Be very afraid
It has admittedly been awhile. I am doing my writing elsewhere on my own page. I won’t broadcast that here, but some people know where that is. However, I felt the need to address a group called “StopHoustonmurders.com”. They have set their sight on Democratic judges locally and have run a whole litany of ads. These ads tend to find themselves on what I affectionately call “old people television.” I encountered probably 40 of them in the span of an hour when watching “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
When I say 40 I am not exaggerating. The general course is run about five or six of these ads back to back even having them interrupt other ads for other products. The setup is the same. You see a bunch of people holding up posters of dead loved ones with the voiceover focusing on one of those. It tells you that their loved one was killed by a criminal that a “bad judge” had released. These bad judges are “all Democrats” so we should vote them out to help protect our community.
With all apologies to momma, my bullshit detector was going off and it was screaming at me. Immediately we begin to ask the questions everyone should ask. Are we supposed to take your word for it that all of these judges are Democrats? What were the circumstances of these cases where they “released a criminal”? Did they serve their full sentence? Did a parole board grant their parole? Were they convicted of a violent felony or were they nonviolent offenders that suddenly committed a violent offense?
Tip O’Neill once said that all politics is local. You don’t get any more local than the home. Someone that is out of work or can’t afford to make ends meet doesn’t care how well the economy is doing. Someone that has had a loved one murdered doesn’t care about crime rates. I think we all get that. However, most of us don’t have a loved one that was murdered. So, those crime rates matter and it matters in particular if you are going to question the policy of judges and other elected law enforcement officials.
I know everyone is going to be shocked to hear this, but the rates of violent crime in both the United States and Houston are down. For Houston, it went down from 2022 to 2023. So, it would seem that is little empirical evidence to suggest that the policies of these so-called Democrat judges are making things worse. Again, I know you are shocked.
Instead what we have is yet another example of right wing political groups ratcheting up fear and hatred in order to score political points. More insidiously, they are using real victims to put forth this manufactured issue. It is not dissimilar to the Trump campaign using “data” that shows that two thirds of voters are worried about the economy. When you do nothing but tell people how bad the economy is then is it any wonder that people suddenly think the economy is bad?
Similarly, if you tell people that America is becoming a lawless hellscape then is it any wonder that many people assume that crime rates are out of control? It is all they have at this point. By all means, don’t provide any context. Just bombard people with imagery of Gotham and crime that is out of control. Make sure to imply that it is “the other” that is usually committing these crimes. You alone can fix it by throwing them in jail and throwing away the key. That will do the trick.
They’re getting desperate. They have to keep tossing crap out in the vain hope something will stick.
1I have been hearing liberal Harris county Democratic judges letting convicted criminals out with little or no bail for years. There is never a word said about the O’Donnell lawsuit. Or the crooked bail bondsmen taking 2 or 3% paid over time instead of the customary 10% upfront.
Next door is full of it.
2Thanks for calling this out. I’ve had the same thoughts about these ubiquitous ads; where’s the context? Are there particular judges who are demonstrably “soft on crime”, or are we just supposed to vote out ALL the Democrat judges? (I think we know the answer to that question!)
3The Rethuglikkkans have ramped up this RW rhetoric of dis- and misinformation every election cycle for many decades.
They’ve been distorting crime, economic, and various other sectors of society forever.
However, as you point out, this year is noticably worse than any before. Whether that’s a sign of them having more money on hand or just desperation, who knows? And yes, even on my rural Nextdoor, the usual stupermajority of RWNJs are in a hysterical state.
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As far as Houston crime rates, I used to often do projects there over many decades, going back to the ’70s. The potential for crime was always there, and I and my coworkers were keenly aware of it. We most often worked deep nights, and often in some of the worst areas (this applied to all the other major cities that we also went to).
Of course we armed ourselves, and drove into such areas very cautiously (much of this was long before cellphones).
I’ll give an example: In the early ’70s I bought my first new vehicle. Only had it a few weeks, working deep nights, and upon leaving one morning noticed that the back hatch door (station wagon) had been jimmied, and the paint scraped. This really pissed me off. This happened inside of a securely fenced corporate parking lot adjacent to the office.
So the next night, I brought my 30-06 deer rifle to work, walked right up to the security guard inside the front office door and checked in, he didn’t blink an eye… I went up to the second floor where we were working and set up a table by a window overlooking the parking lot. Opened the window partially and periodically checked out the area all night, and for many other nights. Didn’t get the chance to ‘catch’ the car burglar, they had probably moved on.
But this illustrates how times have changed for sure…
4And it’s now very different about carrying weapons in your vehicle. I think that in Texas now you can carry nearly anything with you, but it didn’t used to be so. During a couple of traffic stops (again, drove a lot on deep nights…), I got pulled over and questioned. Usually asked if I was carrying a weapon, yes, then the officer would ask for permission to retrieve it (without me touching it of course), certainly. They’d usually take the loaded Condition One semi-auto back to their vehicle and run some checks on it. Then politely bring it back and wish me a good night.
Forgot to explain that when having to work in places like Houston, we temporary assignment out-of-towners would usually be assigned to work in those bad areas, and on nights. The locals doing the choicer locations around the town, of course.
5Every repugnantican political ad in this region (NW Oregon/SW Washington) have elements of the narrative outlined by Nick. They find magat sheriffs to spew the same shit. That and migrants are invading because of Biden’s open borders even though repugnanticans led by Trumpf killed a bipartisan border bill. Sick of it.
6Crime rates up? Once upon a time politicos also drummed up something about American marriages going bigtime into divorces and the country is going to hell because of that. Well. The US of A has a 34% divorce rate. Russia is over 70% and Spain is over 80%. We by comparison are damn near Puritanical as a result and can you beat that!
7The magats are doing the same kind of thing here in DFW. Ads run constantly on TV saying that Fort Worth has a much lower crime rate than Dallas because its judges are Republican, whereas, Dallas has an over-the-top crime rate — murders, rapes, you name it, and the Dallas police are fed up with all those soft-on-crime liberal Democrat judges. So vote the lot out this November, etc. etc. I don’t believe one word of it.
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