Eric Risberg/AP Photo
Police investigators work outside the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), October 28, 2022, after her husband Paul Pelosi was attacked by an assailant inside the home early Friday.
In the final stretch of the midterm campaign, right-wing media has turned to one of its most reliable propaganda tactics: crime panic. Ads where I live in Pennsylvania are putting the infamous Willie Horton strategy to shame; at the bar this week, I caught one that all but accused Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman of being an accomplice to murder.
Philip Bump reports at The Washington Post that Fox News has dramatically stepped up its mentions of crime starting about September—that is, after gas prices started coming down—and CNN and MSNBC have, as usual, followed suit. As a result, as Benjy Sarlin at Semafor points out, a poll going back to the 1970s finds the highest number of Americans ever recorded think that crime is going up in their neighborhood.
The striking thing about this messaging strategy is not just the undeniable opportunism—like the supposedly fearsome migrant caravan back in October 2018, it’s a safe bet that Fox’s crime focus will evaporate once the election is over—but also the perverse incentive thus created. Republicans have an objective political interest in increased crime because it allows them to incite a febrile backlash, and many of them are not at all subtle about it. By the same token, their favored policies of total legal impunity for police and making it ever-easier to buy guns will undoubtedly make crime worse, all else equal.
In short, if you want more crime, vote Republican.
On the one hand, while crime data from even 2021 is not available yet, over the last few prior years the most crime-ridden places in the country have been governed by Republicans at the state level. Eight out of 10 of the states with the worst violent crime problems are solidly red; just one (New Mexico) is blue. It is true that the very most violent cities are governed by Democrats, but that is confounded by the fact that every large city is governed by Democrats. The safest states aren’t universally blue, as almost all of them are in New England and New Hampshire is swingy, but the overall pattern is clear. Even if one excludes large cities, the hinterlands of conservative states like Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana are still much more violent than, say, New York City.
When it comes to murder in particular, conservatives’ obsession with making guns easier to get plainly makes the problem worse. In my home city of Philadelphia, we had a natural experiment of sorts when police decided to put the concealed-carry permit application online in 2021, which created an explosion of legally carried guns and gun theft.
As The Philadelphia Inquirer reports in a grueling investigative piece, this accelerating gun availability has contributed to crime in two ways. First, run-of-the-mill arguments that would have been mere screaming matches or brawls now routinely turn into shoot-outs, sometimes with bystanders injured or killed, which leads to even more people carrying guns out of fear. Texas has done something similar with a new law that removed almost all requirements to get a permit before being able to carry a handgun. The result, reports J. David Goodman at The New York Times, is “an increase in people carrying weapons and in spur-of-the-moment gunfire.” Similar rules will take effect in half the states in just a few months.
Conservatives’ obsession with making guns easier to get plainly makes the problem worse.
Second, the ocean of guns combines with the Philadelphia Police Department’s atrocious job performance—the murder clearance rate here is about 40 percent, meaning in practice that any killer who tries even a little bit to hide their tracks will get away with it—to create an epidemic of tit-for-tat violence.
This effect can be seen in cities all around the country. Police have been engaged in a de facto work slowdown to punish Black Lives Matter protesters. In the process, they have essentially forfeited the state’s monopoly of violence, and so victims of crime take matters into their own hands. In response, Republicans propose more money and more legal impunity for the same departments.
So when a man was arrested after breaking into Nancy Pelosi’s house on Friday and assaulting her husband with a hammer, causing grave injuries, the Republican crime loop closed on itself. The alleged perpetrator, a man named David DePape, apparently attempted to tie up Mr. Pelosi and told police he was “waiting for Nancy.” DePape seems to have posted all manner of right-wing conspiracy content online: anti-vaccine propaganda, transphobia, angry reviews of superhero movies, white nationalism, and antisemitism—in other words, the kinds of stuff one hears on Tucker Carlson every night, though in less plausibly deniable form.
In response, Fox News regular contributor Leo Terrell argued: “Democratic voters, Democratic politicians, this is a wakeup call. Crime is everywhere and it does not discriminate.” That’s right: When right-wing media seemingly drives a right-wing maniac to commit a terrorist attack against one of Fox News’s primary hate objects, it is Democrats’ fault.
Now, crime is not actually everywhere; it has declined greatly compared to the ’80s and ’90s, and it has complex roots. But insofar as right-wing propaganda has whipped up a panic over real crime increases of late, it is a symptom of conservative gun policy, their shredding of the social safety net, their eager endorsement of police who are (to coin a phrase) quiet quitting, and their own hysterical rhetoric that incites a steady stream of conservative activists to commit acts of terrorism.
