'Open civil war': Retired federal judge calls Trump a 'tyrant' and MAGA 'anti-rule of law'
The FBI's report, Luscombe notes, also "shows that murders in cities with more than 1 million residents declined by 19.1 percent, the highest percentage of any category of crime, while rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults showed drops of between 1 percent and 9.8 percent."
Crime analyst Jeff Asher is examining the FBI's figures on his SubStack page.
Asher cautioned that "not every crime is reported to law enforcement" but considers the data impressive nonetheless.
Asher wrote, "The nation's murder rate for 2024 was down 26 percent from 2020's figure and roughly even, slightly lower actually, relative to where it stood pre-pandemic. The nation's reported violent and property crime rates stood at the lowest levels since the 1960s in 2024…. The 2024 data adds confidence that 2025 will feature the lowest murder rate ever recorded."
{===
grift?
an 11 24
The Oath Keepers were among the far-fight groups involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. And on May 25, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that two prominent figures in the militia group — founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs — had been sentenced to federal prison on seditious conspiracy charges.
But the Oath Keepers remain active in 2024. During an early November interview with Wired, Oath Keepers ally Jim Arroyo described preparations for a possible civil war.
Arroyo told Wired, "The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world. I'm training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies."
READ MORE:[Inside a Georgia election official’s months-long push to make it easier to challenge the 2024 results
Jim Arroyo and his wife Janet Arroyo operate the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, an Oath Keepers spinoff in Arizona. And both of them, according to Wired reporters David Gilbert and Tess Owen, believe that Democrats are planning to steal the 2024 election from GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Jim Arroyo told Wired, "They want to take him out so that he can't get back in the White House."
During the interview, Jim Arroyo claimed that the left is uniquely violent in the United States — and the Wired reporters noted the violence of January 6, 2021. But Jim Arroyo believes the debunked conspiracy theory that the January 6 rioters were undercover leftists.
Jim Arroyo told Wired, "The main concern right now is the potential of civil unrest because of the election. Whoever wins, one side's going to be pissed off, and the other side, the radical-left side, is going to be more pissed, and they're more known for burning cities to the ground when they don't get their way."
READ MORE:['Trump is toast': Why Michael Moore is 'confident' Harris will win
*Read Wired's full interview with Jim Arroyo at this link (subscription required).
===
aurora
His name is Jose Miguel Reyes-Perez Earier this year, Lakewood Police arrested him on a felony menacing/vehicle theft case A tow truck driver said Perez "pointed the rifle" at him. Police believe he and another were trying to steal a motorcycle, according to arrest report
---
To highlight the overstated danger of a Venezuelan gang in Aurora, the Trump campaign, checks notes, showed a mugshot of a Lakewood criminal that Jeffco has issued an arrest warrant for. Plus the rally was next to the airport and nowhere near the area that Trump is lying about.
---
demolishdei
[Stephen Miller
](https://x.com/StephenM)
Kamala Surrogate defending TDA. Unconscionable.
Quote
Libs of TikTok
@libsoftiktok
Oct 11
Typical leftist lies. Stephen Millar was pointing to two members of the violent Tren de Aragua gang. x.com/atrupar/status…
contact tracer? russian?
login?redirect_after_login=%2Fcontactchaser
===
Donald Trump, in his visit to Aurora, Colo., claimed again that Venezuelan gang members have “taken over” apartment buildings there, a characterization that police have rejected. In a video message last month, the city’s interim police chief, Heather Morris, said there may be gang members at the apartment complex in question, but that they “have not taken over this complex.” The city has also said the claims of a gang presence there have been “at times, significantly overstated.”
===
nyt
Trump Rally in Aurora, Colo., Is Marked by Nativist Attacks
The former president continued to make claims about the city that have been disputed by local officials, including its Republican mayor.
Donald Trump speaking onstage, in a blue suit and red tie.
Former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign rally in Aurora, Colo., on Friday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Michael GoldJonathan Weisman
By Michael Gold and Jonathan Weisman
Michael Gold reported from Aurora, Colo.
Oct. 11, 2024
Former President Donald J. Trump escalated the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric that has animated his political career with a speech Friday in Aurora, Colo., where he repeated false and grossly exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants that local Republican officials have refuted.
For weeks, Aurora has been fending off false rumors about the city. And its conservative Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, said in a statement on Friday that he hoped to show Mr. Trump that Aurora was “a considerably safe city.”
But Mr. Trump has made debunked claims about Aurora, a Denver suburb, such a central part of his stump speech that he took a campaign detour to Colorado, which has not voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 2004, to make the case in person at a rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center.
And during a meandering 80-minute speech Mr. Trump repeated claims, which have been debunked by local officials, that Aurora had been “invaded and conquered,” described the United States as an “occupied state,” called for the death penalty “for any migrant that kills an American citizen” and revived a promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.
That law allows for the summary deportation of people from nations with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.” It was far from clear whether the law could be used in the way that Mr. Trump was proposing.
The false tale that Aurora, Colorado’s third-largest city, was occupied by armed Venezuelans stemmed from a dispute over housing conditions.
An out-of-state landlord, CBZ Management, was being pressed by the City of Aurora over the deplorable conditions in three of its apartment complexes. The landlord told the city in July that its property managers were unable to make the repairs that tenants and city officials were demanding because armed leaders of Tren de Aragua had taken over the complexes and violently expelled the managers. The claim was amplified by news reports and politicians, and took on a life of its own, especially after Mr. Trump began making it a regular part of his stump speech — even after city officials said the claims had been overstated and were not true.
Image
An apartment complex in Aurora, Colo., owned by CBZ Management that was closed this year by the city after it pressed the landlord to improve living conditions there.Credit...Michael Ciaglo for The New York Times
The city put out a statement on Friday pre-emptively fact-checking the former president ahead of his rally.
“A gang has not ‘taken over’ the city,” it said. “The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. It is tragic that select individuals and entities have mischaracterized our city based on some specific incidents.”
Major crimes, it continued, are down more than 17 percent in Aurora. And “the city is actively deploying every legal tool to ensure CBZ Management is accountable for its properties and meets its responsibilities.”
After the rally, Mr. Coffman, the mayor, said that he was “disappointed that the former president did not get to experience more of our city for himself” and that “the reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity in our city — and our state — have been grossly exaggerated and have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety.”
“The city and state have not been ‘taken over’ or ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by migrant gangs,” he said. “The incidents that have occurred in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people, have been limited to a handful of specific apartment complexes, and our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns and will continue to do so.”
Mr. Trump’s visit to Aurora comes as he has ramped up his harsh language on immigration and continues to claim falsely that undocumented immigrants are fueling a “migrant crime” wave. Available national crime statistics do not support that assertion. But Mr. Trump relies on anecdotal evidence to make his case.
Mr. Trump’s nativist message was echoed by other speakers at the rally, including Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado. Shortly before Mr. Trump’s remarks, Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, made anti-immigrant language central to his appeals to the crowd to vote.
“You have the right to want a country that is of, by and for Americans and only Americans,” Mr. Miller said.
Image
Even as city officials tried to set the record straight before Mr. Trump’s rally, the former president repeated many of the false assertions. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
His false assertions extended to another city, Springfield, Ohio, where he continued to insist falsely that Haitian migrants who are in the country legally were “really illegal,” as he persisted in stretching the bounds of what he described as unlawful entry into the country.
Many of the Haitian migrants in Springfield have Temporary Protected Status, which gives people from a country in crisis — typically after a natural disaster or political upheaval — the opportunity to remain in the United States legally, regardless of how they entered the country. (In the presidential debate last month, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the migrants there were eating household pets.)
At the rally, Mr. Trump continued to use dehumanizing rhetoric, referring to violent immigrants as “animals,” “barbaric thugs” and “sadistic monsters.” At one point, he falsely claimed that Ms. Harris had “infested” buildings in Aurora with gang members.
Though immigration dominated Mr. Trump’s speech, he digressed to attack the news media, demean Ms. Harris and stray to other topics. At one point, he seemed to mix up his namesake company with his presidency. “On Day 1 of the Trump Organization — the Trump Organization, when I founded it, it was nice, but now it’s great,” he said. “But I want to get back to the Trump administration, because the Trump administration is going to do things.”
Mr. Trump during his speech acknowledged that his trip to reliably blue Colorado was meant to draw attention to his message on immigration.
The Aurora rally was one of several stops in blue states he will make as the election closes, in a period when campaigns would typically be more focused on battleground states. On Saturday, he will hold a rally in Coachella, Calif., and he will hold a rally in Manhattan at Madison Square Garden later this month.
Michael C. Bender and Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting.
Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold
Jonathan Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago. More about Jonathan Weisman
mma
Fox News misrepresented ICE data on immigration and crime in over 50 segments
85% of Fox segments about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics included misrepresentations of the data even after multiple Fox personalities attempted to debunk the falsehoods
Written by Rob Savillo
Research contributions from Tyler Monroe & Harrison Ray
Published 10/01/24
Since September 27, when GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) released data on immigration and crime that he requested from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Fox News has misrepresented the meaning of the statistics over and over: In 53 of 62 segments about the data (or 85%), Fox spun the information to promote a number of falsehoods about immigration and crime in the U.S.
- The falsehoods Fox aired included claims that most or all of the migrants with criminal convictions entered the country during the Biden administration, suggestions that migrants with criminal convictions are moving freely within the U.S., suggestions that most or all migrants entered the country with prior criminal convictions from elsewhere, and claims that the total number of migrants with criminal convictions grew dramatically under Biden.
- Video file
Video
Media Matters found at least two instances of Fox News personalities or reporters attempting to debunk the false claims about the ICE statistics that were spread widely on the network: one from The Five co-host Jessica Tarlov and another from Los Angeles-based correspondent Bill Melugin. Both instances occurred the same day the data were released.
Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security subsequently issued a statement to media outlets September 28, which was included in a fact check by CNN the following day, properly contextualizing the numbers from ICE:
The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.
- News outlets soon followed with their own fact checks on the ICE statistics, but that didn't stop Fox News personalities and guests from ignoring clarifications on the data and repeating false claims. The network included such context in less than half of total segments in the study period: 30 segments, or 48%.
When Fox did include the proper context from DHS or ICE — or even from their own reporters — the network continued to push false narratives about immigration and crime. Fox personalities and guests downplayed, undermined, or dismissed the clarifications in more than half of such segments: 17 segments, or 57%.
* Right-wing media ran with those false characterizations of the data, and they were bolstered by former President Donald Trump's misrepresentations in several social media posts.
Trump posted the false claim that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her [Kamala Harris'] three and a half year period as Border Czar,” followed up with another falsehood, “almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” and finally double-downed on both false statements with another post, writing, “14,000 CONVICTED thugs and slimeballs who have committed MURDER have been allowed to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, and roam free.”
Such rhetoric is not only false and misleading; it intentionally stokes unwarranted fears about immigrants and crime, specifically those who have crossed the southern U.S.-Mexico border. The Trump campaign has been using these misrepresentations to unfairly attack Vice President Kamala Harris' record — despite the fact that immigrants in general are more law-abiding than native-born Americans and that studies have consistently shown that undocumented immigrants do not commit more crime than U.S. citizens.
- ## Methodology...
September 27, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble
CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The Harris-Biden regime, they are stuffing foreigners in the reddest communities across the country, in small town red America, I think partially as revenge. Blake might not agree with this, but I think that they get, like, off on this sinister, like, we're gonna go send the Haitians into red America.
BLAKE NEFF (CO-HOST): Maybe a bit of that. Maybe a bit of that.
KIRK: I think there's an element there. You can't convince me. I have no evidence of that, but it's just gut instinct. I'm not gonna get into what states can do to resist this yet because I wanna win the election and do this properly through the federal government. If we lose in November, it's gonna get very, very messy. I'm just gonna be honest. Like, it's gonna get messy of states being —
NEFF: Especially if they start packing the courts, then you're you really have to start thinking, like, OK. What are we gonna do about, like, this truly out of control wants it all —
KIRK: Do we have a country at this point?
NEFF: Yeah.
KIRK: And I don't wanna get there yet, Emily. But, Emily, just so we're clear, the Haitians that are in Huntsville that are raping your women and hunting you down at night — it's only gonna get worse if — unless Donald Trump wins. A new report from Fox News shows that across the border, 13,000 people convicted of murder, 15,000 people convicted of rape on the non-detained list — meaning they're currently roaming free around our country. So right now, roaming free on the interior of the United States are 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 convicted rapists. And they're just — they're having a field day, and they're coming for your daughter next.
...
KIRK: I want you to understand this. That means that they're coming across the border, they run a background check, or someone knows, and then they say, just have fun. That's what that means. That means that they — we know who they are, and then we just release them into the interior and say —
NEFF: It just shocks me, like, the level of control you can have over media narrative that. Like, you know, The New York Times or whoever can blow this off. 13,000 homicide convictions just roaming the US as an elective policy choice.
KIRK: And the election is close. I mean, the election is close. It's very close. And, it — again, there was a poll that just showed up here. Arizona women voters, favor Kamala Harris 52%, 43%. And that does not include the 2 million gotaways. And since those are the border jumpers who avoid border encounters, it's safe to conclude the proportion of convicted criminals is even higher than that 2 million plus of them. Thank you for being a member, and stay safe in Alabama, and pray Trump wins, or else things are gonna get really bad.@@ They're gonna get even worse. There will be hundreds of thousands of Haitians brought into Alabama, and they will become your masters.
---
---
// haiti pet fail? mma 9 24
the “crime crisis” narrative Fox News concocted for Donald Trump was exposed at Tuesday night’s debate when moderator David Muir pointed out that FBI data shows violent crime has actually fallen dramatically in recent years. The network’s stars are responding by lashing out at Muir, falsely claiming violent crime is actually up, and arguing that even if data show violent crime is plummeting, “we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be.”
Trump, in a nonresponsive answer to a question about how he would carry out his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, claimed that due to migration under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, “crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.”
Trump’s assertion of rising crime echoed months of anecdote-based Fox coverage — but Muir pointed out in response that actual data shows the opposite, saying, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
Indeed, preliminary FBI data released in June found “steep drops in every category of violent crime in every region in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier, continuing a downward trend since a coronavirus pandemic surge” during Trump’s administration.
Trump responded to Muir by echoing baseless right-wing media claims that the FBI had been “defrauding” data. But the agency’s report is consistent with other sources showing that crime is falling.
Video
CitationFrom the September 10, 2024, presidential debate.
The co-hosts of Fox & Friends responded the next morning by arguing that data that shows violent crime has fallen is irrelevant in the face of the vibes.
“Any time people say violent crime is down in America,” offered Brian Kilmeade, “I ask you, people of Philadelphia, where they are hosting, find anyone in Philadelphia who thinks violent crime is down. I ask you, people of Chicago, site of the DNC, walk around and tell us how crime is under control. I ask you in Washington, D.C., where violent crime is down, the carjacking capital of the country, ask anyone in Washington, D.C., if they feel safer today than four years ago. There is the numbers and there is the reality.”
“It’s the word ‘violent,’ however they define ‘violent.’ Crime is up,” responded Ainsley Earhardt.
“Kamala Harris didn’t even make that point — it was the moderators,” Lawrence Jones added. “They’re not there covering these stories. They’re not going to all these major cities talking about the violence that is impacting urban America on the day to days, so they probably believe what the FBI numbers are saying.”
In fact, according to data compiled by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, all three cities Kilmeade mentioned have seen steep declines in homicides and at least one other category of violent crime the group reported (rapes, robberies, and/or aggravated assaults).
Video
CitationFrom the September 11, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends.
The trio returned to the subject later in the program.
“One of my favorite parts of the debate, and when it just became clear to me that the bias was jumping off the screen at one point, was the conversation about crime,” Jones complained. “And then David hops in and says, ‘Well, actually, the FBI is saying that the crime is going down.’”
“OK, well now, we know those numbers aren’t quite accurate,” he continued, echoing Trump’s false claim from the debate. Jones then urged Muir to spend more time focusing his broadcast on crime anecdotes, saying, “David, you have a newscast every single day. You may not report on it, but you have local affiliates in major cities all across this country. They are reporting on the crime in Chicago, in Philadelphia. Why not pick up the phone and call them and see what’s going on on the ground?”
“I think, Lawrence, the operative word there was ‘violent,’ and David said, ‘Violent crime has gone down,’” Earhardt replied. “We know that crime is up in these cities, we know that thousands, millions of more illegal immigrants have come over our border under this administration, many of them are affiliated with gangs. We know that more of them have murdered more little girls or young women than ever in my lifetime.” (Earhardt was alive in the 1990s, when violent crime and homicides peaked at levels dramatically higher than the present.)
“So violent crime might be going down,” she continued, “but crime overall, we're all a little bit more scared than we used to be."
“Ask anybody in the streets of Philadelphia, outside where that debate was taking place, if they think crime is going down,” Kilmeade added. “In New York City, you walk the streets here, I don't care what the bar chart or the pie chart says, it’s not going down.”
Related
- ### Fox News' attempt to manufacture a Biden crime crisis runs into a problem: Violent crime is down
02/29/24 12:55 PM EST
07/16/24 9:04 AM EDT
09/11/24
mma 8 24
Fox News is pushing data from a former Trump official to incorrectly suggest violent crime is rising during the Biden administration
Written by Gideon Taaffe
Published 08/23/24
As the Democratic National Convention continued in the background this week, Fox News personalities attempted to cast over the convention a shadow of supposedly rising crime. The network repeatedly sought to dispel FBI data showing a decrease in violent crime by instead using statistics from a Heritage Foundation fellow and former Trump administration official. By comparing current crime rates to 2019, rather than 2021 when Biden and Harris entered office, Fox News is skewing the narrative to deny that crime rates have decreased during the Biden administration.
- ## Violent crime is trending down under the Biden-Harris administration, despite right-wing media attempts to suggest otherwise
- Preliminary FBI crime statistics for 2023 suggest that violent crime was down from a pandemic spike and from 2022.While initial data, based on reports from about 80% of U.S. law enforcement agencies, is in line with external research from the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, the FBI will not publish finalized crime data for 2023 until the fall. The Associated Press, [3/20/24]
- Fox News has failed to adequately cover FBI reporting showing that crime rates have decreased, despite the network’s overall fixation on crime coverage.Earlier this year, after running nearly 400 weekday segments on migrant crime in the first 10 weeks of 2024, Fox largely ignored a March release of the FBI’s quarterly report showing that crime in the U.S. dropped significantly last year. By July, Fox had run nearly 1,000 migrant crime weekday segments in 2024. In August, Media Matters reported that Fox did not cover new data on the air showing that violent crime had dropped sharply in major cities in the first half of 2024, even though the network aired over 4.5 hours of violent crime coverage in the same time period. Media Matters, [3/13/24, 4/3/24, 7/16/24, 8/15/24]
- Right-wing media more broadly have been attacking the FBI crime stats, claiming they have been falsified or altered to benefit Democrats.This claim is based on research by former Trump official Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and president of the Coalition for Law, Order and Safety. Morgan’s research uses a different (smaller) data set than the FBI data and compares current rates of violent crime to pre-pandemic crime rates from 2019. Media Matters, [4/17/24; Washington Examiner, 4/5/24; The Heritage Foundation, accessed 8/22/24; Coalition for Law, Order and Safety, accessed 8/22/24]
- Morgan’s Coalition for Law, Order and Safety is now claiming that crime is up by 9.6% in 66 cities compared to 2019.A Fox News article falsely cites the data in its subheadline, writing, “Violent crime is actually up nearly 25%, independent data analysis shows.” The data cited claims only that “aggravated assault” is “up nearly 25%” in comparison to 2019. Fox News, [8/17/24]
- In part, right-wing claims that the data is wrong are based on the right-wing assertions that large cities like New York and Los Angeles did not submit their data, which is misleading.While it is true that many large cities failed to produce data in 2021 as the FBI switched reporting systems, that issue was almost entirely eliminated in 2022.{: As crime reporter and data analyst Jeff Asher points out, “There were 18,884 agencies representing 333 million people active in the UCR program in 2022. Of that total, over 15,700 agencies representing around 311 million people reported data in some manner that year (94 percent population coverage).” Substack, [6/17/24]}:
- ## Right-wing media are misrepresenting data to incorrectly suggest crime rates are increasing
- Fox host Lawrence Jones falsely claimed the NYPD and LAPD did not submit their crime data to the FBI in 2022. Jones: “While the Biden-Harris administration claims crime rates are falling, they failed to mention a major law enforcement agency like the NYPD and the LAPD didn't submit their crime report to the FBI in 2021 and 2022.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/21/24]
- When Fox host Brian Kilmeade said, “They keep saying crime is going down,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt argued, “Violent crime is not.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/21/24]
- After Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) claimed there was a massive crime spike under the Biden-Harris administration, Fox host Jesse Watters said, “They’re not really reporting all the cities to the FBI.”Watters added, accusing Democrats of ignoring crime victims, “When you put a face on it, it just shames the Democrats, who have been just so out to lunch on a life-and-death issue. Fox News,*Jesse Watters Primetime*, [8/20/24]
- OnThe Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld falsely claimed that reporting on a decrease in crime is a “hoax” because “many cities are no longer reporting the stats to the FBI.”Gutfeld: “Another dangerous hoax is saying crime is down. The only reason you can say that is because many cities are no longer reporting the stats to the FBI. When a narrative goes against your senses — what you hear, what you see — trust your senses. Everyone of us intimately knows a victim of crime if we haven't been a victim ourselves, so again this is not like lying about crowd size. This is a lie that hurts.” Fox News, *The Five*, [8/20/24]
- Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins cited Mark Morgan’s group, suggesting violent crime has increased by comparing current numbers with pre-pandemic crime rates from 2019.Jenkins: “The Independent public policy group Coalition for Law, Order and Safety argues that according to their analysis, it’s actually up across 66 major cities. You can see from January to June 2019 data — for that same period in 2024 shows a 9.6% increase in total violent crime, with aggravated assault up nearly 25%, murder up 6.4%.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/20/24]
- Jones brought up violent crime rising by “9.6%” but didn’t specify that this rate reflects the change since 2019.He said to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg: “When you look at inflation, it’s up 19.4%, when you look at the southern border, it’s 8.1 [million] encounters, when you look at crime — violent crime — across 66 major cities, it’s up almost 10% at 9.6%. Is that a record that you can run on?” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/20/24]
- Kilmeade parroted Morgan’s data, claiming there has been an increase in crime. Kilmeade: “Look at right now, they’re looking at 9.6% increase in total crime. Nearly 25% increase in aggravated assault. 6.4 increase in murders. All negative numbers.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends*, [8/19/24]
===
an 8 24
Donald Trump called off an interview with a local newspaper during a visit to Michigan after he was asked to verify his claims about out-of-control crime in the area, according to a new report.
The Republican presidential nominee campaigned Tuesday in Howell, where he argued that a "crime wave" attributed to his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris was occurring at levels "nobody has ever seen before," but he was unwilling or unable to cite evidence for those claims, reported *The Detroit News*.
"The Trump campaign had initially agreed that Trump would participate in an interview with The Detroit News on Tuesday," wrote state politics reporter Craig Mauger. "But after the newspaper began asking about the Michigan crime data before the event, a campaign aide said the presidential candidate no longer had time for an interview after the speech."
The recently convicted felon told supporters at his campaign event that in bigger cities, "almost all run by Democrats," Americans can't even "walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped. You get whatever it may be."
"The amount of crime that we have is unbelievable," Trump said.
National crime data shows the rate of violent crime decreased from 2017 to 2019 during Trump's presidency before spiking in 2020 to 398.5 incidents per 100,000 people, while the violent crime rate dropped in 2021 and 2022 in the first years of Joe Biden's presidency to 380.7 incidents per 100,000 people.
The Trump campaign waved away that FBI data as "totally unreliable" because the statistics were based on "estimated crime numbers" for law enforcement agencies that didn't report numbers.
Michigan State Police reported that violent crime increased 12 percent in the state between 2019 and 2020, the last full year of Trump's presidency, and then another 1 percent in Biden's first year in office before dropping about 7 percent the following year.
"Why would Michigan want to go back to the higher crime rates of the Trump years?" asked transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who also challenged the former president's record on crime during a Fox News appearance.
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Fox News totally ignored new report showing violent crime is down — while running more than 4.5 hours of violent crime coverage 08/15/24 mma
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floyd BLM protests cops shop trashed trump praised walz handling
Right-wing media smear Tim Walz by pushing misleading claims about Minnesota's crime rate
08/09/24
08/09/24 mma
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July 31, 2024, edition of Lara Trump's *The Right View: Wanted for Questioning
LARA TRUMP (HOST): My goodness. What a mess we are in right now. How about the crime? How about the crime all over the place? I, you know, I lived in New York City for a long time and thank goodness Eric and I moved our family to Florida because I think all the time, like my gosh, imagine I was raising my kids in New York City right now. It's terrifying to go in New York as an adult, let alone take my kids around in New York City, have them live there, go to school there. No one should feel like that in America. And unfortunately a lot of people do.
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07/16/24
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NOTE merge of racism and violent crime and border hype fear mma “they’re rapists”
:{:{06/25/24}:
- ### Fox News' Jeanine Pirro says all undocumented immigrants should be presumed to be violent criminals
:{:{06/24/24}:
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AHA DOH TRUMP WANTS TO RUN AS CHANGE CAND THO INCUMBENT, AND UTTER FAIL SO JUST CREATES NEW RELAITY EG GOOD ECONOMY DESPITE EMPIRICAL FACTS
HOW BIG IS VIOLENT CRIME AS ISSUE? // BIDEN OPEN BORDER CRIME WAVE
NICE RIPOSTE HONKY GOOD SPOX FRONT MAN DEM HELLHOLES CITIES
ABC News host Jonathan Karl fact-checked Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) after he claimed that violent crime was up under Joe Biden's presidency.
During an interview on Sunday, Karl asked Scott if he agreed with the Supreme Court's decision to strike down a ban on bump stocks, which allow some guns to fire more rapidly.
"We trust and believe and respect the decision of the Supreme Court," Scott opined. "What we need to focus on, Jon, is the violence that we're seeing across this nation. Under Joe Biden, we've seen the greatest increase in violent crime in my lifetime."
Karl pointed out that Scott was in error.
"Actually, Senator, as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they're actually down this past year," the host said.
"Under Joe Biden, neighborhoods like the ones I grew up in have never been ravaged [more]," Scott insisted.
Watch the video below from ABC.
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MSNBC, Alex Wagner explains how Fox News fabricates panic about crime waves
06/12/24
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judd pop info 4 24
in the 2024 presidential election, one of the central attacks that Trump and his political allies are levying against Biden is that Biden is responsible for a "migrant crime" wave. The argument was summarized by Trump in a March 22 video:
[A] real bloodbath is occurring right now under crooked Joe. It’s Biden’s Border Bloodbath. There’s never been anything like that. Every day, Joe Biden is setting loose thousands of unvetted, unscreened, military-age men into the United States from parts unknown… We had the safest border in history. Now we have the worst border probably in the history of the world. Every day innocent citizens are being killed, stabbed, shot, raped, and murdered because of Biden migrant crime. It’s a new word, a new term. It’s migrant crime, but we call it Biden migrant crime cause he’s responsible for it 100%... When I’m your president, we’re going to end this disgrace, and we’re going to stop Biden’s Border Bloodbath. It is a bloodbath indeed, and we’re going to get it stopped.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched a website dedicated to the issue, BidenBloodbath.com. "History will remember Biden for his destruction, chaos, and failure. Lives of everyday Americans have been shattered as a direct result of Biden’s open border policies — and he doesn’t care," the RNC claims on the homepage. "We have to stand up and stop Biden before he destroys our nation. The cost of doing nothing is measured in the lives lost to the… crime wave washing across America."
This message has been amplified by the right-wing media. Fox News' Jesse Watters, who hosts the network's top-rated primetime show, offered this commentary on April 12:
Migrant crime is quickly becoming one of the largest issues affecting the American people. Communities all across the United States are being terrorized by violent illegals, while Biden rolls out the red carpet for them with his open border policies, but Donald Trump is pledging to take care of the problem and keep our citizens safe when Republicans get back in power
There are violent crimes committed by undocumented migrants, which are traumatic for the victims, their families, and their communities. That is why the accusation that Biden is responsible for a surge in violent crime by undocumented migrants is so politically potent. There are disturbing anecdotes of crimes that make powerful fodder for attacks during a political campaign. People, understandably, want to feel safe.
But is there evidence that, since Biden took office, there has been a surge in violent crime by undocumented migrants?
The most straightforward answer would be to look at crimes committed by undocumented migrants over time. Unfortunately, this data is unavailable because law enforcement agencies do not typically collect or report information about immigration status, analyst Jeff Asher notes.
In his newsletter, Jeff-alytics, Asher came up with the next best alternative. He looked at trends for "violent crime across the 14 counties along the Texas border with Mexico." If there is, in fact, a violent crime wave fueled by migrants, it would show up in these counties before anywhere else. The Texas Department of Public Safety maintains up-to-date, reliable crime data at the county level.
Asher found "no evidence of increasing violent crime along the US border with Mexico." In fact, these border counties "have seen a relatively steady violent crime rate below that of the rest of their state and the nation as a whole."
The same trends hold when you look at murder alone. The murder rate in border counties is consistently lower than the country as a whole, with little change over the last four years.
In other words, the best available data does not support the claim that Republicans have made a central issue in the 2024 campaign. There is no "bloodbath" at the border. These areas, in fact, have less crime than the nation as a whole.
The national crime decline
If there is no migrant crime wave at the border, perhaps it will show up in other areas of the country. The data does not support that claim either.
Nationwide, homicide and violent crime dramatically declined in 2023. According to the latest FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime report, which was released in March, homicides were down 13% in 2023 compared to 2022. Meanwhile, violent crime and property crime dipped 6% and 4% respectively. This data is preliminary and based on reports submitted by 15,199 of 19,152 law enforcement agencies across the country, reflecting “about 82% of the U.S. population.” (The FBI will release a more complete analysis for 2023 in the fall.)
Based on initial findings, Asher said “[t]he decline in murder in 2023 is likely the largest one year decline ever recorded.” The last time that happened was in 1996 when murder dropped 9.1%. In 163 of the 232 cities that submitted data, murder “was down or even,” Asher wrote. These findings were also mirrored in a survey by the Council on Criminal Justice, “which found that homicides were down an average of 10%” across 32 cities. The preliminary data also “suggests 2023 likely had the lowest reported violent crime rate nationally since the late 1960s,” Asher said. A few cities, including Chicago and DC, bucked the trend and saw an increase in violent crime in 2023. But there is no evidence this increase was attributable to migrants.
Asher said early data from 2024 shows that “murder is down around 20 percent in 2024 in more than 180 cities” compared to the same time period last year. In some cities, like DC, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, murder has declined by “more than 30 percent.” In Chicago, murder has declined 12%. But Asher concluded that the data, though incomplete, is encouraging overall. “A murder decline of even half the magnitude suggested by the early 2024 data would place the US murder rate this year largely on par with or below where it was from 2015 to 2019,” Asher noted.
The fact that we are not seeing evidence of a migrant crime surge is consistent with historical data that shows migrants, even undocumented migrants, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. A peer-reviewed 2020 study, which used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2012 to 2018, "found a lower felony arrest rate for immigrants in the U.S. illegally compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens and no evidence of increasing criminality among immigrants." An upcoming study by a researcher at the libertarian Cato Institute similarly found that "undocumented migrants in Texas were about 26% less likely to be convicted of homicide than native-born Americans over the decade of 2013-22."
It appears, however, that Republican messaging around the issue is having an impact. Despite the data, most people believe crime is up. A Gallup poll in November 2023 found that 77% of Americans “believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago.”
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fox fail hannity corrects why?
thom 3 an 2 24
— Fascism Fear, Fear, Fear and Even More Fear Alert! While Sean Hannity was interviewing Curtis Sliwa — who was on a midtown street in New York City — on Hannity’s Fox “News” show, there was a kerfuffle off-camera. Turns out a group of the “Guardian Angels” thought they’d caught an “illegal” walking by and tackled him to the ground and beat him up, if press reports are accurate. Sliwa bragged to Hannity:
“The Guardian Angels spotted him, stopped him, he resisted, and let’s just say we gave him a little pain compliance. His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations. He’s sucking concrete, the cops scraped him off the asphalt, he's on his way to jail, but they’ll cut him loose. We gotta take 42nd Street back, Sean. These illegals think they own this street, they think they rule the night. This is our country, if they can't abide by the rules, then we’re gonna kick ’em back from where they came.”
Later, the press reported, it turned out the guy wasn’t an “illegal” and wasn’t a criminal: he was just a Hispanic guy walking down the street minding his own business. Did I mention “bullies and thugs”?...
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https://www.mediamatters.org/bret-baier/fox-anchor-bret-baier-compares-bidens-vaccine-mandates-and-student-loan-relief-trumps
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not sure where to put this
chris hayes congr testimony 6 yr old # so during trump? and was for losses for all reasons
fox said organized crime = mafia not black hordes? said chains pulling out of urban hellholes?
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Paul Krugman: FBI figures expose GOP 'politics of fear' on US crime rates - Alternet.org
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// kennedy LA hearing fail
Charlie Kirk: "Black crime is a major issue in our country" | Media Matters for America
assume he means violent AA crime and homeless? drugs?
mma 6 23
JESSE WATTERS (HOST): San Francisco is on the verge of becoming a failed state. San Francisco's like a rogue nation. The city can't manage its institutions and protect its own people. The only reason the tech people haven't been run out of town is because everything is done over computers. Everything brick and mortar is hightailing it out of there. Jesse Watters Primetimeis this close to declaring martial law in San Francisco. Bring in the National Guard, bring in FEMA, save the city before it's too late. We need a San Francisco rescue plan because San Francisco is coming to a city near you. And just like we should've shut down the virus in Wuhan, we need to do the same thing in San Francisco.
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no cover drop
https://www.mediamatters.org/crime-and-criminal-justice/after-fearmongering-about-crime-cable-news-networks-are-now-largely
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Turning Point's summit for young women:
The Turning Point USA Young Women's Leadership Summit is sponsored by a shady police nonprofit
06/10/23
The weekend of June 9 will bring the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit back to Texas. The three-day event, which promises to be a hotbed of transphobic, staunchly anti-feminist propaganda and fearmongering about contraceptives and trans women, is sponsored in part by a sketchy nonprofit that fundraises off deceptive, pro-police appeals to right-wing media audiences.
Last year’s YWLS event was billed as a “celebration of freedom and femininity” for “cuteservatives,” and speakers told attendees that their mission was to find a conservative husband to settle down and have children with.
This year, the event will be sponsored in part by the National Police Association, a shady nonprofit that seeks to bring “attention to the anti-police efforts challenging effective law enforcement.” But a 2019 investigative report from the IndyStar revealed that the organization does not have the support of local police departments, and local police chiefs call it a “scam.”
The IndyStar reported that the NPA fundraises based on the assumption that donations go directly toward supporting police officers, with letters sent to “vulnerable people” asking for donations to “give our law enforcement officers the crime prevention tools they need.” According to the IndyStar, these donations do not go to police agencies, and the outlet found that “only 25 percent of the group’s spending went to programming.” The letters the NPA sends paint “a dystopian picture of communities and police departments under attack,” even if the picture is plainly false:
The National Police Association's fundraising letters raise different issues depending on the city.
Fundraising letters in Germantown, Wisconsin, last year falsely warned that Germantown is a sanctuary city, a term that refers to states and municipalities that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
“Countless Americans have already been robbed, mugged, raped and even murdered as a direct result of Sanctuary policies of allowing known criminals to remain on the streets,” one copy of a National Police Association letter says, adding, “your gift of $15 is needed to reach citizens like you ... so they realize the kind ofrisks they're facing because their elected officials have allowed their communities to become sanctuaries for violent criminals.”
Germantown Police Chief Peter Hoell told IndyStar the group “must not have researched the demographics.”
“It’s so far-fetched, especially if you know Germantown,” Hoell said of the sanctuary city claim. “It’s a highly conservative community.”
Hoell told residents to disregard the letter. He also reported the National Police Association to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service over what he considered to be fraudulent mail.
“It’s a scam,” Hoel said. “It’s no different than any other scam — just a different angle.”
The IndyStar reported that the NPA’s three employees were volunteers who were not paid by the organization.According to the report, founder Eddie Hutchison — a full-time fraud investigator for the Indiana attorney general's office — worked just a few hours per week and received no income from the NPA in 2019. This appears to no longer be true, as the group’s 2021 tax filings show thatHutchison was paid $96,000 for an average of 100 hours of work per week. The other two executives listed on the form, Derek Peterson and Brad Shaw, reportedly work an average of 0.24 and 0.12 hours per week and receive $58,113 and $28,000, respectively.
Even the NPA’s website shows that not much of its donation income goes toward helping police departments directly — grants for training or gear, it says, are limited to $1,000 per year.
The NPA’s stances are standard pro-police talking points found across right-wing media. In 2021, the group also came out against the COVID-19 vaccine, even though the illness was the leading cause of police deaths. The same year, the NPA ran a campaign called “Stop Filming & Start Helping” in an effort to refocus attention from police violence to police being “assaulted on the job.” The NPA website also features a “Wall of Shame” with articles about people and policies the group sees as “coddling criminals.”
NPA spokesperson Betsy Brantner Smith, who is scheduled to speak at YWLS, uses her Twitter account primarily to spread awareness about anti-police violence but also to applaud anti-LGBTQ hate from Megyn Kelly and retweet attacks against Kohl’s and Target for selling Pride merch. Smith is a frequent guest on Newsmax, where she agrees with hosts that crime is out of control and that police need to be protected, offering little else.
[vid]
the organization also thrives off of filing lawsuits seemingly intended primarily to generate right-wing media attention for the NPA itself.
In April, the group filed a lawsuit pressing Nashville police to release the manifesto of the Covenant School shooter, which the school and parents filed separate motions to counter, citing safety concerns and asking time to allow surviving students to “finish the school year in peace.” NPA responded by saying the parents’ lawsuit is an “obvious expression of anguish seeking sympathy,” and “they will experience even greater suffering if they obtain a denial of public access that results in more school children being murdered.”
In December 2022, the NPA sued an Ohio homeowners association for telling a resident to take down his “thin blue line” flag, a pro-police symbol that has been increasingly embraced by and associated with white supremacists.
Shortly after the original IndyStar report, the NPA also sued two officers who told the outlet that the organization was a scam.
Ahead of this year’s YWLS, Turning Point USA recently took a hit over another one of its event sponsors, Rightside Up, whose founder is a registered sex offender convicted in 2014 of “attempted ‘coercion and enticement’ after trying to persuade ‘a minor female’ to ‘engage in sexual activity.’”
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// wilding central pk 5? they are coming for you
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-goes-unhinged-racist-rant-prowling-blacks-go-around-fun-go-target-white
https://www.mediamatters.org/five/fox-news-host-claims-squatters-are-taking-over-america-and-they-could-be-coming-your-home-next
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aha doh escalator echo is amplify feedback loop
recall dylan roof they AA bogeyman are coming for your white women
mma 4 23
aLICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, I am so glad that Andy reminded us that 1/6 is a part of this continuum here. Philip Bump at The Washington Post reports, quote, "Fox News's coverage since mid-2020 has disproportionately involved clips of isolated criminal activity to generate a sense of unconstrained violence in urban areas -- despite evidence that the increase in crime since the pandemic also occurred in rural areas." You touched upon that, but what I want to come back to is the fact that this week, you had the GOP-led House leading a field hearing about crime in New York City, which then Fox News covers, and it just becomes part of this endless feedback loop where the circus becomes reality.
:{:{}:
}:
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT AND CEO): Yeah, and I think the part that concerns me the most is -- I think, that it's one thing when it's just a misinformation, feedback loop,that itself is a problem, but in a way, it's actually less scary than the current scenario because a couple of years ago -- and now, it's really just fully formed -- there was a switch. And basically the Republican party, via the right-wing media, decided that they were going to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And so once they sort of moved those fringe and set them right and directly front and center in the Republican core, it actually basically pulls in people that are most likely to act on these types of ideas, on this misinformation feedback loop. So what they're basically doing is taking an already simmering cauldron of anxiety, of fear, of hate, of rage, and they are ratcheting up that temperature, bit by bit. And so every time they sort of misrepresent, missample the threat of crime, who's actually responsible, that it's coming for you, they are basically raising the temperature on that cauldron. So it shouldn't be a surprise that it's increasingly starting to spill over and boil over. It's kind of what they're doing. They are organizing power on the fringes. This is what you get when you move the fringes front and center.
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pop info
for several years, Walgreens and other major retailers have been sounding the alarm about an alleged spike in shoplifting, describing it as an existential threat to their business. These dramatic claims generated a nationwide media frenzy.
Now, Walgreens is quietly backtracking.
In a conference call with investors on January 6, Walgreens Chief Financial Officer James Kehoe was asked how shoplifting and related problems impacted the company's financial performance. Kehoe admitted that “maybe [Walgreens] cried too much last year” about the issue, adding that the drugstore chain probably spent “too much” hiring private security companies.
Kehoe added that theft at Walgreens had “stabilized” and the company was "quite happy with where we are." Walgreens’ “shrink” — an industry term for inventory losses from theft, damage, or administrative errors — had gone down from 3.5% of sales last year to roughly 2.5% in its last quarter. Walgreens declined to specify how much of the "shrink" was due to shoplifting as opposed to other causes, like employee theft and damaged goods. Across the industry, "external theft" accounts for only one-third of total shrink. That means shoplifting at Walgreens likely amounts to less than 1% of sales.
But Kehoe’s upbeat comments gloss over Walgreens’ central role in fomenting the national panic over retail theft. Just a year ago, Kehoe said that part of the reason Walgreens’ reported lackluster earnings was because of “gangs that actually go in and empty our stores of beauty products.”
“This is not petty theft,” Kehoe insisted at the time. “It's not somebody who can't afford to eat tomorrow.”
Walgreens has been joined by other major retailers who have been echoing similar cries and drumming up fear: Walmart CEO Doug McMillion warned that Walmart may have to raise prices or close stores because theft was “higher than what it has historically been.” Former Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli stated on national television that retail theft was “spreading faster than COVID.”
Publicly available data, however, contradicts the theft-wave narrative. The number of shoplifting offenses dropped 46 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to the FBI’s crime data explorer. The National Retail Federation (NRF), a trade group that represents retailers like Walgreens and has amplified the theft-wave narrative, has also found that shrink declined to 1.4% of total retail sales in 2021, from 1.6% in 2020. External theft, the NRF found, made up 0.5% of total retail sales in 2021.
In response to a request for comment, Walgreens sent Popular Information the following statement: "Although we are pleased to see retail shrink levels stabilize, this is still a serious national problem affecting us all and all retailers. We have taken a number of steps to address this issue and, most importantly, protect the safety of our customers and team members, including our highly-valued partnerships with law enforcement and security professionals."
So although Walgreens continues to describe retail theft as a "serious national problem," Kehoe was clear that it is not preventing Walgreens from being a profitable company. And yet the company reported a net loss of $3.7 billion in its most recent quarter. Why? The company took "a $5.2 billion after-tax charge for opioid-related claims and litigation." That litigation stems from Walgreens' role in fueling the opioid epidemic by filling illegitimate prescriptions for highly-addictive pain medication.
What happened in San Francisco
In May 2021, Walgreens told the New York Times “that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.”
Months later, the retailer announced the closure of an additional five stores in San Francisco and told the San Francisco Chronicle that “organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco, and we are not immune to that.” The company said it had to increase investments in private security in San Francisco by “46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment.”
When the company announced it was closing five stores in San Francisco due to rampant theft, police data obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that “the five stores slated to close had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018.” Moreover, the company’s claims that thefts at its San Francisco stores were four times its national average were not reflected in citywide crime data — in 2020, shoplifting had reached its lowest level since they began collecting data in the 1970s.
Moreover, back in 2019, Walgreens announced it would close 200 stores across the U.S. as part of a larger “cost-reduction” plan. The San Francisco Chronicle, in 2021, raised the question of “whether a $140 billion company was using an unsubstantiated narrative of unchecked shoplifting to obscure other possible factors in its decision."
How Walgreens played the media
Mainstream media has historically gravitated toward sensationalist crime coverage that often obscures reality. With Walgreens, a similar pattern emerged: the drugstore chain’s dubious narrative was spread unchecked by some of the largest news organizations in the country.
One of the first viral stories on Walgreens’ alleged theft issue was published by the New York Times’** San Francisco Bureau Chief Thomas Fuller in May 2021. “The mundane crime of shoplifting has spun out of control in San Francisco, forcing some chain stores to close,” read the subhead. In the piece, Fuller recounts a time in 2016 he saw a man grab “a handful of beef jerky” and walk out of a Walgreens. Based on this five-year-old anecdote and a statement from Walgreens, Fuller declared a “shoplifting epidemic” and called into question a sentencing-reform measure that reduced some thefts from felonies to misdemeanors. The piece, notably, does not include any data on crime rates in San Francisco.
The New York Times’ coverage of Kehoe’s comments acknowledged that “Walgreens received national attention in October 2021 when it announced that it was closing five stores in San Francisco, citing shoplifting as the reason for the closures.” The story acknowledges how Walgreens’ shoplifting claims “fed into political debates about crimes.” The piece, however, fails to mention the critical role the Times itself played in amplifying Walgreens’ claims without supporting evidence.
Since May 2021, the New York Times has published at least six stories warning readers of retail theft. Over the same time period, other outlets provided even more voluminous coverage of the issue. The Wall Street Journal published at least 13 stories on the retail theft “epidemic”, including four from its editorial board. CNN published at least seven articles on the“wave” of retail theft. And Business Insider published at least 18 stories on how retail theft has “ballooned” into a billion dollar problem for companies. According to the Center for Just Journalism, the number of stories featuring the keywords “organized retail crime” or “organized retail theft” increased by more than 270% between 2020 and 2021.
The overblown claims in this media coverage have political consequences. Walgreens’ theft concerns was “a flash point in a stinging criminal justice debate that helped electrify the recall of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.” California Republican Chair Jessica Millan Patterson wrote in an op-ed that the Walgreens closures were evidence that “Democratic policies have created a crime spike.” Boudin was removed from office by voters in June 2022.
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not violent but hyped
pop info judd
12 22
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced during an interview on CNBC last week that the retailer may have to raise prices or close stores due to insufficiently aggressive prosecution of retail theft. McMillon claimed that, as a result of lenient sentences, theft at Walmart is “higher than what it has historically been.” During the interview, McMillon does not disclose how much merchandise Walmart is losing to shoplifting or how that compares to previous years.
Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, racked up $559.2 billion in revenue last year. So far this year, the company has made $15 billion in profits. Last quarter alone, Walmart recorded $152.8 billion in sales, nearly a 9% increase from the previous year. The purported spike in shoplifting at Walmart did not stop the company from announcing a new $20 billion share buyback plan last month. And McMillon is being paid as if the company is thriving. In 2021, he took home $22.574 million in total compensation — 1,078 times more than the median Walmart employee.
Publicly available data also contradicts McMillon’s claims. As Popular Information previously reported, the number of shoplifting offenses dropped 46 percent between 2019 and 2021, according to the FBI’s crime data explorer.
Of course, not all shoplifting incidents result in charges. But the National Retail Federation, a trade association that represents Walmart and other major retailers, found that "shrink" — an industry term for inventory losses from theft, damage, or administrative errors — declined between 2019 and 2021. In 2021, the average shrink rate was 1.4% of total retail sales. That means for every $100 in sales, an average of $1.40 in inventory was lost. Retail theft alone amounted to 0.5% of total retail sales, or $0.52 for every $100.
 |
The average retail shrink in 2021 is the same as it was in 2015. The only difference is that shoplifting and external theft made up a slightly larger portion of the "shrink" in 2015 than it did in 2021.
Walmart isn’t the only company stoking fears of a shoplifting surge. Last year, Walgreens announced that it was closing five stores in the Bay Area due to the “scale of thefts.” Popular Information found that this claim, however, was not reflected in citywide crime data, which showed that in 2020 shoplifting had reached its lowest level since they began collecting data 45 years ago. Walgreens also said in 2019 that it planned to shutter 200 stores as a “cost-saving measure,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “[T]he timing of Walgreens’ decision led observers to wonder whether a $140 billion company was using an unsubstantiated narrative of unchecked shoplifting to obscure other possible factors in its decision,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle.
Target CFO Michael Fiddelke told CNBC last month that theft rose “about 50% year over year.” The company told Winsight Grocery Business that it is working with legislators and law enforcement to address the “growing national problem” of retail theft. Similarly, last week, the former CEO of Home Depot, Bob Nardelli, described retail theft as an “epidemic” and said that shoplifting was “spreading faster than COVID.”
Despite the apocalyptic rhetoric, losses from shoplifting pale in comparison to the wages employers steal from employees each year. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employerssteal roughly $15 billion annually from their employees from minimum wage violations alone. This figure, which excludes other common forms of wage theft like overtime violations, “exceeds the value of property crimes committed in the United States each year.”
Since 2000, Walmart has had to pay $1.5 billion in penalties for wage and hour violations, according to the Good Jobs First Violation Tracker.
Will more aggressive prosecution deter theft?
CNBC's Rebecca Quick, one of the hosts of Squawk Box, asked McMillon about "laws that have been changed." Specifically, Quick claims that there are new laws that provide "criminals won't be prosecuted below a certain level." McMillon accepted the premise of Quick's question, arguing the laws need to be "corrected."
But Quick's description of the law is inaccurate. States have not passed statutes legalizing theft. Rather, all states have a felony threshold for shoplifting. In Connecticut, shoplifting more than $200 in goods is a felony. In Texas, the threshold is $2,500. Misdemeanor theft, below the felony threshold, generally results in little to no jail time. Felony theft can result in years in prison.
Since 2000, at least 40 states have raised their felony theft thresholds. Walmart and other retailers have spent millions opposing these changes, arguing that raising the felony threshold will increase shoplifting. The data, however, does not support this claim.
A 2017 study by Pew Trusts found that "in the 30 states that raised their thresholds between 2000 and 2012, downward trends in property crime or larceny rates, which began in the early 1990s, continued without interruption." Further, the study found that "states that increased their thresholds reported roughly the same average decrease in crime as the 20 states that did not change their theft laws." Notably, the "amount of a state’s felony theft threshold—whether it is $500, $1,000, $2,000, or more—is not correlated with its property crime and larceny rates."
In 2010, South Carolina raised the threshold for felony theft from $1,000 to $2,000. Pew Trusts found that "since the law was implemented, the state’s property crime rate …continued to fall, dropping 15 percent in the three years after reform." Despite the higher threshold, "the value of goods reported stolen in the state…did not change, remaining about $200 on average."
Retailers were able to push through a harsh anti-shoplifting law, with no felony threshold, in Arizona. It resulted in a "man who robbed [a] Walmart of goods worth less than $10… facing two felony charges."
Why doesn't increasing the felony threshold increase shoplifting? Most shoplifters are not making a calculation about the potential legal consequences. Many are addicted to drugs and are willing to do anything to feed their addiction. Last month, Walmart proposed paying $3.1 billion to settle lawsuits alleging it "improperly filled prescriptions" for opioids, fueling an addiction epidemic.
===
===
big in gop midterm eg mccarthy contract w am reboot
fox hellscapes
mma 9 22
JEANINE PIRRO (CO-HOST): The first thing that you've got to do is recognize that, not just McDonald's -- Caterpillar, Boeing, Citadel -- they're all leaving Chicago. I love Chicago, I lived in Chicago, it is one of my all time favorite cities, it's beautiful. And it's been destroyed.
...
This city is -- Chicago is descending into anarchy. And there's pain, and there's loss, and there's suffering. Instead of playing these nonsense political back and forth, why don't you go out into the community and find out what you can do for the people who are suffering? And by the way, part of your job, Mayor, is to make sure that the economy is good. And the one thing you don't do is trash employers, especially big employers, in your city.
So you're not worried about crime because you're making great progress and, you know, you want to fight with the business leaders. I mean, Chicago is a mess right now. And it's because we've got people and politicians like this woman who have no idea how to run a city, no idea how to stop crime.
LISA KENNEDY MONTGOMERY (CO-HOST): I actually -- I disagree with you there. She runs the city into the ground.
===
aha: soros is 3-fer: not xian, elite, koch/oligarch mirror
===
https://www.mediamatters.org/crime-and-criminal-justice/mainstream-media-coverage-crime-pushes-right-wing-narratives-blame
no lnx vid
Mainstream media coverage of crime pushes right-wing narratives that blame Democrats, but crime is worse in GOP-controlled areas
Crime is rising in rural areas, cities, and states run by Republicans despite GOP claims that progressive policies are to blame
WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT
PUBLISHED 10/25/22
Mainstream media outlets are bombarding prospective voters with coverage about crime, playing into election narratives from conservatives and Republicans that blame both individual incidents and broad nationwide trends on Democrats. But this news coverage often fails to debunk these disproved GOP narratives or note that violent crime has also risen in GOP-run areas.
Some notable recent mainstream media failures in pre-midterm reporting include giving a free pass to Georgia U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker’s lack of performance in debates, failing to press GOP nominees on their scandals and flip-flops, scandalizing Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s recovery from his stroke earlier this year, and allowing Arizona’s secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem to spout conspiracy theories and lie his way through an interview unchallenged.
The poor coverage has continued in some news reports about crime as an issue in the upcoming elections. Republicans have hyped the specter of crime to an absurd degree, and numerous stories have taken the bait, featuring snippets of GOP ads, quotes from Republicans emphasizing narratives blaming Democratic policies or focusing on crime in Democratic-run areas, and/or focusing on polling showing that voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on crime.
A September 26 New York Times article headlined “G.O.P. redoubles efforts to tie Democrats to high crime rates” included all of these Republican-friendly narratives. An October 5 Politico article headlined “Midterm voters key in on crime” noted, “Republicans relentlessly tie Democrats to a pandemic-era rise in crime on the campaign trail and in TV ads.” An October 15 article from The Hill, headlined “Republicans ride crime wave worries in midterms home stretch,” reported that “Republicans up and down the ballot are working to make worries about a crime wave translate to a red wave,” citing one political ad in Illinois, quoting one Republican gubernatorial candidate, and citing multiple polls on the issue including one saying voters think Republicans are “better suited to deal with crime than Democrats.”
On October 20, NPR’s All Things Considered aired a segment which bore the online headline “Democrats are embracing the police, but can that distract from crime in their cities?” An October 25 Associated Press story on the New York gubernatorial race explained that “Republicans around the country are closing with a message that follows closely to what [Lee] Zeldin has argued much of the year. In recent debates from Georgia to Michigan and Wisconsin, GOP contenders have blasted Democrats as inattentive to crime.” And on October 21, NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns aired a segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe pushing GOP narratives on crime in Pennsylvania.
Video From the October 21, 2022, edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe
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Yet, for all this attention given to GOP narratives on crime, none of these stories pointed out that while Republicans blame Democrats for violent crime, it’s nearly as high or worse in GOP-run parts of the country. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Violent crime isn’t just rising in the nation’s cities. Murder rates across the rural U.S. have soared during the pandemic.” From the article:
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Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government.
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The rise came close to the 30% spike in homicide rates in metropolitan areas in 2020.
The CDC hasn’t analyzed 2021 homicide data yet. In some rural counties, murder rates remained high last year, while in others they have begun to recede along with Covid, data from local law-enforcement agencies shows.
The center-left think tank Third Way released a report on March 15 titled “The red state murder problem,” which found that “despite a media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states as much or more than the Democratic bastions.”
Third Way also found that in 2020, “per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden” and “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”
From the report, which used data from 2019 and 2020 because data from 2021 wasn’t yet available:
Every news outlet from FOX to CNN to The New York Times to local newspapers has a story with attention-grabbing headlines like “US cities hit all-time murder records.” Fox News and Republicans have jumped on this and framed it as a “Democrat” problem. They blame it on Democrat’s “soft-on-crime” approach and have even referred to a New York District Attorney’s approach as “hug-a-thug.” Many news stories outside of Fox have also purported that police reform is responsible for this rise in murder and have pointed to cities like New York and Los Angeles.
…
But there is a large piece of the homicide story that is missing and calls into question the veracity of the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.
For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations. In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry, over the stunning levels of murders in these and other places.
An October 20 article published in The Atlantic also reported on “an exhaustive new study” from the Center for American Progress that “compares cities that have elected so-called progressive prosecutors with places whose district attorneys continue to pursue more traditional approaches.”
Senior editor Ronald Brownstein explained that this study “found that murder rates increased in a smaller share of cities with progressive prosecutors (56 percent) than in those with traditional prosecutors (68 percent) or prosecutors who fell in the middle (62 percent).” From the article:
Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery. “I think it’s really important to emphasize the extent to which we looked for a relationship and found none” between a prosecutors’ commitment to reform and crime rates, Todd Foglesong, a fellow in residence at the University of Toronto and one of the co-authors, told me.
And on October 22, former Washington Post columnist Radley Balko, who often writes about the criminal justice system, exposed the GOP’s bait-and-switch when focusing on crime in Democratic-run areas while upbraiding a sloppy column in the Post from his former colleague and serial misinformer Marc Thiessen. From Balko's substack newsletter, The Watch:
It’s certainly true that where people live closer together, they’re more likely to kill each other. More density means more crime. This has been true since the dawn of civilization. It has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans.
But as James Surowiecki points out on Twitter, if we were to eliminate the murder statistics from Kansas City and St. Louis, the rest of Missouri’s murder rate would still be higher than that of New York state, even if you include murder statistics from New York City. Put another way, Republican-run Missouri’s murder rate without its two largest cities is still higher than Democrat-run New York’s with its two largest cities.
The same is true of Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi, three other states Thiessen mentions in his column. Thiessen wants to blame those states’ high murder rates on cities like Jackson, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge. But as Surowieki points out, the murder rates in those states without those cities would still rank among the top 10 most murderous in the country.
…
Last year, for example, Republicans and police groups pointed out that Oklahoma City was one of the few large cities to see a drop in homicides in 2020. Since Oklahoma City is in a red state, has a Republican mayor, and has a traditional, law-and-order district attorney, conservatives contrasted the city to places like San Francisco and Portland (both of which, it’s worth noting, have much lower homicide rates than most cities in the country). But homicides in Oklahoma City then shot up in 2021, from 76 homicides to 90. So they stopped using it as an example.
The largest U.S. city with a Republican mayor -- Jacksonville, Florida -- set a 23-year high for murders in 2020. The city saw a dip in 2021, but only after that particularly violent year, and it remains the most murderous city in Florida. So if you want to measure the change in murders from 2020 to 2021, Jacksonville is a Republican success story. If you want to measure the overall murder rate, it remains more violent than progressive-led, Republican-whipping boy cities like Tampa.
The next largest city with a Republican mayor is Ft. Worth, Texas. Homicides soared there in 2021, despite falling in nearby Dallas. The next largest Republican-led cities of Fresno, Mesa, Omaha, Colorado Springs, Miami, and Tulsa have all also seen an increase in murders since the pandemic. Bakersfield, California, which has a Republican mayor and has long been a bastion of conservative politics and law-and-order prosecutors, has long had one of the highest murder rates in the country.
As of 2020, 11 of the 50 largest cities in the U.S. were run by Republicans, and 10 saw a spike in murders since the pandemic began.
This crucial context is missing from the mainstream media reports listed above, which consistently push the right-wing narrative that Democrats are to blame for high crime.
Many of the articles we mentioned above highlighted polls showing Republicans having an advantage on this issue. The New York Times article stated: “Polling shows that voters tend to see Republicans as stronger on public safety. By a margin of 10 percentage points, voters nationwide said they agreed more with Republicans on crime and policing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll” from September.
Politico reported that “Republicans are leaning into fears that are evident in the polling: About three-quarters of respondents said violent crime is increasing nationally.” The Hill cited three polls on the importance of crime to voters for the upcoming elections, then added: “Another Sept. 23-Oct. 3 Reuters poll found that more voters think Republicans are better suited to deal with crime than Democrats, 39 percent to 30 percent.”
With the stated importance of this issue among voters, media outlets have a responsibility to get the story correct; rather than relying on what voters think is happening with crime, they should tell readers the reality. If they did, perhaps the polls they cite wouldn’t be so favorable to the Republicans who are lying about crime.
Crime and criminal justice
Related
Study: Fox hosts turn crime into a political cudgel against Democrats
10/19/22
Fox News is misleading viewers about Fetterman's record on policing
10/21/22
Listen to Media Matters' Matt Gertz explain Fox News’ hypocritical and disingenuous “crime” coverage
===
an 10 22
:{:{In the 2022 midterms, countless Republican candidates — hoping to distract voters from the abortion issue — have been focusing heavily on violent crime and blaming Democrats for the crime rates in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Philadelphia. Crime was one of the subjects that }:Democratic nominee Joy Hofmeister:{ and incumbent Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt debated on }:Wednesday, October 19:{, when Hofmeister reminded him how high the murder rates are in some red states.}:
Hofmeister told Stitt, “The fact is, the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma, under your watch, than in New York and California. That’s a fact.”}:
Stitt disagreed, not surprisingly. But when podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen tweeted video of that part of the debate, he illustrated her point by also tweeting a study released in March 2022 by the centrist Democratic think tankThe Third Way — which found that “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”
READ MORE: How GOP nominees are attacking Democrats as 'soft on crime' with Fox News' help: report
The Third Way reported that “some ‘blue cities, like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, have seen real and persistent increases in homicides.” But looking at states, The Third Way reported that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.”
According to The Third Way, “We found that murder rates are, on average, 40 percent higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts. And finally, many of the states with the worst murder rates — like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas — are ones that few would describe as urban. Only 2 of America’s top 100 cities in population are located in these high murder rate states.”
The Standard Journal, on October 19, published an article attacking The Third Way’s study. But journalist Ronald Brownstein, in an article published by The Atlantic the following day, points to a new study by the Center for American Progress (CPA) that, Brownstein writes, “reinforces” what The Third Way had to say back in March.
Brownstein reports, “Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery…. The data, from CAP, a liberal think tank and advocacy organization, reinforces the message from a study released earlier this year by Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. That report found that per capita murder rates in 2020 were 40 percent higher in states that voted for Donald Trump than in those that voted for President Joe Biden.”
READ MORE: The crime-fighting policy Republicans refuse to acknowledge
According to Brownstein, “The CAP study represents probably the most comprehensive attempt yet to quantify the progressive prosecutors’ effect on crime rates. Looking at the period from 2015 to 2019, for instance, the study found that murder rates increased in a smaller share of cities with progressive prosecutors, 56 percent, than in those with traditional prosecutors, 68 percent, or prosecutors who fell in the middle, 62 percent. The study used a classification system for local DAs developed by a former federal prosecutor who is a critic of the progressive movement.”
READ MORE: Watch: Matt Gaetz's solution to gun violence is to perpetually arm everybody everywhere
===
mma 922
HARRIS FAULKNER (FOX ANCHOR): So Will, there is no surprise that when you take the money away to hire cops, you'll get fewer of them because you've taken the money away to hire cops, and crime will spike. So, what do you say to people like Ilhan Omar.
WILL CAIN (FOX HOST): That, quite honestly, you're a parasite feeding off of a host until that host will ultimately die. You know, I think about this and we have disagreements within our political spectrum, Harris, and you know, once you start going down the path of attacking the person ad hominemyou are not really doing anything to help solve the problem, and you are probably indulging in your base instincts.
But you also have to be real about this. The current policies that have been advocated for by, not just Ilhan Omar, but a good chunk of the left over the past couple years have been sort of themoral preening of someone who looks in the mirror and likes what they see back regardless of the effects of their action. That is parasitic, that is killing the host. What the means specifically is, you are looking at violent crime up 24 to 29%, you heard Mike say 29% in Minnesota over the past couple of years. So, all of these policies, and it is not just defund, you played it in her own words, dismantle, which she didn't get accomplished to its full extent. What that means is,she is preening, she is gathering some votes, although fewer and fewer it should be pointed out.
:{:{}:
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And she is winning, unfortunately, and she is getting national fame and Twitter likes and she'll get high fives and probably some defense in support of this segment or against my criticism in this segment. But what she is really doing is feeding off of her community -- Black and brown -- and, on average, poor socioeconomically. She is feeding like a parasite off of that community while they literally die in increasing numbers [from crime?].I am sorry, but that is not simply that we have a political disagreement, that is a real parasite on our political system.
===
===
an raw 8 22
Former President Donald Trump spoke for nearly two hours in his closing address at the CPAC summit in Dallas.
In Trump's view, America has been destroyed in the 18 months since he left office, with out-of-control crime, inflation, and oddly enough unemployment, which Trump estimates to be three times the official number.
Trump took the stage to the song "God Bless the USA" and began by thanking the "proud patriots" in attendance.
Trump said he was proud to be joined by Rep. Ronnie Jackson (R-TX), who was his White House surgeon.
"He was an admiral, a doctor, and now he's a congressman," Trump noted, saying he asked him which was the best.
"And he sort of indicateddoctor, because he loved to look at my body. It was so strong and powerful," Trump said.
Trump then introduced Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
"This is no time for complacency," Trump warned. "We have to seize this opportunity to deal with the radical left socialist lunatic fascists. We have to hit them very, very hard. It has to be a crippling defeat."
He went on to complain about Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) for supporting the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed a procedural vote after Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote while Trump was speaking, resulting in harsh words for GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
"But McConnell is the most unpopular politician in the country, even more so thancrazy Nancy Pelosi, and something has to be done," Trump urged.
Trump said Biden "surrendered our strength and our everything [in Afghanistan], they surrendered our dignity."
Michael Hardy, senior editor at the Texas Monthly, was one of the local journalists covering the speech.He said that line had "echoes of the Nazi 'stab in the back theory' of losing WW1."
Trump then described crime in "Democrat-run (sic) cities" in very dark terms.
"The streets of our Democrat-run cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims," Trump claimed. "Bullets are killing little beautiful little children who never had a chance. Car jackers lay in wait like predators."
Hardy described that as "some literal blood-and-soil rhetoric."
And Trump went on saying "we need to courage to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done," which Hardy said "is arallying cry for street violence and worse."
Trump went on to call for a military takeover of San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Portland.
"Trump's rhetoric is significantly more extreme than even a few years ago," Hardy said. "This might be most frightening speech I've ever heard. Full-on, unapologetic fascism. Trump has either been reading Mein Kampf or having someone read it to him."
Trump repeated his lies about election fraud and teased a 2024 presidential comeback.
Former RNC official Tim Millersaid, "I know everyone in the DC GOP is just hoping Trump will die but it’s impossible to watch this CPAC speech and not come to the conclusion that he’s going to run and be very hard to beat in a primary. Sorry to be the bearer of bad weekend news."
After his speech, Trump danced on stage to the song "Hold On I'm Coming" by Sam and Dave.
"Don't you ever feel sad; lean on me when times are bad," Sam and Dave sang. "Then the day comes and you're down; in a river of trouble and about to drown. Just hold on, I'm coming. Hold on, I'm coming."
You can watch his speech here.
===
homicide (vs crime) spike b/c of covid lockdown?
no lnx twt an 4 22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ny-times/
NY Times pummeled over piece on 8 conservative men who don’t feel 'free to be themselves in the culture'
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement April 13, 2022
Some might say The New York Times is the king of normalizing views from the right, even views that could be considered disturbing or, in some cases, even dangerous to their fellow citizens, the nation, or the world. The Times’ pre-World War II profiles of a young Adolf Hitler are a legendary example.
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In 2015 The Times republished what it calls “1922: Hitler in Bavaria,” patting itself on the back for getting “a lot of things right,” like its “description of his ability to work a crowd into a fever pitch, ready then and there to stage a coup.”
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The Times that year also reported that “several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea thatHitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”
History knows how that turned out.
Fast forward to 2017, when The Times published a profile commonly referred to as “The Nazi Next Door,” originally titled, “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door,” which was written by Richard Fausset.
Salon’s Matthew Smith described the piece, bemoaning the “creepy trend of media outlets attempting to humanize Nazis and white supremacists.”
“Tony and Maria Hovater were married this fall,” Fausset’s story begins. “They registered at Target. On their list was a muffin pan, a four-drawer dresser and a pineapple slicer.”
“Ms. Hovater, 25, was worried about Antifa bashing up the ceremony. Weddings are hard enough to plan for when your fiancé is not an avowed white nationalist.”
A caption of a photo reads: “Mr. Hovater and others in the loosely defined alt-right movement are hoping to make their ideas less than shocking, even normal.”
Some felt The Times, intentionally or not, certainly appeared as if it were trying to lend a hand. And in fact, after massive outrage, which forced a headline change (along with removing a link it included to “a webpage that sells swastika armbands,”) the Times’ editors defended publishing the piece by saying they thought “it was important to do so.”
Between 1922, and 2017, and after, no doubt the Times has published other works that normalize the radical right, extremism, and fascism.
Earlier this year a Twitter user posted his take on how the Times in 1935 covered a “large anti-Hitler protest in front of a Nazi ocean liner.”
And oh yes, 1924:
“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally in [Madison Square] Garden; Police Check Foes,” was a front-page headline in the Times about a stunningly disturbing NYC event in 1939.
Meanwhile, fast forward to today.
“These 8 Conservative Men Are Making No Apologies” is the headline in Tuesday’s Times Opinion section. The piece is by the Times’ deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy and the Opinion section’s editorial assistant Adrian J. Rivera. And while no one should make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis, the question some are asking is why did The Times think it important to profile a group of conservative men, since conservative men have pretty much been in charge for decades?
“There was no talk of a stolen election, no conspiracy theories about voter fraud or rants about President Biden’s legitimacy. Yet listening to our 90-minute focus group with eight conservative men, you couldn’t help but worry for our democracy a bit,” it begins.
“The men didn’t see themselves fitting into American society today. They didn’t feel free to be themselves in the culture,” the piece claims. “Seven of them said they felt like a stranger in their own country. At a time when democratic institutions are under pressure — and even under attack — and the United States feels so ununited, what causes these Americans to feel so alienated from America?”
The Times, to my knowledge, has never done a focus group of, say, eight LGBTQ men over 50. Or eight LGBTQ people of any age. What about doing a focus group of eight Northeast Democrats? How about visiting a diner and listening to supporters of President Joe Biden? Or Senator Elizabeth Warren? Or Reps. Jamie Raskin or Val Demmings?
When does the paper of record start highlighting views of people from the left, rather than a Nazi from 1922 or conservatives from 2022?
Again, The Times defends its piece, claiming these are “Americans whose voices are often not heard in opinion journalism.”
The Times apparently has never heard of Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, or Facebook.
The Times piece includes one hour and 22 minutes of audio it titled, “8 Conservative Men On Being a Man in America Today.”
To give a taste, here are some of the men and their top concerns about America or American society:
:{:{}:
}:
Tony (white, 72, retired, Massachusetts): Government spending.
Derrick (Black, 63, software engineer, Georgia): Inflation.
Michael (white, 67, retired, Florida): Economy.
Christopher (Black, 51, small-business loan broker, Maryland): Elitism.
Danny (Middle Eastern, 47, Realtor, Florida): Disgraceful.
Joe (white, 37, apparel manufacturing, New York): Weak.
Joe says: “This is not the America I remember growing up in, and it’s just sad to see what’s going on.”
Robert says: “You’re not free to be yourself anymore because of crime. You’ve got to be concerned about ‘If I go out, am I going to be a victim of crime?'”
:{:{}:
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(Most crime is actually at historic lows, but you won’t hear that on TV or social media. The Brennan Center reports the “violent crime rate in the United States has decreased sharply over the past 25 years.”)
Later in the piece, Robert reveals, “I voted for Trump. I like Trump from when he was with ‘The Apprentice.’ I knew him as a businessperson. That’s why I voted for him. And then — oh, Lord — from church to every place, people just had a problem with it. You can’t have a different viewpoint.”
One interviewer asked questions like “What does it mean to be a man?” “Is masculinity important to you?” “Who would you all think of as good examples of masculinity or manliness these days? Who’s a good example?”
Responses to The Times’ piece were strong and appropriately unforgiving:
===
===
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/marjorie-taylor-greene-russian-propaganda
**U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene**, continuing to move closer and closer to **Russian President Vladimir Putin**, says “real Americans” only care about “open borders,” gas prices, and inflation but not Ukraine. She also declared that “COVID doesn’t exist.”
“What real Americans care about is gas prices they can’t afford, inflation that goes up enough to where grocery bills are unaffordable, and they’re very concerned about our out of control open border,” Greene said on the floor of the House Thursday. “Crime is out of control,” she added, ignoring that major crimes like murder are “out of control” mostly in just red states.
“But yet Washington has completely disconnected and seems to care more about sending our sons and daughters to a potential war where they do not belong,” she claimed, saying “we need to focus on our country first.”
“America first” is a Trump-era “policy” that essentially says America first and only, period.
The extremist Republican Congresswoman from Georgia just yesterday,in what she claimed was an “address to the nation”that was carried only on Facebook Live, inaccurately announced “both sides” – Russia and Ukraine – have violated their treaties.
The Washington Post called her Facebook Live speech a “10-minute riff,” noting she repeatedly called Ukraine defending itself from the harmful and dangerous Russian attacks and slaughter “a war they cannot win.”
“False claims, debunked nonsense, echoes of Russian propaganda,” is how the Post describes her remarks from Wednesday, in its piece titled “A layer cake of misinformation, dishonesty and pro-Russia apologism.”
Watch Greene on the House floor today:
---
ref
https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2022/03/new-report-destroys-gop-talking-points-blaming-dems-for-crime-trump-states-have-8-out-of-the-10-highest-murder-rates/
===
New Report Destroys GOP Talking Points Blaming Dems for Crime: Trump States Have 8 Out of the 10 Highest Murder Rates
Published on March 16, 2022 By David Badash
Consider these explosive headlines from Fox News over the past several months: “Democrat-run cities overwhelmed by crime surge,” “Murder and crime rates spike in Democrat-run cities – is it a control play?” or, “Democrat-run cities experience record breaking homicide rates.”
Ten days before Christmas last year House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy falsely blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a “crime wave” that’s “spreading across the country.”
“Speaker Pelosi should look in the mirror to see what caused the ‘attitude of lawlessness’ spreading across the country,” he wrote. “Democrat politicians defunded police, raised money for rioters, and pushed policies that are soft on crime. They own this crime wave.”
And here’s McCarthy just days ago, again lying, claiming crime is “created by Democrats.”
A new report from Third Way destroys all these GOP talking points – and points out that “murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.”
About that claim Leader McCarthy made? He should look in the mirror – and at his own district before pointing fingers.
The report notes that “the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.”
In fact, in all of 2020, “per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden.”
It gets worse for the GOP.
“8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century,” the report reveals.
The actual facts blow away what an average Fox News watching die-hard Republican voter would think.
“We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden. In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts.”
“Mississippi had the highest homicide rate at 20.50 murders per 100,000 residents,” Third Way reports, “followed by Louisiana at 15.79, Kentucky at 14.32, Alabama at 14.2, and Missouri at 14. The national average was 6.5 per 100,000 residents, but the top five states had rates more than twice that high.”
These red states are not generating “murder is out of control” national headlines. They seem to generate no headlines at all. The rest of the top ten were filled out by South Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Arkansas, and Tennessee—all states rarely talked about in breathless media reports about rampant crime in Democratic strongholds.
The report does not even mention guns, which are a massive part of the problem, exacerbated by red state gun free-for-all policies.
And for those Fox News watching die-hard Republican voters who may say Third Way is a left-wing think tank, it’s actually been criticized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. And former bank regulator William K. Black has accused Third Way of being a “group that pretends sometimes to be center-left but is actually completely a creation of Wall Street.”
Read the full report here. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem
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