In a recent video I shared on Facebook, Will Johnson confronts several older white progressives at an anti-Trump rally. These individuals struggle to articulate their reasons for disliking Donald Trump. One of their reasons is opposition to Trump’s efforts to reduce crime in American cities, violence that disproportionately affects black people. This may seem strange at first, but there is a reason for it—and it goes to the heart of the epistemological problem that corrupts the rank and file on Democratic side of the aisle.
The encounter resonates with themes from my criminal justice class, where I recently reviewed crime statistics. In that session, I examine overall trends alongside three key demographic factors: age, gender, and race. I emphasized to my students that we spend several days unpacking the underlying causes of these numbers, as I anticipate concerns from progressive students about the stark overrepresentation of black individuals in serious crime data. This got me in trouble with a dean a few years ago, so much concern is not imagined.
To illustrate, consider homicide statistics: More than half of homicide victims in the United States are black. Their perpetrators are predominantly black men. Black men constitute only about 6 percent of the US population, yet they are responsible for between 45 percent and 50 percent of homicides. Rhetorically, I pose the question: Is this disparity inherent to the concept of race itself? The answer is no. Instead, I tell them, geographic and social context shape the statistics: these murders overwhelmingly occur in urban areas, specifically in black-majority neighborhoods within cities.
To explain this pattern, I draw on established criminological frameworks, such as social disorganization theory, differential opportunity theory, and subcultural theory. These models highlight how structural factors—community instability and lack of resources—foster environments conducive to crime. A historical dimension underpins this: the Great Migration of black Americans from 1910 to 1970. During this period, roughly half of the black population left the rural South for cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Moreover, internally within the South, blacks migrated from rural areas to the cities. By 1970, the majority of black Americans, who had once lived primarily in rural communities and small towns, where children grew up in intact families, were concentrated in inner-city ghettos across the United States, where the black family disintegrated.
This is not a partisan observation but an empirical one: these cities have long been governed by Democrats. These are Blue Cities. The progressives in the video I shared—Democrats themselves—falter when the black man asks why their party seems indifferent to the situation in black communities. They offer no substantive response.
Their silence raises a troubling dilemma: either Democrats deliberately seek to subjugate black people through policies that promote poor labor force attachment, welfare dependency, family disintegration, and crime, or they suppress discussion of these issues to avoid exposing how their own policies—from globalization (offshoring and mass immigration) to welfare programs—have devastated black communities. Make no mistake: ghettoization and family disintegration lie at the heart of this crisis. Through these mechanisms, black populations have been systematically idled and marginalized, maintained in a state of economic and social subjection.
Who bears responsibility for this? It’s not the MAGA movement or Republicans. Historically, Republicans freed the slaves and, during Reconstruction, attempted to restructure society to prevent black subjugation. Republicans do not control the major cities of America. The post-slavery oppression of black people was engineered by Democrats.
A deeper truth emerges here: even if we set aside the notion that some Democrats would actively desire this outcome, the reality is that they do not genuinely aim to help black communities but rather maintain them in impoverished inner-city areas. If Democrats answered the questions honestly, they would have to acknowledge the horrors inflicted by progressive social policies on the very people they claim to represent.
Progressives are terrified of this recognition, not only by those outside their ideological bubble, but by themselves. Such an admission would shatter their faith in the Democratic Party. Many have been raised from birth to identify as Democrats and to despise Republicans. Their worldview hinges on a binary premise: Democrats are good, Republicans are bad; Democrats are liberators, Republicans are oppressors; progressives are anti-racist, conservatives are racist. To confront this as a falsehood would mean dismantling their entire identity. They would leave the tribe. They fear the judgment of their peers: “What happened to you? You used to be a progressive Democrat. How can you align with Republicans now?” This is the power of political identity—it is a pseudoidentity that disorders clear reason for the sake of ideology.
This is why reasoning with such individuals is so often futile. They rationalize the destruction of black communities as a charitable act to be enforced by the government—a view that is 180 degrees from reality.
The corporate state media plays a massive role in perpetuating this distortion. As the propaganda arm of transnational corporate elites and globalists who are disorganizing the working class to disorder the nation, the media promotes an ideology that, if people were rational and open to facts, would attract virtually no adherents.
I suspect this is why progressives identify with Islam. In Islam, if one leaves the faith, then he risks death. For progressives, excommunication is substituted for death. This is why I have been subject to harassment by progressives. It’s not my opinion, but what progressives perceive as my betrayal of the tribe.
There are several examples of my betrayal. There are few issues that I’ve changed my mind on so dramatically in the face of logic and evidence as gun control. I was spectacularly wrong. I was spectacularly wrong on the trans issue, too, but that was because I didn’t know what I was talking about. On the question of guns, I have no excuse. I also have no excuse for past arguments on matters of crime and race. I should have known better. The problem was tribal. I was never fully progressive, but I was pulled into the orbit of that worldview for many years. Leaving that orbit was liberating.
It’s instructive how my view on guns, queer theory, and race and crime started to crumble at the same time. That’s what really frightens progressives to the point that they refuse to engage in conversation—because they’re afraid if they change their mind on one thing, then other articles of faith will start to fall to the point where they risk losing their worldview, which is precious to them not because it’s a rational standpoint, but because it’s an emotionally satisfying epistemic—and because they don’t want to alienate the tribe where all their friends dwell.
freedom and reason 