The Tenth Man Podcast with Kevin Travis
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The Tenth Man Podcast with Kevin Travis
S5 S17 - Blacks Commit Most Violent Crime - Racist Myth?
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The “13/50” Myth Myth: Crime Stats, Liber Rules, and the Number No One Wants to Discuss
Kevin Travis introduces a recurring segment called “Liber Rules,” arguing that progressives treat plausible claims as true without evidence, and applies it to the claim that “13/50” crime statistics are fabricated and that repeating them is hate speech. He cites FBI Uniform Crime Reports showing Black Americans account for about 52% of murder arrests and Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing about 54% of murder convictions, contending the disparity increases with deeper scrutiny. He disputes “over-policing” as the driver, arguing murders generate 911 calls and would also appear in hospitals and morgues if white crime were being systematically missed. He highlights SPLC-cited data on largely intraracial crime and notes cross-racial figures, then emphasizes that 56% of U.S. murder victims are Black and that Black homicide victimization is far higher than for whites, concentrating in long Democratic-run cities; he links outcomes to fatherlessness and Democratic social policy while stating race is not the variable.
00:00 Provocative Opening
00:34 Liber Rules Explained
01:19 The 13/52 Claim
02:37 Hate Symbol Trap
05:07 Data Arrests vs Convictions
06:22 Unsolved Murders Pivot
07:14 Over Policing Argument
10:16 Numbers Aren't Hate
11:05 SPLC Intraracial Rebuttal
13:39 The Real Furious Number
14:55 Democrat Cities Focus
16:07 Fatherlessness Policy Link
16:43 Culture Not Race
17:25 Staircase Recap
18:26 Final Takeaway
19:30 Closing Credits
#SPLC #13/50 #FailedDemocrats #AmericaCrime
Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.
Crime statistics are a myth, the FBI and the DOJ are lying, and repeating their numbers is hate speech. Why the people claiming to protect Black Americans are actually the ones burying them today on The Tenth Man Welcome to The Tenth Man. I'm Kevin Travis, and today we begin something new, a recurring series I'm calling Liber Rules, short for liberal rules. The unwritten logic, if you can call it that, that governs how the progressive left makes arguments. And again, I say logic loosely. Liber rule number one: if an argument is plausible, it's true No burden of proof required. They assert, you disprove, and if you can't or won't, that's proof enough. Today's episode is a demonstration of that rule in action. A middle-aged progressive acquaintance of mine, a gal who hasn't built much, but has accumulated an impressive collection of confident opinions, came to me recently with what she considered a trump card. The thirteen-fifty myth, she called it. The idea that white supremacists have been weaponizing Department of Justice statistics to paint Black Americans as a violent race. The claim is simple. Black Americans are about thirteen percent of the population, but commit fifty percent of violent crime. Actually, it's a little worse than that. The statistics say they commit fifty-two percent of violent crime, and you'll see these numbers keep climbing. And according to my acquaintance, and according to a growing chorus on the left, this is a lie. It's a fabrication, a white supremacist talking point dressed up as a statistic Now, before this episode is over, I'll tell you what number the left should actually be furious about. And it isn't 50, and it isn't 52, but we'll get there But let me take a moment to acknowledge the quandary this puts us in, and I want you to take note of it because it's a Liber-Rule classic. They've created a myth about a supposed myth. They're not arguing the numbers in context. They're not offering competing data. They're saying the numbers themselves are false, and that repeating them is an act of hatred. The Anti-Defamation League has designated 13/52 as a hate symbol, or 13/50, either one. It's not a contested statistic, but a hate symbol. Stating a mathematical claim from federal data is now, in their framework, equivalent to wearing a white hood. And that means that if I show you the FBI's own tables, I'm a white supremacist. And if I challenge their framing, I'm defending white supremacy. Well, that's not an argument, it's a trap. And I guess the only way out is to walk straight through it. So if you've got a friend or a coworker or a family m-member who came at you with this, um, you'll be prepared, and then share this episode. Find The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis on your podcast platform of choice or theirs, and tell them to listen first and then argue. But at least now you won't be caught off guard. You know how when they tell you something outrageous and you know that can't be right. Well, we'll dismantle the whole thing for you right now Let's start with what the left is actually claiming. They are not, for once, blaming systemic racism for this disparity. They used to do that. The old argument was, yes, the numbers are real, but poverty and redlining and the legacy of Jim Crow and underfunded schools, of course, they're the most highly funded schools in the world, explain them. And that argument, it at least engaged with some real factors. But this new one doesn't bother. It just shows that they exercise no critical thinking. This new argument says the numbers aren't real. The FBI is wrong. The DOJ, Department of Justice, is wrong. The Bureau of Justice Statistics is wrong, and the data are false. So let's look at the data they say are false. FBI's Uniform Crime Report, which aggregates arrest data from more than sixteen thousand law enforcement agencies covering over ninety-four percent of the U.S. population, shows that Black Americans account for approximately fifty-two percent of murder arrests. And the left says, "Aha, those are just arrests. Those are not convictions." It's the racist police going into the Black neighborhoods, throwing a net over all the young Black men and, and arresting all of them, and it's not convictions. Well, fine. But the Bureau of Justice Statistics tracks convictions, and convictions run at 54% Black. The number went up. They're actually not arresting enough Black guys. So their argument doesn't just dissolve, it actually backfires. And every layer of scrutiny we apply just makes the disparity larger, not smaller. And again, there's one more layer to go. We'll get there at the end of this episode. W- And when we do, I want you to remember that this was their own demand for a deeper look that took us there Next they say, "Well, a third of murders go unsolved, so we don't know who the killers were." Well, that's true. We need to look at the closure rate of murders, and we'll do that in another episode. So it's plausible, and I suppose those unresolved cases could be due to anyone. And under Liber Rule number one, the unproven assumption is as good as a fact. So by their own standard, I guess we could assign the unsolved murders to whichever group we'd like. Maybe we could be racist and do that. But we won't. We're gonna stick to what's known and let them assume that I suppose a third of murders are done by white people. But next comes the argument that really deserves its own section, because here's where the logic collapses entirely They say these numbers are inflated only because Black communities are over-policed. Notice they invented a new word here, over-policing. It's racist cops patrolling Black neighborhoods producing all those arrests, and that, not actual crime, is what drives this disparity. It sounds pretty sophisticated but it really isn't, and here's why. It's as simple as this. Police don't control when there's an arrest. A nine one one call controls it. When a murder happens in any neighborhood in America, somebody calls nine one one. Someone reports a gunshot or a body, and someone tells a detective what they saw. The police respond to the community's report, not the other way around. If Black communities are generating a disproportionate number of homicide calls, the question is not whether the police are racist. The question is, what is happening that's generating those calls? Are you gonna call the people making the calls racist? And moreover, the over-policing argument implies that the opposite must be true, that White communities are under-policed. Now, think about what that requires. That would mean that thousands and thousands of White murderers are operating without consequence. Thousands of bodies in White neighborhoods. Rising crime in communities because no one's being arrested. No one is being convicted, and the bodies are piling up. Of course, there are no bodies piling up because the disparity in the data is not a data problem. If systematic undercounting of White crime were real, and that's literally what they're claiming. This is literally what my friend said. "It's like a needle in a haystack, and they're not looking in all the haystacks." But if that were true, we'd see it in the hospitals, we'd see it in the morgues, we'd see it all over the communities, but of course, we don't And here's the part that should end the argument, but of course it never does. The left says over-policing hurts Black communities. But if crime in Black neighborhoods is real, and it is, then policing benefits those communities. Removing police doesn't reduce crime. It removes the only institution standing between a community and the people committing crimes against it. Now let's talk about the particular trap embedded in this argument, because this is what makes it a Liber Rule specimen. By declaring 13/52 a hate symbol, the left has made the statistics themselves undiscussable. Engage with the numbers and you're trafficking in hate. Question their rebuttal and you're defending hate. This is not debate. It's a closed loop But a mathematical claim cannot be a hate symbol. Symbols carry meaning independent of fact, and the number fifty-two doesn't hate anyone. The FBI database doesn't hate anyone. What hates people is refusing to look at a problem because looking at it is uncomfortable for you. The Southern Poverty Law Center, not a right-wing source by any stretch, published data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics specifically to debunk the myth Their article is worth reading because it contains the evidence against their own argument. They noted that most crime is intraracial, that Black victims are most often killed by Black offenders, and white victims by white offenders. They offered this as reassurance. "Whites have nothing to fear from Black Americans," they said, "because the violence stays in its lane." Here's what's insulting about that response. Nobody on the right is arguing otherwise. There's no serious conservative commentator anywhere, no one citing these statistics is standing on a street corner warning mothers to hide their children because a Black man is walking by. White Americans already know that most violent crime is intraracial. They know it because they live it. Their own communities have their own crime committed by, mostly by people who look like them. That's not the argument anyone is making, and to say so is mere race-baiting. The argument we're making is about policy. It's about what's happening in specific cities, in specific zip codes, under specific Democrat administrations that have held power for decades. The intraracial rebuttal is a straw man built to make the conversation about race fear instead about the failure of government And oddly, it doesn't even survive its own data. According to the figures the SPLC themselves cite, fifteen percent of crimes against white victims were committed by black perpetrators in a country where black Americans are thirteen percent of the population. You see, according to the trends, there should be few to no violent crimes committed against white people by Blacks. But it's Black Americans who are committing cross-racial crimes at a rate that exceeds their share of the population. And it's not a white supremacist talking point, it's the SPLC's own table. The organization that declared 13/52 a hate symbol published the numbers that explain why people find it worth discussing, and they just hoped you wouldn't read down that far I told you at the top there was a number the left should actually be furious about, and here it is. The percentage of American murder victims who are black is fifty-six percent. Black Americans are only thirteen percent of the population, and yet more than half, far more than half. Any presidential candidate who got fifty-six percent of the votes, you would call it a landslide. And yet fifty-six percent of all murder victims in the United States are black. The homicide victimization rate for black Americans is more than six times the rate for white Americans, twenty-one point three per hundred thousand versus three point two per hundred thousand, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It might be worth noting since we always compare our crime rate, our murder rate, our homicide rate to that of the other wealthy countries. You see, the three point two per hundred thousand murder rate, homicide rate for White Americans falls right in line with that for all the other countries Now ask yourself where those murders are concentrated, the twenty-one point three per hundred thousand. They're not in rural America. They're not in the Republican-governed suburbs. Those murders are concentrated in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Memphis, St. Louis, and New Orleans. Every one of those cities has been governed by Democrats, in most cases exclusively by Democrats, for fifty years or more. Chicago hasn't elected a Republican mayor since nineteen thirty-one. Baltimore hasn't since nineteen sixty-seven. Detroit hasn't since nineteen sixty-two. That's all before you were born, isn't it? These aren't cities that tried conservative governance and watched it fail. These are cities that never tried it, and the body count is what that looks like after half a century of Democrats. And those are people being buried. Those are the mothers and sons and fathers we should be talking about when we talk about Black crime in America. And the party that's been running those cities the entire time has the nerve to call the statistics racist You know, somewhere around 70% of the men in prison are Black Yet around 80% of the men in prison, white, Black, or other, came from fatherless homes. There's your common thread. And Democrat social policy since the 1960s has systematically replaced fathers with government checks, rewarding single motherhood, penalizing marriage, and then expressing surprise at the results. And it's not coincidence, it's cause and effect, and it has a name and a voting record. And now let me be precise about what we're arguing and what we're not. We're not saying Black people are violent by nature. That's the racist interpretation, and it's wrong. Race is not the variable. Culture is the variable. Democratic policy is the variable. Fifty years of dismantling the Black family and calling it a social safety net is the variable. Generations of young men are raised without fathers in neighborhoods without opportunity, in cities where Democrats have held every lever of power for decades, and whose answer to every failure is more of the same. That's the variable Now let's walk the staircase one more time because this is where the left's argument doesn't just fail, it indicts them They said 50% of murder arrests are Black. It's actually fifty-two, 52% of murder arrests are Black. They said that's just arrests, so we looked deeper at convictions, and 54% of convictions are Black. The number went up. Then we looked deeper still. Fifty-six percent of murder victims are Black. Every layer of scrutiny we applied made the tragedy bigger. They invited us up the staircase, and at the top we find twelve thousand Black Americans killed every year, not by white supremacists, not by over-policing, but in cities that have been run by the Democratic Party since before most of those victims were born. That's the irony. The party that made Black victimhood its founding argument is presiding over the greatest ongoing massacre of Black Americans in history, and they call anyone who points it out a racist. There's the tragedy. The people most in need of honest policy are being handed dishonest politics instead. The myth of the 13/50 myth doesn't protect Black Americans. It protects the people who've been failing them for fifty years. The KKK, at the height of its power, killed dozens of Black Americans a year, and that was wrong, but Democrat governance is producing twelve thousand Black deaths a year. If Black lives really mattered, then that math would matter. The myth of the thirteen-fifty myth doesn't protect anyone. It just keeps the bodies from being counted and the votes from being lost. Connecting the dots, this is The Tenth Man with Kevin Travis. Thank you for listening.