Democrats Own the Nationwide Crime Epidemic

DOOCY: So, when a huge group of criminals organizes themselves and they want to go loot a store — a CVS, Nordstrom, Home Depot — until the shelves are clean, do you think that’s because of the pandemic?

PSAKI: I think a root cause in a lot of the communities is the pandemic, yes.

BUCK: There you had Psaki Bomb, dropping yet another one — and props to Peter Doocy. The best job in the West Wing is to be the one person who can and will ask real questions of the regime. I mean, most of the people that are there, there’s no point. They’re just there to take the press releases from the West Wing and tell everyone what a brilliant mind Psaki has all the time. But Doocy of Fox News actually gets pushback, gets answers to information they don’t want to give.

CLAY: You’re killing it. By the way, Peter Doocy, he’s only 34 years old, and it feels like every day we’ve got at least one question from him just actually holding their feet to the fire. Right? He is doing a phenomenal job of speaking truth to power, which is what journalists are supposed to do and so few are willing to do.

BUCK: Can you imagine if we even had half of the people in the media that were at least willing to be oppositional to the regime or just hold them to account, just do the speak-truth-to-power thing? Instead of we have 95% of them in the back pocket of the regime, and we see what the results are with what’s going on here after now going on two years of Fauciite madness.

But on the crime issue, which was what I thought we should dive into for a second, notice you’re hearing her talk about “root causes.” That’s what it used to be back in the ’70s, back in the ’80s, when people were unwilling in major cities that were being destroyed by crime, because crime has such a corrosive effect, top to bottom.

When you have too much crime particularly in a city, concentration of people together, you’re going to have businesses that move out. You’re going to have real estate values collapse. You’re going to have lesser goods and services. It filters all the way through. And it has such deleterious effect on everybody who lives there. And in the ’70s and ’80s we had all this, “Oh, root causes!”

It’s essentially “crime is a social problem, a societal problem,” and what we learn is, “No, actually, there’s a very small percentage of people that act as criminals in society,” a very small percent. Even in high-crime neighborhoods it’s a small percent of people that are actually committing the crime, and if you enforce the laws, what we learned with Giuliani and among other places — broken windows, policing, et cetera.

We all know about that miracle, right? What’s really causing the problem? Obviously, it’s not the pandemic, because the pandemic hasn’t resulted in higher crime rates in other countries similar to us. It’s actually lower crime rates, particularly lower violent crime rates. We’ve seen a huge spike in violent crime, a large part of it is what we could call the progressive prosecutors, which is a project that is…

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s financially backed, in part — he’s one of the backers of this effort. George Soros wants there to be people that are making the decisions about how we deal with criminals in the criminal justice system. People that are always taking the most left-wing, let’s be honest, view about it. Let them out as quickly as possible. Punish them as seldom as possible.

Introduce social justice measurements into the whole process of whether or not someone should be held accountable for a crime. And the results of that are things that we see in San Francisco and New York, to be sure, Clay. But I was actually doing some research with my team on TV earlier in the week. And what’s amazing is a lot of people that are listening to this, in much smaller cities that don’t get a lot of attention in the national news media — Lansing, Wichita, you go down the list — they’ve also had major increases in crime, and they also have progressive prosecutors in these places.

CLAY: It’s a fundamental failure. And this all to me is directly tied back to the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests, because what that did, they were so successful in branding any criticism of response to George Floyd as racism or the next step, which is what everything is now, white supremacy, that if you were a white person and certainly if you were a white person in a position of prominence, you were effectively held hostage by Black Lives Matter.

And the argument to defund the police almost became an argument that any white person was afraid to argue against, and really the unfortunate thing of lenient-on-crime policies is most of the cost is not born by affluent people in rich neighborhoods because the overall crime in those neighborhoods is still very low. They still have lots of police.

They weren’t the ones arguing in favor of defunding the police. The cost is borne by majority minorities in inner-city neighborhoods. So if you go through and, look, we say, “Okay, the murder rate was up 30% in the United States,” the murder rate among minority populations increased way higher than 30A% because they were the overwhelming victims.

The unfortunate reality is Black Lives Matter protests led to more black lives being lost than at any point, percentage increase, in decades in the United States of America. And that’s such an uncomfortable truth, Buck, that you know how this works: A lot of uncomfortable truths are buried instead of discussed, because if you discuss it, the people who bring it up are afraid of what people are going to say about them. Facts are white supremacist evidence, facts are racist. This is the problem with having a national debate when you have so many people afraid to say what they really feel.

BUCK: That’s absolutely true. And one of the big issues that we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter as a movement is that it actually goes in the exact opposite direction when they talk about police reform from what is often needed. When you’re talking about the bail reform laws that are out there, okay, bail reform in general might sound like a good thing because you don’t want people…

“I don’t have 500 bucks. I’m in for a nonviolent crime. I have to sit in jail for a week?” That’s what we were led to believe bail reform is. But now it’s turned into, “Well, basically unless we think you’re a threat to society you’re going to be in and out on the same day and you’re not going to have to pay any money,” and it feels like the whole process is meant to be just an easier process for the criminal.

When you add into this, by the way, Clay, the number of people who commit crimes who would have been pre-bail reform held in custody but actually get arrested and then re-offend before they even see a judge, it’s stunning. I mean, it’s a number that should be zero, and it actually happens with frequency. People will get out. I just stole something. I going to go steal something else. What’s the big deal? I’m in and out the same day.

CLAY: Waukesha is a direct result of this. Those six people in Waukesha, Wisconsin are dead because of bail reform. That’s the reality. There are probably thousands of people, this year alone, that are dead because of bail reform. And there’s a difference between somebody who has a nonviolent offense and is being held behind bars and somebody who is in a position of committing a violent felony and they’re let out, like we saw with Darrell Brooks in Waukesha for a thousand dollars when they never should have been out at all. It’s absolutely ridiculous.