Republicans are still going on about what an urban dystopian hellscape New York City is these days. New York even elected a tough-as-nails former cop as mayor, who’s made crime a priority, and that’s still not good enough for rightwingers. They saw a homeless person on the street, and that’s just not like the New York City they remember from Busby Berkley musicals.
Rightwingers are especially pissed that New York’s Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul won’t accept the narrative they’ve contrived. Sunday, Hochul told MSNBC’s Al Sharpton that Republicans are shamelessly inflating concerns about crime for their political gain.
“These are master manipulators,” Hochul said. “They have this conspiracy going all across America trying to convince people in Democratic states that they’re not as safe. Well guess what? They’re also not only election deniers, they’re data deniers. Safer places are the Democratic states.”
Lately, Democrats have more aggressively spoken this truth. Joy Hofmeister, the Democrat running for governor in Oklahoma, told incumbent Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt to his goofy face that “the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma under your watch than in New York or California. That’s a fact.”
PREVIOUSLY:
Yes, Oklahoma And Other Red States Have Higher Violent Crime. It’s A Fact, KEVIN.
Everyone But Mayor Eric Adams Seems To Want To Get Rid Of Solitary Confinement On Rikers
Monday morning, “Fox & Friends” claimed that Hochul said that “reports” on crime in general are a conspiracy, which is not true. She said Republicans are twisting data and spinning lies to their political advantage.
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt lamented the fate of innocent working people who have no choice but to risk their very lives and take the New York subway. This sad demographic likely does not include Earhardt herself, who didn’t even know the going price for a subway ride. She guessed that it was either $2.75 or $3. (It’s $2.75, but she’s not paid $2 million a year to Google.)
Subway-riding expert Earhardt continued, “You’re praying for your own life when you go down under the ground and hoping that you don’t run into someone who’s crazy and gonna push you onto the tracks or stab you coming up from behind and stabbing you or slugging you across the head. This is a real issue.”
It’s not, in fact, a real issue. The so-called “crazy” people Earnhardt decries are not subhuman Morlocks who live underground. Many suffer from mental illness, and Democrats are the ones who are recommending actual solutions to the problem other than locking away the homeless for life. Also, the subway has an estimated total daily ridership of almost four million people. The number of riders who are pushed onto the tracks, stabbed from behind, or slugged across the head each day is significantly less than that. So far in 2022, there were a reported 25 incidents of people violently shoved from the platform. These are not odds you should pray over. God’s a busy deity.
However, rightwing media outlets such as the New York Post run headlines stating “Subway Assaults Jump By Over 50 percent To Highest Total In 11 months.” That’s scary until you read further and learn that “there were 180 felony crimes recorded on the subways in March — down two from February. But the number of felony assaults jumped from 41 in February to 62 in March, according to the new stats.” Crime is obviously never desirable but the risk is objectively lower than contracting COVID-19 in a “red state” during the height of the pandemic, which Republicans consistently minimized. Republicans’ selective outrage is the true conspiracy here.
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