Blaming the Blamable
We recently published on the Chronicles website a heartrending piece on the mounting homeless problem in our nation’s capital, “The Shocking Hypocrisy and Callousness of the Left’s Homeless Outrage” by Adam Mill (Chronicles Online, Aug. 19). The city spends $1 billion dollars a year looking after a homeless population that has reached 5,000 in number. This amount must be supplemented by more than $33 million paid annually by the federal government to meet the cost of patrolling and meeting the basic needs of this vagrant population.
According to Mill, who works in D.C., the city’s occasionally violent, mentally unstable vagrants frighten bystanders and the people who live near and around them. Since governmentally subsidized social agencies often have a vested interest in making the problems they’re supposed to address more costly and more extensive, their operation has not reduced the scope or gravity of the problem.
Adding to these difficulties of living in Washington, D.C., there is also the sky-high crime rate, which we have learned is even worse than what doctored police reports released by the city’s Democrat-run administration indicated a few weeks ago. Even according to these accounts, however, the district has the fourth- or fifth-highest murder rate of any American city and is at or near the top in carjackings. Fox News has flooded us with pictures of crime victims in Washington and other large cities as it and other conservative media depict its urban residents as hapless targets of lawlessness.
The reason these putatively good blue-city urbanites are so beset by undeserved troubles, we are told, is that they have irresponsible Democrat-led governments, which often side with the thugs against them. District Attorneys like Alvin Bragg in New York and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and leftist mayors like Brandon Johnson in Chicago, Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Michelle Wu in Boston, and Jacob Frey in Minneapolis, have inflicted their feckless, soft-on-crime policies on innocent citizens who just happen to be trapped in large cities that they apparently can do little to improve.
“Let’s not blame the victims,” is a favorite leftist maxim that Conservatism Inc. has begun to echo in describing blue-city urbanites, and especially urban minorities.
The reality is entirely different. Urban residents, and especially blacks and white college-educated women, have become the reliable mainstay of leftist, soft-on-crime municipal governments. It is no accident that the majority of the black population vote overwhelmingly for Democratic politicians who get rid of bail laws, weaken police power, and protect criminal illegals. In New York City, the next likely mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and in Minneapolis, mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, are woke Muslims who have made a campaign ritual out of denouncing “police violence.”
Although support for such social radicals can be found in affluent areas like Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Minneapolis’s Kenwood and Lowry Hill, Mamdani and Fateh should be able to count on unfailing support from racial minorities in the general election. (Fateh may be a special case; he won the primary against incumbent Mayor Frey, but the Democrats stripped him of his victory on Aug. 22, citing voting irregularities.) Although the Republican opponents of such figures will likely be running on law-and-order platforms, which should be popular in crime-infested cities, urban voters, and especially those physically endangered minorities, will sweepingly reject what they believe to be badly disguised Republican racists and/or sexists.
Pardon me then if I don’t view those who persist in these dumb actions as victims of what they’ve enabled. I’m also deeply annoyed by those Con Inc. television celebrities who keep misrepresenting the reasons that inner cities are convulsed by crime. Contrary to what these would-be oracles indicate, those who vote to pamper the criminal class may not be all that upset by the situation. They may well view the criminals as people like themselves and regard the police, even the black ones, as working for enemy whites. It’s also possible that these urbanites don’t grasp or want to grasp a connection between their unchanging voting preferences and the flourishing of a criminal class in their neighborhoods. In Chicago in 2023, the black majority heavily supported Democratic mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson, whose most oft-quoted position in his mayoral race was “police defunding is not a slogan but an actual, real political goal.”
Perhaps the most radical voting bloc at the present time is white college-educated women, who make up 17 percent of the total electorate and who back the social left overwhelmingly. The GOP stands at negative 35 percentage points and Trump at negative 38 percentage points among this constituency, and there is no social issue where these women don’t surpass any other voters in their radicalism.
This demographic has been disproportionately present among those who back Mamdani in New York City and Fateh in Minneapolis. It’s also glaringly visible among those who are demonstrating against Trump’s efforts to bring criminality under control in the district. Although I wish to see no one victimized by violent attackers, every time I learn that a feminist urbanite has met this fate, I ask myself whether that person wasn’t complicit in her misfortune by making it impossible to protect public safety in her city.
Unfortunately, those who are vulnerable to rampant urban crime have often helped create the conditions that favor the criminal class. It is ridiculous to treat them simply as victims when they are making a bad situation even worse. I see no reason why our “conservative” media don’t tell us this obvious truth instead of desperately hiding how much voters are responsible for urban crime.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/blaming-the-blamable