In the ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats over who can scare away regular Americans more, the Democrats are going all in with their policies and rhetoric on violent crime. Left-wing Democrats have scared the hell out of regular Americans with their “defund the police” rhetoric and even more with actual cuts to funding for many big-city police departments and their refusal to prosecute many crimes.
After a multi-decade decline, crime rates are way up. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that voters are not happy about this. After months of largely ignoring the problem, President Joe Biden realized he had to address it. In essence, Biden’s response pins the entire violent crime rise on access to guns. His solutions focus almost exclusively on gun control. We should debate gun policies, but pretending gun access explains the rising crime rate is preposterous on its face. This is not going to end well for Democrats.
It’s hard to fathom now, but former President Bill Clinton, the greatest Democratic politician in recent memory, won over much of middle America in part with his “tough on crime” agenda. Putting 100,000 new cops on the street was a singular early Clinton administration achievement. Imagine today’s Democratic Party taking on that cause? Clinton’s crime policies blunted the winning Republican argument that Democrats were soft on crime. And it worked. Crime rates dropped to historically low levels, even while gun ownership continued to skyrocket.
The radical wing of the Democratic Party has undone all this political and substantive progress with their wacky “defund the police” movement. Even with the corporate media pulling as hard as they can to help sell the cause, there is no possibility of convincing the average American voter that defunding the police is anything but crazy.
This does not mean, of course, that there aren’t police reforms we should be debating. Videos of horrendous actions by individual officers drive home the point that there are bad cops out there. But bad apples aside, people know that police have tough jobs that most of us would not want to do. People also know that vilifying police as a class, getting rid of police, sharply reducing police funding and refusing to enforce basic laws are all going to cause a spike in crime. Yet these are precisely the policies and rhetoric coming out of the left wing of the Democratic Party. And surprise, crime rates are skyrocketing.
We had much higher crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period many of our major cities were flat-out dangerous, especially at night. With the bipartisan reform efforts of the 1980s and 1990s, that all went away. The result was huge investment and population growth. The radical left’s crime agenda puts all this at risk.
The solution to rising crime is not complicated. It’s the same formula that worked for Clinton: Enforce the law; fund enough police; and support honest police work. Those commonsense concepts are no longer acceptable to the radical left. Frontline police are the ones squeezed in this new environment. Their jobs are too dangerous, and their pay is too low, to put up with the demonization they are now facing. In Portland, Oregon, the epicenter of American crazy, the entire riot squad just resigned en masse after enduring a year of abuse from the city’s political leadership. Without support from our political leaders, this is what we can continue to expect.
Biden knows all this, but he doesn’t have the political will to take on the crazies in his own party, starting with his vice president. Kamala Harris asked her supporters to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to provide bail money for those arrested in the George Floyd protests. Subsequent reporting by the Daily Caller showed that the Minnesota Freedom Fund bails out violent criminals and even serial domestic abusers. Instead of reversing her support for this radical cause, Harris has left her fundraising plea up for over a year now.
The left’s “defund the police” insanity is premised on racial injustice. Interestingly, though, members of affected minority communities do not share the generally wealthier and whiter radicals’ zeal to vilify and undercut law enforcement. Law-abiding people of all races who live in higher-crime neighborhoods want a strong police presence. Biden could have taken up their cause and pushed back on his party’s ascendant radical fringe. That sort of political courage would have been rewarded.
Pretending our crime spike is all about gun access, as the president is now doing, is the opposite of political leadership. Lawful gun ownership and sales do not lead to higher crime rates. Americans have had access to guns for decades. None of that changed recently. What changed is a failure in many cities to support the police and enforce the law.
The president missed a huge opportunity to show leadership and occupy the political center with his crime rollout this week. If Democrats lose large numbers of seats in 2022 and 2024, his punting on the crime issue will be a big reason why.
Neil Patel co-founded The Daily Caller, one of America’s fastest-growing online news outlets, which regularly breaks news and distributes it to over 15 million monthly readers. Patel also co-founded The Daily Caller News Foundation, a nonprofit news company that trains journalists, produces fact-checks and conducts longer-term investigative reporting. The Daily Caller News Foundation licenses its content free of charge to over 300 news outlets, reaching potentially hundreds of millions of people per month. To find out more about Neil Patel and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com
At least one good thing will come out of it.
ASSUMING the votes THIS TIME< dont' get defrauded like hell…
It is so sad that Creepy Sleepy corrupt Joe is destroying so many lives of low income and people of color. His absolutely STUPID policies are driving inflation and increasing crime at records rates, which is devastating to low income families and so many people of color. I just don’t understand how anyone with >1/2 a brain could have voted for Biden, who has always done the wrong thing for the people of the US. (but, made loads of money while doing it). Question: Are there that many stupid people in our country?
Think about this:
Are people Democrats because they are Fools?
Or are they Fools because they are Democrats??
To Democrats, Truth, Facts, Reality and History are all irrelevant,
if the Democrats do not WANT to believe them.
Democrats will just make up their own Truth, Facts, Reality or History
To fit what they WANT to believe or fits into the Con or Deception that they are running at the time.
The Democrat Party’s Chutzpah Knows No Bounds.
The definition of “chutzpah.” It’s someone killing his parents and then falling on the mercy of the court on account of his being an orphan.
The Democrat Party’s fantasy that it’s the Republicans who are obsessed with race, maybe they should be reminded of who’s pushing Critical Race Theory? Rubbing salt into racial wounds daily, and promoting the fiction that the greatest threat to the republic is “white supremacy.”
TO Me its BOTH.
THEY ARE FOOLS so they vote democrat, but they are DEMOCRAT so they are fools!
YES , there are ! Just listen to what they say, you will hear the proof.
“The president missed a huge opportunity to show leadership”. Joe has dementia, Joe is for open borders and Joe is pro criminal. So how in the **** can Joe show leadership?
I disagree that Joe is a failure to lead on crime,,,,,,,he and his crime family have got rich off Joe’s criminal lead in crime, to the point that the criminals he leads and will pardon in the future are now running his party and The Whitehouse.
It’s very hard for one criminal or criminal family to want to lock up or hold other criminals accountable for their illegal and immoral actions. Hopefully with fair and corrupt free elections they will eventually be held accountable and prosecuted. I’m hoping karma comes around. It’s never soon enough though.
I couldn’t agree more! Joe is an outstanding Crime Leader! He has been corrupt for a very long time and has gotten stinking rich doing it.
CRIMINALS take care of other crooks..
Joe would only show any leadership 9if it was physically possible) IF and ONLY IF he could make money doing it. 🙂
AND since he was PART n parcel of the defund the cops movement, AND HIS VP, was all for CODDLING AND BAILING OUT rioters, ITS ironic that now he says he ‘wants to fight for law and order”..
The blame for increasing violence in this country lies totally in the hands of the communist-democrat party and Joe Biden and nowhere else.When we get rid of them, violent crimes in this country will fall like a rock.
Stupid old depends wearing Joe Biden is the one who needs to be slammed to the floor.