For Dems, It’s Only a Matter of Crime
Democrats own this massive spike in violence, and voters know it.
Now that America’s crime wave is coming home to roost, the Left is pumping out ridiculous excuses faster than you can say “defund the police.” It’s Republicans’ fault, the White House insists! It’s the cops’ fault, the media says! Or, it’s no one’s fault — the violence isn’t real! But the people’s choice award had to go to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who compared the whole crisis to Shark Week. Because apparently, homicide and summer go together like Jaws and Richard Dreyfus.
As clever as their explanations may be, they’re no substitute for the truth — which is that there’s only one group to blame for the bloodshed on our streets, and that’s the party who spent the last year encouraging it! Democrats own this massive spike in violence, and voters know it. From local mayors to the party’s presidential nominee, the far-Left has spent the last 13 months catering to the pro-lawless, anti-police mob. And now that the country is reaping what Democrats have sown, they’re desperately trying to convince America that a) they care; and b) they had nothing to do with it — both of which stink of insincerity.
All most people have seen these last several months is a Democratic Party bent on demonizing law enforcement, minimizing the madness (or outright supporting it), and pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that makes our communities unsafe for everyone. In other words, they don’t think the Left is trying to fix our problems. They are our problem. And as recently as this weekend, the country’s absentee leader, didn’t want to be bothered. “I want to talk about happy things, man,” Joe Biden said. “It’s the holiday weekend. I’m going to celebrate it. There’s great things happening.” Tell that to the families of the 230 victims who were shot and killed while the president was busy lighting sparklers.
In places like Chicago, local Democrats can’t believe their ears. “… [T]he mayor’s policies have… put the entire city under siege,” Alderman Raymond Lopez (D) fumed, “spread[ing] fear and violence into every neighborhood.” And yet, when the president touched down in the Windy City to meet with Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the subject — much to the Chicago Tribune’s dismay — was never even broached. In other cities, like New York, the tension between the national Democrats and local party is palpable. Former police captain Eric Adams’s (D) stunning primary win in the Big Apple was the biggest sign yet that there’s major trouble ahead for Democrats. His winning platform — focused almost exclusively on curbing crime — turned out to be a major repudiation of the Left (and a sudden wake-up call to party headquarters).
“If black lives really matter,” Adams argued, “then it means that we won’t have senseless gang violence in New York, Chicago, Atlanta. I say that it’s time for us to stop believing that we should have the right tweets. We should have the right safe streets.” No wonder the Democrats are sweating bullets, Michael Goodwin wrote. “Those same voters chose Adams in big numbers and cited growing crime in their neighborhoods as the reason. They don’t want less policing — they want more and better policing.”
And what does the Left want? Open borders that let gangsters, drugs, and traffickers into our country. Fewer guns for lawful citizens to defend themselves. Gutted police departments that let thugs and criminals rule our streets. “And what we are seeing now is city after city, New York being the kingpin, they’re becoming killing fields,” FRC’s Ken Blackwell lamented on “Washington Watch.” “We are now watching the Left slowly draining opportunity out of our society. They are looking for a radical transformation of our constitutional republic, making it one that’s run by a one-party governed federal or central government. And death and destruction are the results.”
Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) is the perfect example of what shouldn’t be done. For the last four years, he’s basically been dismantling the law enforcement system in New York — pushing through laws that let violent criminals out of prison and back on the street. It’s a classic move of the Left. They create a huge mess from their outrageous policies, then turn around and say that they have to spend someone else’s money to fix the problem.
And frankly, the Left wouldn’t even care about the spike in crime if it weren’t proving to be a political crisis for them as well. When even the New York Times is asking, “Do liberals have an answer to violent crime? And if so, what is it?” Democratic strategists have to be worried that their majorities are in danger. They’ve already alienated law enforcement and everyone involved in public safety. Now they’re losing homeowners, suburban moms, small business owners — who can’t thrive in lawless chaos. The next shoe to drop may be black voters, who care just as much — if not more — about keeping crime off their streets. And that will be next to impossible with police forces that have been defunded, demoralized, dispirited, and discredited.
New York City is down about 1,500 officers right now, thanks to the billion dollars officials slashed from the budget and the number of disgruntled officers who are retiring. In Chicago, they’re down 700. In Los Angeles, 600. Our police force isn’t simply walking away — they’re leaving. After this past year, they’re not going out on a limb to be aggressive in enforcement, because the local administrations don’t have their back. Why should they risk their lives, their retirement, and their families’ futures if liberal leaders are going to cut and run on them? That has to change — and soon — or else Democrats aren’t just going to have a political problem. They’re going to have a national one. And they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
Originally published here.
‘I Was Preparing for Death at Every Moment’
It was her worst nightmare — come true. The mom of three had been dreading the day when the Chinese Communist officials would come after her. And one night, they did. That phone call, three years ago, feels like yesterday. It was the moment Zumrat Duwat would discover the truth that her government’s officials were denying: the network of concentration camps for her people was real. Then she — like so many millions before her — disappeared to one.
“It’s not like a normal prison,” she remembers from her new home a half-a-world away in Virginia. “There’s a lot of unbelievable torture in that place,” she told Breitbart through a translator. “I was there for 62 days, and I was preparing for death at every moment. I was preparing to be killed at every time.” Her nightmarish ordeal lasted two months, but the scars of what she experienced will last forever. “I witnessed them torture a person for saying, ‘I believe in God, not Xi Jinping,’” she shudders. “Then they took the person, and we never saw them again.”
The same happened again. And again. “The people are asked if there is a god, and do you believe in God?” she explained. “If they say yes, they will kill them. They are asked, do you believe in Xi Jinping or God? And the ones who say ‘Xi Jinping’ live.” She was forcibly sterilized, took unknown drugs, was the victim of DNA testing and “bizarre medical procedures” that — Zumrat believes — were the preparation for the ghoulish organ harvesting survivors have warned about. “We suffered a lot,” she said somberly. “They only have one goal: to eliminate us. Genocide.”
This is the reality of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — the same regime that the Leftist media has had the audacity to applaud on its 100th anniversary. But not everyone watching the country’s leaders carry out these horrors on innocent people is cheering. Governor Pete Ricketts (R-Nebr.) is appalled that the world would have such a muted response to the milestone — or worse, outright praise it. “I wanted to make sure that people remembered that the implementation of communism [not just in China but all around the world] has led to nearly a hundred million deaths nationwide,” he said on “Washington Watch.”
He decided to declare a Victims of Communism Month in Nebraska, an attempt to put the movement’s violent past — and present — in perspective. “More people have died at the hands of communist regimes than died in World War One and World War Two combined,” Ricketts pointed out. “And this includes about 65 million in China, about 20 million in the Soviet Union, two million in Cambodia, two million in North Korea, about a million in Eastern Europe. And we need to remember those stories.”
But tragically, they aren’t the stories that today’s American education has been anxious to tell. Our young people, especially now — thanks to critical race theory and other subversive Marxist curriculum — aren’t learning about the bloody roots of governments like China’s. And moms and dads, Ricketts urge, really need to be proactive about making sure their children know where dangerous philosophies like this one lead. “It really is something that we need to focus on as parents, because we’re primarily responsible for our kids’ education if the schools are going to drop the ball on teaching [that] Marxism is where communism comes from. And it teaches about class warfare, between creating conflict within a society and depriving people of their rights. That’s the basis of it.”
Our free enterprise system, on the other hand, “lifts people up and provides for human flourishing and religious freedom. And we can see it to this day in places like China, where the Chinese Communist Party is oppressing people like the Uyghurs. And Christians are — to this day — still being persecuted there, and their [churches]… destroyed. And that’s what we need to make sure our young people know when they see the propaganda the CCP is putting out.” We have to tell them the “true story of what it means to live under communist oppression.”
There are a lot of people on the Left who don’t think communism is a bad thing, Ricketts said. But “go look at history,” he challenged. “People need to understand that it is really fundamentally against what we stand for here in America.” It’s also fundamentally inhumane. Two things that ought to motivate the entire government — and the West — to rise up and fight back. Because there’s an entire generation of other Zumrats who will die if we don’t.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
