Eddie Scarry of the Federalist explores recent claims about crime in states governed by Republicans.
Because Democrats know they’re completely untrustworthy when it comes to law enforcement, having turned virtually every major city into a rape and murder zone, they’ve made the obvious choice.
No, silly, they haven’t started arresting criminals. They’ve started lying.
It’s a lie told recently by Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and then repeated twice this week in The Washington Post. The latest came in a column by Dana Milbank. (Yes, someone actually named their son Dana Milbank.)
“Violent crime is generally worse in Republican-run states,” he wrote on Tuesday under the headline, “It’s just murder living in a red state.”
The source for that claim, the same one made by Newsom, is a report published earlier this year by the leftist outfit Third Way. The report observed 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.”
To start, the point in correlating crime and Democrat policies has never been that “blue states” are violent hellholes. It was always that Democrat mayors and district attorneys are demonstrably anti-law enforcement, and more interested in racial “equity” than in prosecuting offenders. Again, that’s mayors and district attorneys, elected officials who serve on the city and county levels, not state. Of course, Republicans have tied every Democrat running for every office to the issue, but the exact line of attack was always in reference to county and city officials. …
… [F]or this to be a devastating blow to the Democrats-suck-on-crime narrative requires ignoring that in every state, including otherwise red ones, there are densely populated areas that tend to be blue. And it just so happens, more often than not, that’s where the surge in crime has taken place.