President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.
Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared to the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.
What do crime stats have to do with it? This is about TV footage of guns being pointed at black and brown people.
Like the TV footage in the early 1960s of southern pig cops turning firehoses on women and children.
One thing that most don’t realize is how they opponents of civil rights learned a lot to counter the tactics of protesters and activists, including the appropriation of such events by the opponents.
Take Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a rabidly Islamophobic Somali refugee to Holland who is celebrated by the Dutch far right even though she literally embodies every single characteristic they attribute to refugees (they are all fraudulent, they were never in danger, they want to leech off the welfare state, take unfair advantage of the country they live in, and undermine its values).
Ayaan is a full blown fascist, but she claims that what she does in opposing civil rights advocates in Holland and in the US is somehow identical to the March on Selma in the 60s. Except she will never, ever be hosed by police and have police dogs siced on her.
There is even a National Association of the Advancement of White People that claims they are only doing what the NAACP is doing… (they were founded by David Duke, btw) and even the whole civil disobedience thing that was widely celebrated in the 50s and 60s had laws passed against it as early as the 70s. Basically trying to make sure that if in the future they want to civilly disobey unjust laws they can be unceremoniously thrown in prison with all their statements of civil rights advocacy only used against them in criminal courts.
The only freedom that truely exists in neoliberal society is the freedom to grow rich by royally fucking over your fellow human beings. As long as you don’t get caught too soon (as in, before you are rich enough to afford a place on Fox New’s whitelist) you will get away with it. There are fewer and fewer people going to prison for major financial fraud. Close to none actually. In the 80s and 90s, during the Gordon Gecko era, you still could go to jail for a few short years and come back out richer and more influential than you started. Jail doesn’t exist for rich people.
Even with the child safety act, they make specific exemptions for politicians as their own privacy is seen as sacrosanct, and despite one supporting politician getting caught with child porn on their devices, they will never see the connection.