California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a leftist Democrat, is out there milking the violent crime issue for all its worth. If you think that’s a bit weird, I’m right there with you. For decades, Democrats have taken fire from Republicans for being soft on crime because, well, they ARE soft on crime. Yet, as Newsom correctly points out, California’s violent crime rates are lower than that of many Republican led states. It’s a smart political move coming from someone who hopes to be a presidential contender one day, and, unfortunately for conservatives, he has Republicans right where he wants them.
“Facts are stubborn things. Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama. Alabama is a top 3 most violent state in the country. Where is the president?” Newsom asked at a crime enforcement press conference last week, targeting President Donald Trump for deploying or threatening to deploy national guard units in high crime places like Washington D.C., Los Angeles, California, and others.
And when you use Grok to break down the list of the states with the highest violent crime per capita, California ranks 10th, pretty high but still behind eight Republican led states: Alaska (2nd), Arkansas (3rd), Louisiana (4th), Tennessee (5th), Missouri (6th), South Carolina (7th), Alabama (8th), and Oklahoma (9th). What’s worse, the top ten states with the lowest violent crime per capita are Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Vermont, New Jersey, Idaho, Massachusetts, and Hawaii. While Republicans do control four of those governorships (New Hampshire, Wyoming, Vermont, and Idaho), eight of the ten are still essentially blue states.
The politically correct Republican response is to cite the fact that major metro areas within many red states, like Memphis, Tennessee, St. Louis, Missouri, and New Orleans, Louisiana, are actually run by Democrats who take zero advice from their Republican governors. But while that is true, the attempted explanation only provides limited insight into the issue.
The problem for conservatives who want to remain politically correct and noncontroversial is that while Democrats certainly run many high crime areas, they don’t run all of them. How is the crime rate in Maine, or Connecticut, or Massachusetts? Pretty good, actually. Are those places generally safe to visit and walk the streets? Yep.
In fact, there are plenty of Democratic-run cities that do fine when it comes to violent crime, regardless of their policing policy. Maybe you’ll smell weed on every street corner, but you won’t necessarily get mugged or murdered every time you go from a shop to your car. If Democratic policies always led to high crime rates, wouldn’t crime be exploding in all these places?
There is, however, a factor that is more predictive for crime rates than even whether or not Democrats are in control, and that is the percentage of the population that is black. Obviously, this is territory where Republican politicians and conservative commentators who don’t want to get cancelled can’t normally go, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Enter ‘End Wokeness,’ a massive X account with 3.7 million followers that responded to Newsom’s clucking with a point most Republicans can’t use without being labeled racist: “Governor Gavin Newsom: ‘My state has less crime than Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi’ … You wanna go there?” the account administrator wrote over a picture of a map of the United States showing where the highest percentages of blacks or African-Americans reside.
The correlation is uncanny, which explains why so many go to such lengths to shut down any discussion of it. The fact of the matter is, whether a place is run by Republicans or by Democrats, the higher the black percentage of the population, the higher the rate of violent crime will be. There are no exceptions to this rule, although a state can be high in crime for other reasons, such as Hispanic gangs in California pushing the state to 10th despite a low black population percentage.
Admittedly, there aren’t many Republican-led metro areas with high violent crime rates. But this is more of a chicken, egg argument than anything else. After all, places with high black populations almost always vote in Democratic leadership. And so we’re back to the original contention.
On the map, you can see states like Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina with few counties not dominated by blacks as a percentage of their population. Georgia and Mississippi, run by Republican governors, aren’t in the top 10, but they are 18th and 19th respectively. So maybe Republican leadership can curb the crime a bit with tough on crime policies. It’s definitely worth a shot where it can be done, but it isn’t going to come close to lowering it to Connecticut levels.
Interestingly, Tennessee is home to the metro area with the highest crime in the country - Memphis, with an almost 50% black population and an astonishing 2,500 violent crimes per 100,000 people per year. The rest of the state is largely safe, but Memphis alone is enough to put Tennessee in the top five in the country.
None of this means that every black person is a violent criminal, of course. In fact, most aren’t. However, the fact that so many are means that something continues to be seriously wrong with black culture in general, and it is law-abiding black people who are mostly paying the price. I don’t know what the fix will look like, if it ever comes, but pretending there isn’t a problem is no longer an option.
Newsom obviously knows that ‘respectable’ Republicans won’t call out the obvious, and so he is free to peddle his lies and obfuscations with little real pushback. Maybe it’s time to redefine what it means to be ‘respectable’ in public discourse.
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