America is in a literal death spiral. The more mass shootings take place, the more innocent people die. And then more of Americaâs Republican politicians tell us that only more guns will solve the problem.
We need to see mass shooting as a form of domestic terrorism. Weâve moved from having ten Constitutional Amendments that most of us cared deeply about to a place where the Right only really cares about the Second Amendment. Maybe we shouldnât be all that surprised that there are so many Americans who care more about guns than they care about people.
For a certain group, that seems to be what America is all about. If they cared about freedom, nothing would be more of a priority than defending every personâs right to go about their daily lives without the threat of violence. If we really cared about the sanctity of human life, we would prioritize people over guns. On to cartoons.
The unholy trio who prioritize guns over people:
The GOPâs platform is turning into a cliff:
When your anti-human policy list is this long, you must be a Republican:
It isnât a game:
Clarence is tracking mud into the Court:
Rep. Jim Jordan plans to investigate AG Bragg in NYC:
Poppy bloom, Picacho Peak SP, Picacho, AZ – February 2023 photo by Leila Shehab
Wrongologist blog commenter Terry McK had this to say responding to Wrongoâs post about Speaker McCarthy and his lieutenant Marjorie Taylor Greenâs antics surrounding gifting Tucker Carlson with the J6 videos:
âWe lie to ourselves about the nature of our government…..Nor have we a marketplace of ideas. We could have â but the marketplace is dominated by the intellectual equivalent of soda and snacks….Now most speeches are performance art delivered to an empty chamber. â
Heâs correct. Here are a few recent developments that track with Terryâs thinking. First, Joe Perticone in the Bulwark: (emphasis by Wrongo)
âA strange proposal is working its way through the Idaho state legislature that would have that state envelop more than a dozen of Oregonâs most conservative eastern countiesâin effect, shifting the border between the states 200-plus miles to the west. While last Wednesdayâs vote in the Idaho House approving this âGreater Idahoâ idea is nonbinding, it does legitimize the movement that has long been promoting the plan.â
A Bluer Oregon and a Redder Idaho. This movement is by the far-Right members of Idahoâs government. And among the 15 Oregon counties targeted to become part of Idaho, 11 have so far formally expressed their support for the plan. So unlike Taylor Greeneâs rantings about a national divorce, this idea has a lot of elected officials on board.
âTwo Republican lawmakers in Idaho have introduced a bill that would make it a misdemeanor for anyone in the state to administer mRNA-based vaccinesânamely…COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.â
This probably wonât go anywhere. And state-level politicians everywhere also have tons of bad ideas.
â…there was a constant traffic of small jets and private aircraft, humming into and out of a town that has become a modern refuge for people with remote jobs…many of them driven to the Northern Rockies by a worry…that the rest of America is on its way toward environmental, political, or economic breakdown.â
Pogue speaks with Catharine OâNeill, great-great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. Sheâs a Conservative who worked in Trumpâs State Department and after the 2020 election moved to Wyoming:
âShe…views the corporate elite as enemies of America and believes that weâre on the cusp of a populist uprising against the brand of transnational capitalism championed by Republicans for most of the last half-century.â
She lives on a 580-acre âvertically integrated cattle operationâ she started. Today sheâs anti both Parties but would happily vote for Tucker Carlson if heâd step forward. These are the thoughts of the âdissident rightâ. A few of the wealthy have created secretive groups to help people âexitâ from society and from what they see as a failing American system.
From Pogue:
âWho even needs a civil war,â one…texted me recently, âwhen the institutions are doing such a good job of delegitimizing themselves?â
This cohort sees the Northern Rockies as one of a few places in America that will be livable once life in much of America is fighting heat waves, floods, storms, and fires. Theyâre focused on how to live through âmanaged decline,â the wind-down period after the age of cheap fossil-fuels and rapid economic and technological progress wane.
Theyâre certain that will also bring about the erosion of Americaâs âstate capacityâ, the governmentâs ability to do things. Then our âreal economyâ will hollow out, and our political divisions will worsen, even more than currently.
But this movement isnât only supported by the wealthy. Average American workers are increasingly priced out of housing and better educational opportunities for their kids. Many of these workers have service jobs that support the wealthy from Los Angeles to Jackson Hole, and from Cape Cod to Miami Beach. A Moodyâs Analytics report says that for the first time in 20 years, the average American is ârent-burdenedâ, meaning they put at least 30% of their income towards housing.
This makes many middle class Americans very susceptible to arguments by the dissident right about how corporate elites and modern capitalism are hurting their chances to realize the American Dream. This was the basic thrust of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in 2011. Now, the right wing is trying to take up their cause.
Will there be a second civil war? It doesn’t need to be a war. People donât understand how easy it would be to launch an insurgency in America. We should take a lesson from the way the Taliban defeated the American military using small arms, and there are plenty of small arms in America. Insurgencies are less a war than an extended political conflict, in which the insurgents try to get governments to overreact. And when they inevitably do, the insurgents build support. It doesnât take all that much to create a plausible scenario for conflict.
This is Wrongoâs second wakeup call this week. We canât do much about the wealthy who tell themselves that theyâre better off without America.
But we can and must do a lot to persuade average Americans not to fall victim to their rhetoric.
Some of you may have heard about a study called âThe Hidden Tribes of Americaâ by the group More in Common. Itâs trying to understand the forces driving political polarization in America today. They classify the American electorate into seven distinct groups, they call âTribesâ.
But their key conclusion is that most people donât belong on the far left or far right: (brackets by Wrongo)
ââŠthe largest group that we uncovered in our research has so far been largely overlooked. It is a group of Americans we call the Exhausted Majority…representing a two-thirds majority of Americans, who arenât part of the Wings….most members of the Exhausted Majority arenât [simply] political centrists or moderates. On specific issues, their views range across the spectrum.â
More:
âBut while they hold a variety of views, the members of the Exhausted Majority are also united in important ways: They are fed up with the polarization plaguing American government and societyâŠ.. [they] are so frustrated with the bitter polarization of our politics that many have checked out completelyâŠ.. they arenât ideologues who dismiss as evil or ignorant the people who donât share their exact political views. They want to talk and to find a path forward.
This chart from the study graphically illustrates the seven tribal groups of the American populace. As you can see, there is a left-wing group that is about 8% of the US population. And there are two right-wing groups that equal about 25% of Americans. That leaves four groups in what the authors call the âExhausted Majorityâ. They are 67% of the American populace.
Here are some demographic characteristics of the seven groups:
Wrongo identifies as one of the Traditional Liberals, their description rings true.
The authors say that in their research, this tribal membership predicted differences in Americansâ views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings. You can read or download the whole study here.
An âExhausted Majorityâ may be a positive political development. Wrongo spends nearly every day thinking that there are just two opposing camps. And that they each view each other with fear and loathing, refusing to listen to anything that doesn’t fit their existing narrative. As weâre entering the next presidential campaign, itâs good to know that Wrongoâs view of our polarization might be well, wrong.
Is the âExhausted Majorityâ merely a new response to our dysfunctional politics? Wrongo isnât alone in thinking that whatâs wrong with our country will take decades to overcome. Faced with that, people start to look for quick fixes, or a way to stop listening to the wrangling. And you donât have to be unaligned with either Party to share this sense of exasperation.
The people described in the âExhausted Majorityâ are similar. Itâs also true that for most people, politics isnât the be-all-end-all of their lives. Theyâd prefer that the business of government didnât require their involvement. Theyâre trying to get their kids educated, and to keep them safe. They prefer to see political compromise happen without needing to be involved.
But if you can walk away from politics when it frustrates you, then youâre in the lucky minority:
There are large numbers of parents who have discovered that their child is addicted to opioids.
There are many people who had lost their health insurance when they were laid off.
Many sent their daughter to college in the South only to learn that she no longer has any reproductive rights.
Many are worried that books are being taken from public school libraries.
Some fear that they may lose the right to vote.
These people canât simply throw up their hands and walk away. Only political action will help them. We all know that the political radicals are irredeemable. We also know they make the most noise, but they’re a minority.
The fed-up people on both sides and in the middle have to find a way to take the country back from the radicals, instead of allowing ourselves to be herded into existing opposing camps.
Time to wake up America! We canât simply drop out. Thereâs too much at stake. Democrats need to find candidates and a message that can motivate an additional 5%-15% of the âExhausted Majorityâ to vote with them. To help you wake up, watch, and listen to the RedMolly band play a very nice cover of Richard Thompsonâs âVincent Black Lightning 1952â. It’s a surprise how beautifully it adapts to a bluegrass idiom, and the dobro work makes it:
âVincent Black Lightningâ is one of the most perfect songs ever written. We saw Thompson perform it live at Tanglewood last summer.
On Saturday, Wrongo and Ms. Right went to a dinner party with friends and two generations of family. The after dinner talk turned to how quite a few of the kids and grandkids werenât planning on having children.
We tossed around ideas about why they were unlikely to procreate, and somethings stood out. First, they see climate change as an existential threat that society is unwilling to solve, even though the technology already exists. Why bring a kid into that?
Second, society seems broken. Our group meant that we face simultaneous crises, layered on top of each other. Â This situation involving simultaneous global challenges, for which we have few solutions, is called Polycrisis.
And a crisis in one global system can spill over into other global systems. They interact with each another so that each new crisis worsens the overall harm. The Polycrisis environment weakens every individualâs sense of security and their place in the world.
One impact that seems related to the simultaneous climate, health, economic and geopolitical challenges are the effects on children. The needs for special education and special services for the very young has never been greater in America. Itâs forcing big changes in public school budgets across the country.
No one is really sure why this is happening.
Wrongo isnât proposing a solution, just suggesting we need to think more about how the problems of declining birth rates, coupled with the growing issues our young children are facing, might be interrelated.
âIn the past, our communities were primarily horizontal â they were simply the people we lived close to….Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that Iâve decided to call vertical â groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity.â
Smith says that in the past few decades, Americans became disengaged from their local communities, hunkering down in their houses, and failing to interact with the people around them. That led to a well-documented decline in Americansâ participation in civic organizations, local clubs, etc. Our neighbors can also be stifling and/or repressive because they impose uncomfortable community norms on us.
Weâve always had Smithâs vertical communities: âthe Jewish communityâ, âthe LGBT communityâ, and many others. But in the past, an identity grouping wasnât a true community. We all have identities that connect us with faraway people â other Irishmen, other Taylor Swift fans.
Prior to the internet, we couldnât have much contact with them. These loose vertical communities werenât efficient ways to exchange ideas. Before email, text and streaming video, getting the word out was very slow, and our horizontal communities would decide whether what we wanted to share was worthwhile.
Now, weâre no longer isolated. The internet brought us a world of human interaction: social media feeds, chat apps, and so on. Suddenly weâre surrounded by people through their words, their pictures, and their videos.
Now we organize much of our human interaction around virtual vertical communities. Former occasional connections became Facebook groups, subreddits and personal networks on Twitter. And like our small towns back in the day, vertical communities use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms.
But vertical communities canât provide things like public education, national defense, courts of law, property rights, product standards, and infrastructure that we all depend on.
These require a government to administer them. And governments are organized horizontally; mostly defined by lines on maps. But what if we socialize, cooperate, and fall in love with the people from our vertical community? What if we grow apart from the people next door and the relationship is irreparable?
We see this every day in America when citizens go to a PTA meeting and discover a bunch of strangers saying things that they despise.
Wrongo isnât saying that vertical communities are another enemy. But they can and do exacerbate the polycrisis by making truth harder to see. And by making effective action more difficult.
If you doubt this, remember how powerful the anti-vaxx vertical was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Todayâs vertical communities are strong enough to keep our government from getting much of anything done. How can we work together with neighbors when we share few common bonds?
America today is a predatory society. We predate on politics, ideas, values, and culture. Bidenâs trying to change this, but can he succeed? How many of us are trying to help? Changing a society thatâs this broken, one thatâs moving deeper into vertical communities will be a very heavy lift.
âWe are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.â
To help you wake up, listen and watch the Nitty Gritty Dirt Bandâs 2022 cover of Bob Dylanâs âI Shall Be Releasedâ with Larkin Poe (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) on vocals and a fabulous slide guitar solo:
Sample of Lyrics:
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears heâs not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Just crying out that he was framed
Late afternoon, Mt. Baker, WA – January 2023 photo by jsmooth
Letâs take on a few key questions raised by the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis police. Wrongoâs primary question is: âIs the life of a police officer worth more than the life of any other citizen?â
Police in the US are trained to see every interaction with the citizens that they are sworn to âprotect and serveâ as a potentially life-threatening situation. Their primary concern is to go home at the end of their shift, healthy and in one piece.
That level of fear encourages aggression. All police have heard stories of other officers shot as they approached a car, So they often are as tense as a solider in a warzone. And in an America thatâs drowning in guns, that fear is well-placed.
When thereâs a confrontation with a suspect, police culture focuses the cop on making the suspect comply with the copâs initial order. And police culture tilts toward the use of physical force when compliance isnât immediate.
Police culture is based in male bonding, and in an âus vs. themâ mentality. Police culture brings with it a code of silence to protect even wrongdoers. Finally, police culture is reinforced by local police unions that are led by mostly older white men, who oppose any progressive change.
A second question is: âWhere should we assign blame for continued police violence?â Sherrilyn Ifillâs newsletter has useful context. She asks if the failure of white people to effectively confront and contain the violence by white cops against Black people should be considered as a failure of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, as some pundits suggested this week.
The BLM movement helped white Americans understand what systemic racism meant. It showed America how it impacted peopleâs lives through violence by police throughout the US. But to ask a Black political movement to change police culture which tilts conservative, White and military, places the burden on the wrong political organization. The correct place for managing this change is local city governments and their citizens. They need to take on the task of creating true civilian control over their local police forces.
The fact that the five officers charged in Nicholsâs murder are Black complicates discussion of the role of race in policing. Weâre used to cases involving White officers and Black victims. But this case makes it clear that thereâs a larger issue at work: an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people. It is as much the system and its tactics that fosters violence, as it is the racial identity of the officers involved in the brutality.
The NYT quotes Professor Jody Armour, a University of Southern California law professor:
âItâs not just a Black and white issue, but a Black and blue one. And when you put on that blue uniform, it often becomes the primary identity that drowns out any other identities that might compete with it.â
After the George Floyd killing by cops in 2020, Americans realized that police violence was a national and possibly an intractable problem. Various US states approved nearly 300 police reform bills after Floydâs murder, creating civilian oversight of police, more anti-bias training, stricter use-of-force limits, and alternatives to arrests in cases involving people with mental illnesses, according to a recent analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.
But as the NYTâs Charles Blow says, America caught Covid and then simply walked away before the work was done:
âToo many liberal politicians showed us that their commitment to legislation, and even language, to protect Black lives from police violence was polling dependent….They ran scared of being labeled woke or of supporting a âdefund the policeâ ideology.â
More:
âPolice unions also learned a lesson: that they could survive the most intense and coordinated denunciation of their practices they had ever faced and still dodge federal legislation to address the violence that happens on their watch.â
We like to say, “this isnât who we are.” The evidence, though, is that this is exactly who we are.
Time to wake up America! Letâs ask why police lives should be worth more to our community than the lives of those they are sworn to protect.
To help you wake up, listen to the late Tom Verlaine of the band Television who died last week. Televisionâs first two albums, âMarquee Moonâ, and âAdventureâ were critical successes but didnât sell. âMarquee Moonâ is considered one of the defining releases of the punk era.
Wrongo and Ms. Right lived in a loft in lower Manhattan in the very late 1970s – early 1980s. Wrongo occasionally went to CBGBs, then the mecca of punk rock. Once, we had the Dead Boys entertain at a party at our lakeside weekend place. It’s tough to think that the icons of early punk music are now in their 70s.
There arenât many videos of Television performing live. But here they are doing âFoxholeâ from their album âAdventureâ, at the UKâs Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978:
The band included Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, and Fred Smith on guitar, with Billy Ficca on drums.
Sample Lyrics:
You show me the war but the war’s such a bore.
In the line of duty, in the line of fire
A heartless heart is my proper attire.
By now, everyone has heard about the killing of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five former Memphis police officers. Some of you may have also viewed the video of Nicholsâs beating by those officers. We wonât be linking to it on this blog, ever.
Wrongo will have more to say about this during the week. But for now letâs understand that this is due in large part to the US failing to get police reform. Â There was a comprehensive package of legal reforms, called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that passed the House in 2021 but could not break the Senate filibuster. On to cartoons.
Never forget that there are two Americas:
Congress is useless:
What we should mean when we say âEverything everywhereâ:
(New columns will be light and variable for the next week, since Wrongo and Ms. Right are attending grandson Conorâs wedding in NC. Regular programming will resume on July 6.)
âHoboken feels downright roomy. Wander down the wide, busy sidewalks of Washington Street, the cityâs main strip…and one thing becomes clear….A pedestrian doesnât have to play the…perilous game of New York City crosswalk chicken, where you squint through the windows of a massive metal box to catch a glimpse of another speeding metal box whose driver doesnât see you.â
More:
âFew drivers park next to crosswalks in Hoboken because they canât. Those spots are blocked off with bike racks or planters or storm drains or extra sidewalk space for pedestrians or vertical plastic pylons that deter all but the boldest delivery-truck drivers. Stand at a corner, and you can see what is coming toward you, and drivers can see you too, and you donât have to step out into the road and risk your life to do it.â
This concept is called Vision Zero, a strategy that municipalities across the US and abroad have adopted that seeks to alter traffic and engage pedestrians to lessen the severity of accidents. In total, Hoboken has had three traffic fatalities since 2015.
As Hobokenâs streets get safer, the rest of America is getting less safe. Traffic fatalities in NYC were up 44% percent in the first quarter of 2022. Hoboken has empowered itâs pedestrians and every corner makes it clear they have the right of way. Hobokenâs streak of zero fatalities could end at any time, and eventually will, but thatâs no reason for other cities and towns not to enable similar change. On to cartoons.
Somebody should remind the Conservative ideologue Justices that America is a multi-belief country:
Itâs on the ballot in November:
Clarence rewrites the 2nd Amendment:
Now concealed carry has multiple meanings:
The scales of justice get a Conservative makeover:
The J6 hearings have inspired criticism from Texas. The late Molly Ivins referred to Texas as the “national laboratory for bad government”:
Uvalde ,TX failures give new meaning to an old idea:
Americaâs in a dark period, and itâs becoming increasingly difficult to see how we can come out of it.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way say:
âThe Republican Party…has radicalized into an extremist, antidemocratic force that imperils the US constitutional order. The United States isnât headed toward Russian – or Hungarian-style autocracy…but something else: a period of protracted regime instability, marked by repeated constitutional crises, heightened political violence, and possibly, periods of authoritarian rule.â
They say weâre heading into a period of protracted instability. They arenât saying we face a civil war. Itâs more subtle: a future of intermittent armed conflict, something like âThe Troublesâ in Ireland.
Youâve probably seen the campaign ad by Missouri Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens, where he struts into a home after some camo-clad associates have broken in, saying their purpose is âRINO huntingâ. After the team busts into the house, Greitens walks in through a cloud of smoke and says:
âJoin the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. Thereâs no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesnât expire until we save our country.â
Hunting down oneâs political enemies with guns hasnât been the American way, but it sure is becoming so now. Itâs only a matter of time before racial, sexuality and politically-based violence occurs at scale in America. The Brennan Center found that 17% of Americaâs local election officialshave been threatened during the 2020 election cycle. There’s a growing domestic terror threat to civil servants.
But it was only two weeks ago that Republicans found it easy to have moral clarity when authorities arrested a man and charged him with the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The suspect turned himself in before anything happened. However, Republicans were outraged and questioned why Biden and other Democrats did not condemn what happened.
Candidates say outrageous things all the time in the heat of the moment and lately, hitting below the belt is often rewarded. But that is a far cry from a call to hunt down your political enemies in order to âsave the country.â
The GOP is normalizing violence, and it became clear after the Republican response to J6. From Robert Hubbell:
âThe Republican National Committee described the events of January 6th as âlegitimate political discourse.â Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde said that video of the attack on the Capitol looked like âa normal tourist visit.â Mike Pence, whom rioters wanted to hang, said on Monday that Democrats were using the January 6th hearings âto distract attention.ââ
Republicans try pretending that they have no idea whatâs happening (âI havenât seen the ad, so I cannot commentâ). But the right thing is to take the risk that someone will yell at them on Facebook and Twitter and condemn it by saying loud and clear, âThis isnât the way for a candidate to conduct himself.â
Unless Republicans change their act, the normalization of violence will move toward its logical conclusion â election officials and politicians will be wounded or killed by someone who believes that violence is a legitimate political tool.
GOP candidates are posting ads about killing us in our homes. The Texas state GOP party wrote a campaign platform calling for the repeal the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and seceding from the US, while saying that gay people should get back in the closet. They passed a resolution declaring that Biden’s election was illegitimate.
This is the platform of the governing party of the nationâs second largest state, and no non-Texas Republican has complained.
Pundits keep saying that Democrats have no chance in the 2022 mid-terms because of Bidenâs low approval ratings. Wrongo has repeatedly said that there are âpersuadableâ voters who can be reached before the Fall. Proof of that is in the 6-point increase in public support for indicting Trump since the start of the J6 hearings.
If pundits argue that Bidenâs unpopularity will affect the 2022 races despite Bidenâs absence from the ballot, they must also agree that other issues not on the ballotâ the J6 conspiracy, the Supreme Court abortion decision, Texas secession, and yes inflation, will also affect the 2022 races.
The 2022 election (not the 2024) will determine our future. Will people vote this Fall based on the price of gas? Or the threat of a recession? Or, will they understand that thereâs a real possibility that democracy as we know it in the US could vanish?
Democracy is whatâs on the ballot in 2022. Inflation comes and goes. Recessions come and go. If we lose our democracy, it wonât be returning any time soon.
Americans understand democracy. Theyâve fought and died for it. Dems can make voters see that democracy is on the ballot this year, while inflation and other issues sadly need to take a back seat.
Let’s not make the mistake of selling Americans short. Democracy is more important than our pocketbooks. People will vote for democracy.
The slogan should be âVote Democratic And Save Democracyâ.
German Lopez in the NYT writes about how urban gun crime is very concentrated, saying that a small number of city blocks often account for most of the gun violence in US cities. He says that just 4% of city blocks account for the majority of shootings in Chicago:
âThe violence is so intensive that a few neighborhoods, blocks or people often drive most of the shootings and murders in a city or county. And this is true in both urban and rural areas, said Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton.â
Letâs pick up on the comment that this is true in both urban and rural areas. The WSJ has an article that says thereâs been a big spike in murders in rural America:
âHomicide 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.â
Thatâs pretty close to the 30% increase in urban areas. But the WSJ points not to a lack of tough-on-crime policies causing the spike in rural homicides, or a lack of social services, safety net, or investment in anti-poverty measures. Instead, it says that the primary culprits are Covid lockdowns and a lack of âpastoral careâ from churches.
âProgressive prosecutors take the approach of not prosecuting some low-level offenses like drug possession. In Philadelphia, for example, cases brought by the district attorneyâs office from 2018 through 2021 dropped by nearly 30% compared with the prior four years. This week, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner defended progressive prosecutors while promising to tackle gun violence at the swearing-in ceremony for his second term.â
The Conservative formula is simple: When crime increases in liberal cities, the cause is: reformist prosecutors, bail reform, and defunding the police movements.
But when murder spikes in counties coded as white or rural, and controlled largely by Republicans, the causes are societal and therefore blameless ânamely the fraying of the social fabric brought about by the pandemic. They fail to mention the persistence of drugs in rural America, or how corporations have hollowed out the economies of rural America by moving abroad.
Johnson says that weâre caught in a âNarrativeâ by leaders in both Parties, that the Covid-era surge in crime was the result of lax DAs, bail reform, and other far-left measures. And the only way to combat it, was to remove the reforms, fund more police, and to effectively sunset the Black Lives Matter movement.
And Johnson says:
â…data very clearly indicates that crimeânamely, murder rateâincreases appear to be entirely divorced from the policies of the prosecutors and police budgets of the affected areas. Despite the widespread, casual lie that radical, far-left reform prosecutors or defunded police budgets have caused a spike in crime…â
Despite everyone knowing that socio-economic problems are also at the heart of the homicide rates in urban areas.
âIn Democratic strongholds like Maryland, a rise in violent crime has pushed the partyâs candidates to address the issue of public safety in newly urgent terms….Long seen as a political wedge for Republicans to use against Democrats, crime is increasingly a subject of concern within the Democratic Party and the big cities that make up much of its political base.â
The homicide spike is transforming the Democratâs playbook on law and order. Itâs forcing the Party to seek ways of balancing its determination to overhaul the criminal justice system with the imperative to protect some of its most loyal voters from a rising tide of violence.
The challenge is to walk a fine line: How can urban Democrats make the police more responsive but not militarized or heavy-handed; how to move police departments away from the often discriminatory tactics favored by the law-and-order mayors.
Still, when crime goes up in urban areas, itâs the reform efforts that are to blame. When crime goes up (by roughly the same percentage) in rural places where no such reforms exist, the âTough on Crimeâ approach and the lack of robust social services canât be blamed.
Both Democrats and Republicans want police budgets to grow. But neither have any answers as to how incremental dollars will reduce homicide rates, or make the police more effective at their jobs.
The WaPo reports that Facebook is allowing marketplace buyers and sellers to violate its ban on gun purchases 10 times before being kicked off the platform. They reported that Facebookâs guidelines also include a five-strikes system for gun sellers and buyers who call for violence or voice support for a âknown dangerous organizationâ before they lose Facebook access.
Five years ago, Facebook banned the private sale of guns on its website but it hasnât previously explained how the company enforces the ban. Apparently, they really donât. On to cartoons.
The GOPâs #1 strategy:
GOP strategy #2:
Kids understand:
Liz Cheney, another guided missile:
Wrong argument in the wrong court:
Twisted logic by Republicans who defied the J6 committee:
