Increasingly Bizarre Examples of the Liberal Descent into Alternative Reality

We do not expect satire to be the literal truth, but in order for it to be humorous, it must be based in some sense on truth. Kashana Cauley, over in the New Yorker, has written a humor item based upon just about the most untrue argument I could imagine reading in the pages of that publication. Entitled “I, a Conservative, Am Terrified by the Crime in a City I’ve Never Been To,” its entire thesis is that the crime fears driving New York voters are entirely the product of people who have never set foot in New York City.

This is part of a larger genre of tantrum, in which Democrats burrow ever-deeper into denial of reality in order to insist that the things voters are upset about don’t actually exist and are inventions of some right-wing media cabal. I have detailed the raging battle between those (including New York governor Kathy Hochul) who insist that the crime problem is a made-up “conspiracy,” and those (such as New York mayor Eric Adams and Nassau County-based congresswoman Kathleen Rice) who acknowledge reality. Former New York governor David Paterson is among those, saying last month that “For the first time in my life, even in the late ’80s and ’90s when the crime rate was killing 2,000 people a year, I never felt as unsafe as I do now just walking around.” Yet, even Bill Clinton, who used to know better than this, joined in mocking the idea of subway crime: “Lee Zeldin. He makes it sound like Kathy Hochul gets up every morning, goes to the nearest subway stop, and hands out billy clubs and baseball bats to everybody who gets on the subway”:

Would the Bill Clinton of the early ’90s — the guy who executed Ricky Ray Rector, called out Sister Souljah, and trumpeted the 1994 Crime Bill — have made the mistake of just mockingly dismissing real voter concerns about crime?

This is happening on many fronts. In The Atlantic, Tim Alberta talks to Bruno Lozano, the former mayor of Del Rio, Texas, and a onetime rising star among Texas Democrats — young, Hispanic, military veteran, openly gay — who has left office and is thinking of leaving the party:

“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said…“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said.

Then there’s MSNBC’s Joy Reid, who claims that “inflation” is a word Republicans “taught people” just now:

Did Joy Reid sleep through the 1970s? Gerald Ford was wearing a “Whip Inflation Now” button in 1974. I was nine years old in 1980, and I knew all about inflation; it was the dominating pocketbook issue of the day, one people talked about at grocery stores and in line waiting to fill up their cars. It was pervasively acknowledged in popular culture. As NPR noted last year, “The 1970s was a period defined by devastating double-digit inflation, requiring drastic action from the Federal Reserve. . . . On the popular sitcom All In The Family, Archie Bunker was reduced to eating meatless spaghetti. . . . Gerald Ford declared inflation ‘Public Enemy Number One.’ Carter called it the nation’s most pressing domestic problem.” An April 1978 Saturday Night Live skit with Dan Aykroyd had Carter telling Americans to fight inflation by burning 8 percent of their money; another skit just before the midterm elections had Carter arguing that, “Tonight, I want you to try to look for in inflation, an entirely new word: Inflation is our friend. . . . In the year 2000, if current trends continue, the average blue-collar annual wage in this country will be $568,000. Think what this inflated world of the future will mean — most Americans will be millionaires. Everyone will feel like a bigshot. Wouldn’t you like to own a $4,000 suit, and smoke a $75 cigar, drive a $600,000 car? I know I would!”

Joy Reid is two years older than I am; is she really so ignorant of the events of her own lifetime? Or has she just dropped so far down the rabbit hole that she can’t acknowledge problems for which the Democratic Party’s progressive ideology has no answers.

Which brings me back to Cauley’s effort at satirizing the views of New Yorkers up in arms over crime:

Recently, I was watching the news, which I do for only nineteen hours a day, when the news showed me that hellhole called Brooklyn. There is so much crime there! No, I’ve never been, but I’m one of the nation’s experts on Brooklyn crime, because the news always shows it, and, since I watch the news all the time, I’ve been exposed to more Brooklyn crime data than ninety-six per cent of Americans…That’s why I’ve never been to Brooklyn. The crime rate! Everywhere you go there, brown people might look at you — and that’s another crime! Sometimes, Black people there look at you, too, which is a felony. That’s why all the Black people in this country are in jail. According to the news, the neighborhoods there are so unsafe. It all started when someone smashed a car window in Brooklyn Heights in 1976, and it just kept going until a second person smashed a car window in Brooklyn Heights in 2022.

Now, first of all, despite the satiric effort to pretend that all of the city is as relatively safe as Brooklyn Heights, the NYPD itself reported last week that:

NYPD officers in October 2022 made 4,367 arrests for complaints of major felony crimes, a 16.5% increase over the 3,749 arrests for major felonies in the same month last year. Arrests for major felonies are up 25.8% (39,742 v. 31,582) so far in calendar 2022, compared with the first 10 months of 2021. Overall index crime in New York City increased in October 2022, by 5.9% compared with October 2021 (10,930 v. 10,324) driven largely by a 19.3% increase in grand larceny auto (1,244 v. 1,043), a 9.6% increase in grand larceny (4,564 v. 4,163), and a 8.9% increase (1,388 v. 1,274) in burglary.

The NYPD’s chart also lists a 15.8 percent increase in rape versus October 2021. And, of course, the spike in crime is not just a 2022 thing; while crime is nowhere near early 1990s levels, things have been getting visibly worse over the past few years. Even some mainstream-media commentary has found this impossible to deny: A New York Times report last month looked at crime in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hill neighborhood, profiling the mostly non-white residents living in fear. The headline: “As New York’s Fear of Crime Grows, a Neighborhood Lives With Its Reality.” On Sunday, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle told Hochul, “Here’s the problem. We don’t feel safe, you might be working closely with Mayor Adams, you may have spent a whole lot of money but I walk into my pharmacy and everything is on lockdown because of shoplifters. I’m not going in the subway. People don’t feel safe in this town. So, you may have done these things. But right now, we’re not feeling good. We’re worried we could be San Francisco.” Also, the crime issue isn’t just in the city; Hochul’s own health department has been warning of an “alarming rise” in opioid overdoses in Central New York driven by fentanyl trafficking. Lee Zeldin had a gang shooting in front of his own house.

What is really bizarre is Cauley’s idea that New Yorkers are afraid of crime because they’ve never set foot in the city. This is, in particular, a funhouse-mirror view of the populations of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, and Dutchess counties. A million people every day commute into New York City from outside, a great many of them living in these counties around the city. Quite a lot of the residents of those counties have up close and personal experience with crime; many, including retirees and those who no longer commute to the city, grew up there. My family’s trajectory is common: My grandparents came to the city as immigrants, my parents grew up in Washington Heights and moved out, my dad worked as a New York City cop for 30 years, and I grew up surrounded by the kids of New York cops and firefighters. I then repeated the cycle by commuting into Manhattan for work for 23 years, 20 of them while living in Queens. My wife’s parents left the Bronx for Westchester when she was a toddler and there was a shooting in the park near them. My dad used to tell the story of being called for criminal jury duty in Rockland, and the prospective jurors were asked if they’d ever been a victim of a violent crime; my dad was the only one who didn’t raise his hand. Nearly every story was about being mugged, assaulted, etc. in the city, and that was when people decided to move to Rockland. This was all pre-Giuliani New York, but the ancestral memories are strong, and the patterns of people commuting and moving remain. Where I live now, my next-door neighbor retired from the NYPD a year or two ago, and the Republican congressional candidate running to replace Rice is Anthony D’Esposito, who spent 25 years as a detective on the NYPD. Most anywhere on Long Island or in the suburbs north of the city, it would be really hard work to talk to more than a handful of people without meeting someone who lived and/or worked in New York City for many years.

The local readership of the New Yorker almost certainly knows this. But there is bad election news looming, and a need for comforting fictions about why it is coming.