Lies — maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble — create a lying world.
— Bari Weiss, “The Great Unraveling“
People are selective about where they get their information and whom they trust. Then there are the manipulators who insist, “Who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?” Like imperial stormtroopers to Obi-Wan’s measured tone, the compliant comply.
Owing to such forces, the perception is widespread that crime is on the upswing across America. And why not, writes Eric Alterman? Republicans for decades have mounted political campaigns by fostering that perception backed by a simple message: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
Alterman writes:
In November 2020, the Gallup organization published a study demonstrating that “Perceptions of Increased U.S. Crime [were] at Highest Since 1993,” even though crime was nowhere near its highest levels. In the past, Gallup noted, a perceived rise in crime was usually felt by those who associated themselves with the party out of power.
“American carnage” was the themes of Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address. He’d opened his campaign declaring Mexico was sending rapists across the border along with drugs and crime. He doubled down on the steps of the Capitol that day with “some weird shit.”
At the 2020 Republican convention in New York City, Rudy Giuliani declared his city a hellscape of “murders, shootings, and violent crime,” the products of having a Democratic mayor:
In fact, everything this often drunken troll said was a lie. Violent crime in NYC had been in decline for years. The city was experiencing far fewer murders than it did when he was the mayor in the 1990s. Murders did spike in the first six months of 2020—as they did almost everywhere in America at the beginning of the pandemic—but remain on pace to be far lower than they were at the end of Giuliani’s time in office. What’s more, the city is in the midst of “a 2 percent drop in overall reports of all major crimes, the police say. Rape reports, for instance, are down 25 percent, and grand larceny has dropped 20 percent.” And while there had been a recent rise in killings and in gun violence, it came “after seven years of record-breaking calm when murders dipped to below 300 one year—2017—for the first time since the 1950s.”
But reality must give way to perceptions that win elections. Thus saith the GOP playbook. And so as actual crime declines, the perception of crime increases “driven more by media and politicians than by personal experience or day-to-day observation.”
Ghoulish Operating Procedure is to link white people’s misperceptions about crime levels to Black men with guns. This time around, however, doing so presents some challenges for Republicans.
Because what is trending in our “deeply traumatized country,” writes Chris Ladd at Political Orphans, are crimes of general mayhem in public settings committed by “white psycho killers, gonzo stories of ‘Florida-man’ crime,” and tales of “white ladies gone mad,” like the naked one who wrecked an Outback Steakhouse.
Ladd elaborates:
Over the decade prior to the pandemic the FAA acted on 1300 unruly-passenger complaints from airlines. The agency has received 1300 complaints since February. We’re not just talking about rude or boorish outbursts. Attendants are facing a sustained pattern of assaults, often serious, with little or no apparent context. An incident in Southwest Airlines in May led to a flight attendant losing two teeth. Her attacker was a woman. These are not the kinds of crimes Republicans need to fuel their hoped-for racial or class panic. There are no bad neighborhoods at 35,000 feet unless you’re flying Spirit.
It’s not just airline workers feeling this wave of crazy. Service workers all over the country are experiencing it too. A crazy white guy stabbed a restaurant manager in a Houston suburb back in March for asking him to wear a mask. An elderly white woman in The Villages, FL was arrested for assault at a Burger King in May. Upset over the thickness of the tomatoes in her burger, she began hurling racial slurs, then the sandwich, at restaurant workers. Workers in Asian restaurants are facing assaults, tied to a rise in anti-Asian attacks.
The “Karens” have been out in force. Bagel Karen was filmed calling a fast food worker the n-word over a problem with her order. Downtown Karen has been luring the dogs of passersby into traffic. Antivax Karen had to be carted off a Royal Caribbean vessel after she tested positive for the ‘rona but refused to leave. Perhaps the most disturbing and revealing of all this year’s Karens is Victoria’s Secret Karen. She threatened to assault a black woman in a Victoria’s Secret store. Then, when she realized she was being filmed, she collapsed in a fit of hysterics.
In Knoxville, a white man “screaming irately, frantically jumping around and sweating profusely,” exposed himself to drivers while attempting flips on a busy four-lane.
We are well on our way to more than doubling last year’s pace of documented road rage assaults and murders, which was already nearly double the previous year’s toll. The US is averaging ten mass shootings a week so far in 2021. A troubling percentage of these shootings, like the murders at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis in April, defy any attempt at explanation. It’s not merely that the shooters’ motives are flimsy or insane, but there seems to be no motive at all. Many of these killers aren’t bent on revenge for some slight, shouting terrorist slogans or even following orders from their dog. They’re just showing up one day with a gun blasting at whoever is unlucky enough to be there. They die with no explanation or discernible motive.
Though journalists love to talk about crime in Chicago, this gonzo crimewave is neither an urban problem, nor a regional one. Chicago saw a stunning 55% increase in homicides in 2020, but that was only a modest rise compared to many other US cities. Lubbock chalked up a 180% increase in homicides. Murders were up by a stunning 60% on the mean streets of Omaha in 2020. Murders doubled in Mitch McConnell’s Louisville. Murders nearly doubled in white, Republican Colorado Springs.
Those stats don’t include prospective Vegas-style mass shootings police may have prevented over just one week in Chicago and Denver. Such incidents make it tougher on Republicans to make their crime wave narrative stick to Blacks.
Ladd again:
Looking for a poster-child for this gonzo crimewave? Look no further than the unnamed woman who completed her flight last week from Charlotte to Dallas duct-taped to her seat. According to another passenger, Gonzo Karen left her seat in-flight because she “did not want the plane to fly up anymore.” When attendants would not put the plane back on the ground, she lunged for the plane door, trying to open it. Attendants struggled to restrain her, eventually taping her to her seat, with tape over her mouth. We are not okay.
“America is continuing to unravel in this long hot summer of 2021,” writes Will Bunch in reflecting on how attitudes towards facts and science have declined since the moon landing America watched in 1969:
If you’re thinking that something has radically changed in America in the 52 years since Armstrong bounded down the stairs of the lunar module to take “one giant leap for mankind,” you would be correct. A new Gallup poll released last week shows that confidence in science among Republicans has dropped by an astonishing 27% since 1975, shortly after NASA wound down moon exploration. During this same nearly half-century, faith in science has actually increased among Democrats and independents. The gap between the two parties over science is now wider than for all but a couple of American institutions.
Indeed, it’s remarkable how closely this stunning drop in GOP voter confidence in science — a high 72% in 1975, but just 45% today — tracks with America’s growing vaccination divide between “red states” and “blue states.” Likewise, almost 30% of Republicans said in a separate survey last month that they refuse to get the vaccine — a critical reason why experts now fear the United States can’t reach the herd immunity needed for the pandemic to peter out.
“The masses are receptive to misinformation because America is increasingly divided not by its traditional fault lines, but by one huge determining factor: whether or not you attended college,” Bunch writes.
Perhaps. But Bunch omits that by marrying itself to the religious right ahead of the Reagan years, the Republican Party assimilated its anti-science lean dating from half a century before the Scopes Monkey Trial. The post-Reconstruction “Redemption” movement and monuments to the Confederacy still standing today reflected a deep-seated need to control the past. The anti-science posture of the party today reflects the same fundamentalist impulse to control truth itself, even if it kills people. Even if it kills them. Even if it scorches the planet, drowns major cities, and displaces entire peoples.
What is petering out, what is unraveling, is the perception of this country as one nation, and our ability as a species to recognize and correct its own mistakes.
(h/t SR)