We have previously mentioned Washington Post columnist and dedicated #NeverTrumper Jennifer Rubin many times before. Most recently we noted a tweet of hers at the end of October:
Crime has shown up as one of the major issues in the upcoming election, so naturally Mrs Rubin has made a silly claim trying to blame Republicans for crime, due to the rather odd attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, by a Canadian nudist hippie who somehow has morphed into an evil reich-wing extremist.
The tweet to the left is actually a screen capture; when someone like Mrs Rubin tweets something dumb — which is fairly frequently — I always assume that she might decide to delete it, but, alas! the internet is forever when there are [insert plural slang term for the anus here] like me around.
As we have reported previously, Pennsylvania’s firearms control laws are pretty much uniform across the Commonwealth; state law prohibits municipalities from imposing restrictions which are stricter than those provided for under state law. In 2020, there were 1,009 murders in the Keystone State, 499, or 49.45%, of which occurred in Philadelphia. According to the 2020 Census, Pennsylvania’s population was 13,002,700 while Philadelphia’s alone was 1,603,797, just 12.33% of Pennsylvania’s totals.
Now there’s a “here she goes again” moment!
By Jennifer Rubin | Tuesday, November 29, 2022 | 9:00 AM EST
Given the spate of domestic terrorism attacks in recent years — the slaughter at the Tree of Life synagogue, the massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection; for example — you would think law enforcement agencies are engaged in a robust effort to combat such violence, right? Wrong.
Note how Mrs Rubin characterizes the Capitol kerfuffle as “domestic terrorism.”
Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a largely overlooked — yet damning — report detailing the failures of national security agencies on this front.
“Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased,” the committee reports. “National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland.” The uptick is predominately attributable to “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” Yet “without better data, it is difficult to evaluate whether federal agencies are appropriately allocating resources and setting priorities.”
The report arrived just as billionaire Elon Musk opened the floodgates to right-wing extremists and purveyors of disinformation on Twitter. The committee notes, “Social media platforms have played an increasing role in the spread of extremist content that translates into real world violence, due in part to business models that incentivize user engagement over safety.” It also found that these companies’ business models “are designed to increase user engagement (i.e., keep people viewing content online) and that, as experts testified before this Committee, more extreme content tends to increase user engagement, thus leading such content to be amplified.”
Well, of course Mrs Rubin is upset, as are so much of the left, that Twitter is reducing — it has not eliminated — censorship of views which she does not like.
The extent of the threat is staggering. The report mentions a 2021 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that found there were 110 domestic terrorist plots in 2020 alone, a 244 percent increase from 2019. The Anti-Defamation League also reports that over the past decade, domestic extremists have killed 443 people. More than half of the deaths were attributable to white supremacists. Had foreign terrorists committed such crimes, Republicans would have raised a ruckus.
Perhaps Republicans have “raised a ruckus,” but not the kind of ruckus the left like. She noted that “over the past decade, domestic extremists have killed 443 people,” but as of 11:59 PM EDT on Hallowe’en, more than that, 445 to be precise, had been murdered in Philadelphia alone. But, of course, they weren’t killed by “domestic extremists” or “white supremacists” but other Philadelphians, mostly other black Philadelphians.
That number is up to 472 now, but phht! nobody really cares.
According to the Philadelphia shootings victims dashboard, through Monday, November 28th, there had been 147 total shootings in the City of Brotherly Love, 23 of which had been fatal. From 2015 forward, there have been 2,118 fatal shooting victims in Philly, 76.74% of the total, along with 154 black female victims, 5.58% of the total. In a city which is not majority black, 82.32% of all homicides by gunfire victims have been black.
Hispanic males, which are counted separately, and can be either white or black, constitute 283, 10.25%, of the victims, while Hispanic females suffered 36 such deaths, 1.30%. 93.87% of the homicide by shooting deaths in Philly have been among people The Philadelphia Inquirer would classify as “black or brown,” and though the statistics do not tell us the racial makeup of the known killers — and the Philadelphia Police have a rather low rate of actually solving homicides — we know that, generally speaking, the vast majority of homicides involve intraracial, not interracial violence.
The St Louis Metropolitan Police Department, which does publish racial statistics of apprehended killers, noted that, as of November 29, the vast majority of murder victims, 163 out of a total 179, or 91.06%, have been black, and out of 125 identified homicide suspects, 121, or 96.80%, have been black.
The Census Bureau puts St Louis population as being 45.7% black.
As noted above, Republicans in Pennsylvania have “raised a ruckus,” and are impeaching Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner, blaming him for the city’s huge surge in murders, but naturally, the Democrats, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, are appalled, and fighting to save the George Soros-sponsored Mr Krasner.
Mrs Rubin, of course, doesn’t mention any of that, but in just one American city, not even the one with the highest number of total killings, more people have been killed in less than a year than the 443 she told us were murdered by “domestic terrorism,” much of which was perpetrated by “white supremacists.” What am I to conclude other than, for the Post’s august columnist, black lives really don’t matter much?
We had previously noted that, despite the occurrence of a documented murder, the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page numbers hadn’t moved.
