James Carville: Democrats Are The Anticrime Party

If this is the best defense that the Democrats can muster against the charge of being soft on crime, then they are clearly in big trouble heading into the 2022 midterms.

Wall Street Journal:

“From 1993 to 2019, crime steadily decreased in the U.S. Every president since Bill Clinton inherited a declining crime rate and left office with a further decline in crime rate, until Donald J. Trump came along. During Mr. Trump’s final year in office, violent crimes and homicides spiked. Yet if you tuned into Fox News, you’d draw the conclusion that the Democratic Party is opposed to law and order.

Crime is going to be an issue up and down the ballot in 2022, and many local politicians are already feeling the heat. Now that violent crime is on the rise, we Democrats can no longer afford to sit by passively while Republicans trumpet bellicose law-and-order talking points. If we don’t aggressively begin to own the crime issue and make Republicans respond to their own failures, we risk losing our slim majorities in Congress.

The modern Democratic Party is flat-out better on crime than Republicans. …”

Black Lives Matter is the cause of the crime wave.

Democrats are identified with Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Only 35% of Americans believe the George Floyd protests had a positive impact on society including only 38% of “Latinx” voters.

It is Democrats who are hostage to progressive activists who are waging the War on the Police. It is only Democrats who march in the streets shouting “Defund the Police.” It is Joe Biden’s guru Ibram X. Kendi who wants to Abolish the Police because the police and the entire criminal justice system is systematically racist. It was Democrat-controlled big cities including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia which acted on the slogan “Defund the Police.” It was Democrats who surrendered the streets to anarchists who created autonomous zones like CHAZ in Seattle and who painted “Defund the Police” on the streets of DC. These cities are now reaping the whirlwind that they have sowed.

How is Donald Trump responsible for the 800% increase in homicide in Portland? Is it Trump’s fault that Portland has been afflicted for years by non-stop Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots which continue to this day? It was Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland and Gov. Kate Brown and the Wall of Moms who coddled the anarchist brats who were rioting in Portland. They even joined them on the front lines where they fought DHS personnel for months who were protecting a federal courthouse. These people are homegrown radicals who were indoctrinated locally in woke progressivism.

Matt Lewis of all people won’t even defend this bullshit:

Yahoo News:

“First, though, some context is in order. Between the early 1960s and the 1980s, the crime rate doubled, peaking around 1991. It continued to fall for two decades after the passage of the 1994 crime bill, sometimes called the Biden bill, before the violent crime rate began slowly rising around 2015—mostly in a few big cities.

Last year, it exploded. As The New York Times’ Ezra Klein recently noted, “Early estimates find that in 2020, homicides in the United States increased somewhere between 25 percent and nearly 40 percent, the largest spike since 1960, when formal crime statistics began to be collected. And early estimates indicate that the increase has carried over to 2021.” …

But what if it does not recede or keeps rising?

The problem for Democrats is that Biden would be caught holding the bag, and the rise in crime would reaffirm long-held stereotypes about bleeding-heart liberalism. As was the case in the 1960s and ’70s, it would be perceived as a result of progressive policies, including (this time around) the decriminalization of marijuana, criminal justice reform policies that end “mass incarceration,” the rise of “mostly peaceful” protests, and the proliferation of homeless “tent cities” in America’s urban areas. The backdrop would be a liberal media that says violent protests are good and lodges a defense of looting. The message will be that we got soft and repeated the mistakes of the past. …”

Yes, the context here is critical.

The surge in both violent crime and illegal immigration began during Obama’s second term. Donald Trump ran on “law and order” in 2016 and it resonated and he was elected president because Black Lives Matter had already rioted in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Charlotte. Violent crime was already rising in several big cities. The “Ferguson Effect” was coined by the St. Louis police chief in an article in 2014. Donald Trump cultivated the image of being “tough on crime” in 2016.

Insofar as Trump deserves any blame for this, it is due to his embrace of criminal justice reform which was pushed by Jared Kushner, Sen. Tim Scott, Kim Kardashian, Charles Koch and the Democrats. The prisons were emptied of an unknown number of violent felons last year in the context of COVID and the George Floyd riots. It is largely Democrats who have crusaded to demonize and lock up cops and release prisoners.