S4 E11 - Immigrant Crime, CECOT and Today's Mass Shooting

Introduction

In the age where catchy phrases and misleading statistics often dominate public discourse, it's crucial to dissect and understand the narratives being fed to us. This blog post tackles the contentious issue of crime rates among immigrants, the spread of misinformation, and the way media portrayal impacts public perception.

A Joke Turned Political Principle

Reflecting on humor’s paradoxical role in politics, we begin with a quip about credit cards from comedian Henny Youngman. This joke has been twisted into a guiding principle by some political factions, illustrating how humor can be manipulated for ideological ends. Kamala Harris recently made a claim about undocumented immigrants and their propensity for crime, a statement that—though presented humorously—has profound political implications.

Dissecting the Myths

Contrary to popular belief, the notion that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans is widespread but debatable. Articles from various think tanks and academic institutions seem to support this claim. Yet a closer look reveals that these studies often fail to differentiate between legal immigrants and undocumented individuals, leading to skewed interpretations.

Consider one highly touted Stanford study analyzing incarceration rates from 1870 to 2020. This data is irrelevant in assessing the impact of contemporary immigration policies. Moreover, methodological flaws, like equating incarceration to crime rates, further dilute the reliability of these findings.

Rhetoric vs. Reality

Turning the lens to more recent deflection tactics used by some political entities, there's a comparison to the strict law enforcement in countries like Japan and El Salvador. These nations demonstrate how stringent measures can significantly reduce crime rates, areas in which the U.S. struggles. Notably, El Salvador's current administration has led a crackdown on gangs, reducing crime but drawing criticism from media outlets that fear these policies align with Trump's hardline approaches.

Media Mirages and Mass Shootings

The discourse on gun violence provides another layer to the discussion. For instance, an incident in Savannah, Georgia, categorized as a mass shooting by certain databases, showcased media exaggeration. Although five individuals were shot, the only fatality resulted from a related car crash. This misclassification exemplifies how statistics can be manipulated to incite fear and serve political agendas, distracting from nuanced discussions about crime.

Conclusion

Understanding crime and immigration requires us to sift through layers of data and recognize the biases inherent in their presentation. As we navigate these complex issues, it is essential to question the narratives constructed by media outlets and political figures alike. Only then can we foster informed conversations that lead to real, effective solutions.

By examining these topics with a critical eye, we can challenge misinformation and advocate for truthful discourse that impacts policy in meaningful ways.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

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My wife lost her credit cards, but I didn't report it. Whoever found them spends less than she does. That's not just a great one-liner from Henny Youngman. It's the new guiding principle of the Democrat Party. Did you know Kamala Harris does standup? It's true. She's even emulating the work of some of the greats like Henny Youngman. Here's Henny Youngman.

Henny Youngman: 0:46

She lost all her credit cards. I'm not gonna report it. Why should I? The one who found'em spends less than she does.

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Now here's Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris: 0:57

As an aside, I'll tell you, having done the work I've done it is our undocumented immigrants that are the least likely to commit a crime.

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Obviously she thinks she's funny, but this is no joke. We've heard this crazy comparison a lot, but think about what she's actually saying. The fact that any crime is committed by someone who isn't even supposed to be here is a problem. We have young women like Laken Riley being attacked and murdered while out for a morning jog, women being set on fire, burned to death in a New York City, subway car, horrendous crimes committed by illegal aliens. But instead of addressing that, instead of saying every life is precious, they compare it to something supposedly worse, but. Actually irrelevant as if that makes it okay. This isn't a valid defense of illegal immigration. It's an admission that crime is happening when it never should have in the first place. We opened this series talking about this ridiculous comparison and the question, why don't the Democrats and fake news ever come up with useful data? It's surprising that no one is mocking the comparison as it's ripe for ridicule. As the Henny Youngman line shows, you should think about this and put some other dumb comparisons in the comments. There should be dozens of memes about it, and this isn't just a cheap solicitation for comments to help the the algorithm. Seriously there should be a lot of jokes about this. The Democrats use this line because it's catchy even though it's a lie. That's right. We're not attacking this silly comparison just because it's silly. It is silly, but even more than that, it's factually false, but that's standard procedure for the Democrats. The Dems seem to have a secret meeting someplace where they get together to contrive false messages like these:"There is a mass shooting in America every day"."A half million people go bankrupt in America each year from medical bills"."Covid came from a Chinese wet market"."Global warming is making winters colder". The Democrat minions with the matching t-shirts in the crowds led by women with bullhorns will believe and act on any lie provided by the Democrat machine. And this myth about law abiding illegal aliens is just one more lie. The lie is very widespread. A Google search on the myth of immigrant crime shows dozens of recent news articles. These articles say that study after study shows that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native born Americans. Well, it shouldn't be too hard for us to find one of those studies then. And we will. But first, let's warn you, there is not study after study. There is group after group writing article after article about studies and other groups doing the same study Over and over there are really only three studies. All of them are flawed. None of them show that immigrants commit a small amount of crime, and you'll be able to see that for yourself. Today's episode, we'll have special features at the end. So wait for the outro music before you shut us off. And don't forget to tell a friend about the podcast. First, let's look at Reuters. Reuters news agency says that a range of studies by academics and think tanks have shown that immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than native born Americans. A quote, they give five examples, Oopsie. They've reframed the issue. The article correctly states that Trump blames illegal immigrants for violent crime. That's in the first paragraph. Now they're giving us examples of studies involving legal immigrants and therefore totally irrelevant, but that's not the only problem. Let's take a closer look. Study number one, the annual review of criminology. It's not a study at all. It's an article reviewing dozens of other so-called studies. It's mostly useful for explaining their flaws while still accepting their conclusions, and we see a lot of these study studies. The first study type, an actual study. Is the second Reuters entry, a study from Stanford and the National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER N-ber. You'll find this same study copied or the same dataset referenced in many other articles. Stanford's method was to review the incarceration rates of immigrants versus US born, be between 1870 and 2020. 1870 to 2020 but we are criticizing Joe Biden's immigration policy, and he didn't become president until the year 2021. Think about the irony. The people who claim that we are all immigrants are trying to prove that the violent criminals of the Joe Biden era are no danger to us based upon the peaceful nature of our own ancestors and the study's about immigrants, not illegal aliens. This very highly touted study is actually useless in this argument, but we'll go ahead and rip it apart. Anyway. The study of studies we mentioned prior tells us that immigrants are not one homogenous group, but they have vast differences between them. Wouldn't you say The fact that most of the immigrants in the early 20th century came from Europe, came as families and came here intending to find work, make a home, and make a new life. Automatically makes them vastly different from the Joe Biden criminals fleeing dirt hole countries in Africa, Asia, and South America today? A racist could have a field day with this information, but theoretically these differences could mean we're getting better people here today. But for better or for worse, that study is useless based just on these demographic grounds. Another problem is right there in the title. Just like all of these papers, what the fake news and the Democrats claim and what the research articles show are two different things. Reuters claims immigrants commit less crime, but the news article investigates how many immigrants are put in jail. The number of people put in jail and the number of people committing crimes are two completely different numbers. Most crimes are not even solved for one thing, let alone having someone convicted and put in jail and the ones that are solved might all affect the same people. This is not a new discovery either. The authors of the study admit it, but the fake news and the Democrats, unlike us, never read the actual studies. Moreover, and now let's all show that we're smarter than the researchers at Stanford University. There's no such requirement as one man, one crime by using incarceration rates as a proxy for crime rates, they're saying each man in prison committed the same amount of crimes, so their data keep getting more and more holes in them, and that's not even getting into which crimes are more serious than others. Maybe there were more native-born Irish bootleggers in prison in the 1930s than there are Venezuelans today. But I don't think it's the bootleggers we care about when there are multiple murderers running loose in our country. The Stanford study is comparing two values, the incarceration rate versus the immigration status, and we've shown that the incarceration rate is a useless statistic. But what about that other value, the immigration status? Well, problem is not only do they not know how many crimes are committed by the people in the study. They also don't know who was an immigrant or not. They don't know who's an immigrant, legal or otherwise. This study is a little bit shady because it never says exactly how they determine who is an immigrant. They refer to census ACS samples, which in other studies of this type means computer modeling of other census data. Basically, they wrote a computer program to guess who was or was not an immigrant. But of course it's moot because the study never intended to answer the real question about rape and murder and other violent crime, which is commonly committed by illegal immigrants after 2021. In the next parts of this series, we'll look at the other two study types, one that analyzes arrest and conviction records in a single state and another that compares the crime rate to the immigration rate and the blatant lies that go with them. They have some of the same flaws as the study we just looked at today and some new flaws, but none of them proved the very odd assertion of Kamala Harris that illegal immigrants commit less crime than we do.

Kamala Harris: 10:36

Aside, I'll tell you, having done the work I've done is our undocumented immigrants that are the least likely to commit a crime.

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The Democrats are a Nazi terrorist organization that believes that a lie told once is just a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth. So try to stay ahead of them by listening to the 10th Man. One country locked up violent criminals and brought crime to historic lows, but the media's furious because it makes Trump look good. Hear the real story. Today, on the 10th man, a prisoner sits in total silence. He's not allowed to speak unless spoken to. He must sit in a fixed posture for hours, hands on his lap, eyes forward if he steps out of line. Punishment is immediate. Meals eaten in silence. Family visits strictly controlled. Sounds like El Salvador's. CECOT Prison, right? Not even close. In fact, it's 8,000 miles away. It's Japan. Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Why? Because they're strict. They enforce discipline, they demand order, and criminals know there are consequences. Now, El Salvador is doing the same under president Nayib Bukele, and it's working. Crime is plummeting. Gangs are being dismantled. People feel safe again, but instead of applause, Bukele is being vilified by Democrats and the left wing media. We just went deeper into this on the 10th Man Podcast. Check it out if you want the full breakdown. Here's what they don't want you to see. Law and order works. Only when it doesn't help Trump. Let's break it down. El Salvador's prisons are clean, controlled, and organized gangs that once ruled neighborhoods are now in white uniforms, shaved heads locked down. Outside crime is at historic lows, and the people support this. The streets are safe. The western media, they're furious. Meanwhile, Japan allows police to detain suspects for 23 days with no charges, not under arrest, just detained. Japan still has a death penalty by hanging. Japan has a 99% conviction rate. But do the media scream, authoritarian? No. Japan isn't helping Trump. Bukele's real crime isn't mass incarceration. It's mass deportation. He's working with the US to accept deported criminals. MS. 13 thugs, drug traffickers, violent felons. The kind Biden would rather quietly release back into America. Bukele locks them up. That helps Trump and the left can't stand it. They don't want proof that strong borders work. They don't want proof that gang violence can be crushed. They don't want a young, popular Latin American president proving that Trump was right. So they smear him. They attack his prisons. They twist the story because it's never been about human rights. Democrats like all terrorists, use people as pawns human shields, and it's all about power. Here's the bottom line. El Salvador's becoming safe because its leaders got serious, strict justice works. It works in Japan. It works in El Salvador and it would work here if the left didn't fight it. Every step of the way, they want open borders, soft on crime laws and rising chaos because chaos gives them control. They don't want you to know that order is possible. They don't want you to remember that Trump's plan was working and they definitely don't want you asking if El Salvador can do this. Why can't we? Don't leave just yet because we have a new feature for you. It's called today's mass shooting. As we hear in the news, whenever there is a true mass shooting, America has a mass shooting every day, so you should hear about some of these tragic events that make America a third world country. Speaking of the world, let's say hello and welcome to our listeners in Ireland, Ghana, Sweden, Finland, the Ukraine, and Israel, and of course that other third world country to the North Canada where seal hunting season is about to come to an end. Of course, we're only joking. Canada stopped clubbing baby seals before the Berlin wall came down, but we do have to bust their chops a bit. And so we're resurrecting our series. Are you a third world country where you get to pretend that you live in the greatest country in the world and hear what the rest of the world would say about you if you did? All in fun, all with the greatest respect for our community of nations, which are almost as good as the US and now today's mass shooting. They call it a mass shooting, but the only death came from a car. Okay folks. Today we're diving into another tragic event, not to mock the victims, but to shine a bright unflinching light on the people exploiting them for political gain. Because while a man lost his life in Savannah, Georgia on March 18th, it wasn't from gun violence, it was from getting run over by a car. Yet somehow this made it into the gun violence archive as another mass shooting. Why? Because when your database is run by a professional drama queen like Mark Bryant, the goal isn't clarity, it's clickbait. Let's break down what actually happened in this story, a man opens fire and hits five people. Sounds horrifying, right? Because when most people hear the words mass shooting, we picture the worst. A lone gunman walks into a school, a movie theater or a mall starts shooting strangers at random with the cold calculated intent to kill as many as possible. It's chaos. It's terror. It's the stuff of nightmares, and rightly so, but this, according to TV Station, WSAV, all five victims survived. In fact, police said their injuries were not life threatening. This wasn't some ideologically driven rampage or hate fueled slaughter. It was criminal recklessness, very likely tied to a personal beef or gang disputes. Still dangerous, still unacceptable, but it's not what the public thinks of when they hear mass shooting. Then comes part two of the story, the real Tragedy. During his getaway, the suspect leads police on a high speed chase, and in the process he kills an innocent bystander.

19:15

That Chase ending in the unfortunate death of 16 60-year-old, excuse me, Darren Lewis here, the suspect crashed into his car at a very high speed while driving in the wrong lane. Now this morning, GSP officials telling us that the suspect involved in this crash is Kenneth Gordon. The same suspect in the Westlake apartment shooting. Early yesterday morning leaving five people injured. Gordon has previously been charged three other times for fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer along with reckless driving.

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Let that sink in. The only person who died in this entire incident. Died in a car crash. So naturally. Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, a man whose greatest skill appears to be manipulating numbers to terrify suburban moms classified this as a mass shooting. Why? Because five people were hit with bullets regardless of the context, severity, or intent. Doesn't matter that it was likely a gang feud. It doesn't matter that no one died from gunfire. Doesn't matter that the actual fatality was a vehicular homicide. Brian's methodology is simple. If a trigger gets pulled and four or more people are wounded, even if it's a turf war in a parking lot and nobody dies, it's a mass shooting full stop. But this isn't data, it's narrative building. So let's talk about the man behind the curtain. Mark Bryant. Bryant is not a criminologist. He's not a law enforcement officer. He's not even a data scientist. He's a retired IT guy with a grudge and a website. And thanks to the media's laziness, that qualifies him as the nation's top authority on gun violence. CNN quotes him, the Democrats cite his statistics Meanwhile, Bryant's criteria are so absurd. If five drunk idiots shoot themselves in the foot at a backyard barbecue, he'll call it a mass shooting. And the media, they eat it up like pigs at a trough, another mass shooting today. Gun violence epidemic ban everything. But here's what they don't tell you. The vast majority of the mass shootings in the gun violence archive are not school shootings, not workplace massacres, not random acts of terror. They're just criminal violence, often gang related, and most don't even involve a single death, but saying five people got non-fatally shot in a gang conflict, doesn't move the needle on donations or get you a byline on M-S-N-B-C. So instead the headline becomes sixth mass shooting in 24 hours, even if the actual casualty was from a hit and run. Now again, none of this is to downplay the pain of the victims. Darren Lewis didn't deserve to die The people who were shot didn't deserve to get caught up in the violence either. But if we want real solutions to crime, we need real data. Mark Bryant isn't giving us that. He's giving us propaganda with a body count so next time you hear there was a mass shooting today, ask yourself, who pulled the trigger, who got hurt, and who benefits from the panic? Because it sure isn't the public.