Update: Stuart Stevens, of the Lincoln Project, said this about National Guard deployment in Washington DC: “The murder rate of Jackson, Mississippi is three times that of DC.” (Not exactly, but close enough.) He then goes on to say that “the whole thing is complete fraud.”
Here’s what Stevens doesn’t say that needs to be said: Jackson is more than 80 percent black, whereas DC is around 43 percent black. As I reported in today’s essay, even a cursory glance at crime statistics finds blacks drastically overrepresented in homicide perpetration. That’s true for the victim class, as well.
Black lives matter, right? Apparently not, which is why it is white progressives and their black collaborators bitch about law and order (the mayor of Chicago embarrassed himself under interrogation by Joe Scarborough this morning), while black residents are demanding it.
Not only do these types of comparisons skirt the issue of the overrepresentation of blacks in homicide, working from rates obscures the fact that, in 2024, there were 187 homicides in DC. If DC were a state (as some wish), it would be the WORST state in the country for homicide. If that amount of killing doesn’t warrant government action, what does?
As for Jackson, they need the National Guard there, too. Homicide is off the hook in Jackson. Jackson is a big part of the reason Mississippi has the highest murder rate per 100,000 in the nation.
There is another thing Stevens doesn’t say: Local politics in both DC and Jackson are dominated by Democrats in city-wide elections. As I document in today’s essay, the problem of homicide in America is a blue problem.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom’s assertion that eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates are red states is backed by data from a recent analysis. But there’s a catch. According to a 2024 report by the think tank Third Way, per-capita murder rates in states won by Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were 33 percent higher than in states won by Joe Biden in both 2021 and 2022, marking the 23rd consecutive year of this trend. Specifically, in 2022, eight of the top ten states with the highest murder rates had voted for Trump. States like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, which are consistently Republican-leaning, frequently top the lists for highest murder rates.
The catch? Newsom is hiding an important truth: Urban areas, disproportionately black, concentrated in the most violent inner-city neighborhoods, account for the high homicide rates in these states; the party that governs and polices these urban areas is the Democratic Party. To suggest that Republican-made law, policy, and enforcement explain Third Way’s findings is disingenuous.
A few examples: Jackson, Mississippi, is run by Democrats. New Orleans, Louisiana. Run by Democrats. St. Louis and Kansas City Missouri. Democrats. Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee. Democrats. Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama. Democrats. (By the way, Washington, DC, has a higher homicide rate than any of states in Third Way’s top ten. DC is run by which party? Democrats.)
Homicide is largely an urban problem. Below is the list of the worst cities for homicide. Democrats control all of them.
Third Way tries to rationalize away the problem in its report by removing the largest blue city in each red state and recalculating the statistics. It doesn’t change the gist of their claim. The attempt admits the problem. In many red states, the largest city isn’t the only city with high murder rates. One can, for example, remove Kansas City while leaving St. Louis in the calculation—the city with the worst homicide rate in the list. To make the point obvious: some smaller blue cities have higher murder rates than the largest city in each case.
Moreover, Third Way does not control for the proportion of young black males distributed across the states. Black males comprise a much larger proportion of the populations of red states in the South than they do in blue states. In fact, roughly half of all blacks live in the South. A cursory review of the UCR and the NCVS finds blacks drastically overrepresented in serious crime, especially violent crime.
What does Third Way blame frequent homicides on? Absent or poor social services, lax gun laws, and poverty. Concerning lax gun laws, I show in my recent essay The Law and Order President and His Detractors—Who’s Right? that this claim is false. There, I cite the work of John Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime, who makes a compelling argument that legally owned firearms serve as a powerful deterrent to crime. Criminals prefer unarmed and vulnerable targets, so when potential victims are armed, the risks of committing violent crimes increase, leading to fewer such offenses. To be sure, guns are used to commit most murders, but guns don’t shoot themselves. People shoot guns.
Absent or poor social services and poverty plague many communities in the United States, not just those in urban areas. There are, in fact, more poor whites than poor blacks—a lot more—and the murder rate is lower for poor whites than for poor blacks—a lot lower. There are more than 18 million poor non-Hispanic white Americans, whereas there are just over 9 million poor black Americans. Whites make up the vast majority of the rural population, about 80 percent, whereas roughly 80 percent of black Americans live in urban areas. Higher rates of violent crime, especially homicides and aggravated assaults, characterize urban areas. FBI data shows urban homicide rates are routinely 3–4 times higher than they are in rural areas. Poor rural communities have their problems, to be sure, but high homicide rates are not among them.
Bottom line: Third Way and Governor Newsom are lying with statistics. Crime is a blue problem in America.
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Since we’re on the subject of Third Way, the think tank has developed a categorized list of words Democrats should eschew in public communications if they want to avoid alienating the public (Was it Something I Said?).
The jargon identified is ubiquitous in educational institutions and at professional conferences. Some of these words appear in official policy documents. Editors insert these words in manuscripts under review. So I am quite familiar with these terms. Know that I inwardly roll my eyes every time I hear or read them. George Orwell had a term for jargon like this: “newspeak.”
My personal favorites: “microaggression” and “progressive stack.” But there are a lot of good ones in the list, which I reproduce below. As noted, they’re organized into categories. The category names are not mine. Third Way came up with these.
Third Way tells Democrats to think about it this way: “As the catastrophe of Trump 2.0 has shown, the most important thing we can do for these people and causes is to build a bigger army to fight them.” How will Democrats do this? “Communicating in authentic ways that welcome rather than drive voters away would be a good start.”You think? (What catastrophe is Third Way talking about?)
Here are the words:
freedom and reason 