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

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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.

Episode Transcript

Digital Audio Interface (USB (00:10):
My wife lost her credit cards, but
I didn't report it.
Whoever found them spends lessthan she does.
That's not just a greatone-liner from Henny Youngman.
It's the new guiding principleof the Democrat Party.

(00:33):
Did you know Kamala Harris doesstandup?
It's true.
She's even emulating the work ofsome of the greats like Henny
Youngman.
Here's Henny Youngman.

Henny Youngman (00:46):
She lost all her credit cards.
I'm not gonna report it.
Why should I?
The one who found'em spends lessthan she does.

Digital Audio Interface (US (00:55):
Now here's Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris (00:57):
As an aside, I'll tell you, having done the work
I've done it is our undocumentedimmigrants that are the least
likely to commit a crime.

Digital Audio Interfa (01:11):
Obviously she thinks she's funny, but this
is no joke.
We've heard this crazycomparison a lot, but think
about what she's actuallysaying.
The fact that any crime iscommitted by someone who isn't
even supposed to be here is aproblem.
We have young women like LakenRiley being attacked and

(01:32):
murdered while out for a morningjog, women being set on fire,
burned to death in a New YorkCity, subway car, horrendous
crimes committed by illegalaliens.
But instead of addressing that,instead of saying every life is
precious, they compare it tosomething supposedly worse, but.
Actually irrelevant as if thatmakes it okay.

(01:54):
This isn't a valid defense ofillegal immigration.
It's an admission that crime ishappening when it never should
have in the first place.
We opened this series talkingabout this ridiculous comparison
and the question, why don't theDemocrats and fake news ever
come up with useful data?
It's surprising that no one ismocking the comparison as it's

(02:17):
ripe for ridicule.
As the Henny Youngman lineshows, you should think about
this and put some other dumbcomparisons in the comments.
There should be dozens of memesabout it, and this isn't just a
cheap solicitation for commentsto help the the algorithm.
Seriously there should be a lotof jokes about this.

(02:37):
The Democrats use this linebecause it's catchy even though
it's a lie.
That's right.
We're not attacking this sillycomparison just because it's
silly.
It is silly, but even more thanthat, it's factually false, but
that's standard procedure forthe Democrats.
The Dems seem to have a secretmeeting someplace where they get

(02:58):
together to contrive falsemessages like these:"There is a
mass shooting in America everyday".
"A half million people gobankrupt in America each year
from medical bills".
"Covid came from a Chinese wetmarket".
"Global warming is makingwinters colder".

(03:18):
The Democrat minions with thematching t-shirts in the crowds
led by women with bullhorns willbelieve and act on any lie
provided by the Democratmachine.
And this myth about law abidingillegal aliens is just one more
lie.
The lie is very widespread.
A Google search on the myth ofimmigrant crime shows dozens of

(03:42):
recent news articles.
These articles say that studyafter study shows that illegal
immigrants commit crimes atlower rates than native born
Americans.
Well, it shouldn't be too hardfor us to find one of those
studies then.
And we will.
But first, let's warn you, thereis not study after study.

(04:04):
There is group after groupwriting article after article
about studies and other groupsdoing the same study Over and
over there are really only threestudies.
All of them are flawed.
None of them show thatimmigrants commit a small amount
of crime, and you'll be able tosee that for yourself.

(04:26):
Today's episode, we'll havespecial features at the end.
So wait for the outro musicbefore you shut us off.
And don't forget to tell afriend about the podcast.
First, let's look at Reuters.
Reuters news agency says that arange of studies by academics
and think tanks have shown thatimmigrants do not commit crime

(04:48):
at a higher rate than nativeborn Americans.
A quote, they give fiveexamples, Oopsie.
They've reframed the issue.
The article correctly statesthat Trump blames illegal
immigrants for violent crime.
That's in the first paragraph.
Now they're giving us examplesof studies involving legal

(05:09):
immigrants and therefore totallyirrelevant, but that's not the
only problem.
Let's take a closer look.
Study number one, the annualreview of criminology.
It's not a study at all.
It's an article reviewing dozensof other so-called studies.
It's mostly useful forexplaining their flaws while

(05:31):
still accepting theirconclusions, and we see a lot of
these study studies.
The first study type, an actualstudy.
Is the second Reuters entry, astudy from Stanford and the
National Bureau of EconomicResearch, NBER N-ber.
You'll find this same studycopied or the same dataset

(05:53):
referenced in many otherarticles.
Stanford's method was to reviewthe incarceration rates of
immigrants versus US born, bebetween 1870 and 2020.
1870 to 2020 but we arecriticizing Joe Biden's
immigration policy, and hedidn't become president until

(06:13):
the year 2021.
Think about the irony.
The people who claim that we areall immigrants are trying to
prove that the violent criminalsof the Joe Biden era are no
danger to us based upon thepeaceful nature of our own
ancestors and the study's aboutimmigrants, not illegal aliens.

(06:36):
This very highly touted study isactually useless in this
argument, but we'll go ahead andrip it apart.
Anyway.
The study of studies wementioned prior tells us that
immigrants are not onehomogenous group, but they have
vast differences between them.
Wouldn't you say The fact thatmost of the immigrants in the

(06:56):
early 20th century came fromEurope, came as families and
came here intending to findwork, make a home, and make a
new life.
Automatically makes them vastlydifferent from the Joe Biden
criminals fleeing dirt holecountries in Africa, Asia, and
South America today?
A racist could have a field daywith this information, but

(07:19):
theoretically these differencescould 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 therein the title.
Just like all of these papers,what the fake news and the
Democrats claim and what theresearch articles show are two

(07:41):
different things.
Reuters claims immigrants commitless crime, but the news article
investigates how many immigrantsare put in jail.
The number of people put in jailand the number of people
committing crimes are twocompletely different numbers.
Most crimes are not even solvedfor one thing, let alone having

(08:02):
someone convicted and put injail and the ones that are
solved might all affect the samepeople.
This is not a new discoveryeither.
The authors of the study admitit, but the fake news and the
Democrats, unlike us, never readthe actual studies.
Moreover, and now let's all showthat we're smarter than the

(08:24):
researchers at StanfordUniversity.
There's no such requirement asone man, one crime by using
incarceration rates as a proxyfor crime rates, they're saying
each man in prison committed thesame amount of crimes, so their
data keep getting more and moreholes in them, and that's not

(08:44):
even getting into which crimesare more serious than others.
Maybe there were morenative-born Irish bootleggers in
prison in the 1930s than thereare Venezuelans today.
But I don't think it's thebootleggers we care about when
there are multiple murderersrunning loose in our country.
The Stanford study is comparingtwo values, the incarceration

(09:07):
rate versus the immigrationstatus, and we've shown that the
incarceration rate is a uselessstatistic.
But what about that other value,the immigration status?
Well, problem is not only dothey not know how many crimes
are committed by the people inthe study.
They also don't know who was animmigrant or not.

(09:28):
They don't know who's animmigrant, legal or otherwise.
This study is a little bit shadybecause it never says exactly
how they determine who is animmigrant.
They refer to census ACSsamples, which in other studies
of this type means computermodeling of other census data.
Basically, they wrote a computerprogram to guess who was or was

(09:51):
not an immigrant.
But of course it's moot becausethe study never intended to
answer the real question aboutrape and murder and other
violent crime, which is commonlycommitted by illegal immigrants
after 2021.
In the next parts of thisseries, we'll look at the other
two study types, one thatanalyzes arrest and conviction

(10:13):
records in a single state andanother that compares the crime
rate to the immigration rate andthe blatant lies that go with
them.
They have some of the same flawsas the study we just looked at
today and some new flaws, butnone of them proved the very odd
assertion of Kamala Harris thatillegal immigrants commit less

(10:33):
crime than we do.

Kamala Harris (10:36):
Aside, I'll tell you, having done the work I've
done is our undocumentedimmigrants that are the least
likely to commit a crime.

Digital Audio Interface (US (10:49):
The Democrats are a Nazi terrorist
organization that believes thata lie told once is just a lie,
but a lie told a thousand timesbecomes the truth.
So try to stay ahead of them bylistening to the 10th Man.
One country locked up violentcriminals and brought crime to

(11:11):
historic lows, but the media'sfurious because it makes Trump
look good.
Hear the real story.
Today, on the 10th man, aprisoner sits in total silence.
He's not allowed to speak unlessspoken to.
He must sit in a fixed posturefor hours, hands on his lap,

(11:34):
eyes forward if he steps out ofline.
Punishment is immediate.
Meals eaten in silence.
Family visits strictlycontrolled.
Sounds like El Salvador's.
CECOT Prison, right?
Not even close.
In fact, it's 8,000 miles away.

(11:57):
It's Japan.
Japan has one of the lowestcrime rates in the world.
Why?
Because they're strict.
They enforce discipline, theydemand order, and criminals know
there are consequences.
Now, El Salvador is doing thesame under president Nayib

(12:20):
Bukele, and it's working.
Crime is plummeting.
Gangs are being dismantled.
People feel safe again, butinstead of applause, Bukele is
being vilified by Democrats andthe left wing media.

(12:42):
We just went deeper into this onthe 10th Man Podcast.
Check it out if you want thefull breakdown.
Here's what they don't want youto 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

(13:06):
that once ruled neighborhoodsare now in white uniforms,
shaved heads locked down.
Outside crime is at historiclows, and the people support
this.
The streets are safe.
The western media, they'refurious.

(13:27):
Meanwhile, Japan allows policeto detain suspects for 23 days
with no charges, not underarrest, just detained.
Japan still has a death penaltyby hanging.
Japan has a 99% conviction rate.

(13:47):
But do the media scream,authoritarian?
No.
Japan isn't helping Trump.
Bukele's real crime isn't massincarceration.
It's mass deportation.
He's working with the US toaccept deported criminals.

(14:09):
MS.
13 thugs, drug traffickers,violent felons.
The kind Biden would ratherquietly release back into
America.
Bukele locks them up.
That helps Trump and the leftcan't stand it.
They don't want proof thatstrong borders work.

(14:30):
They don't want proof that gangviolence can be crushed.
They don't want a young, popularLatin American president proving
that Trump was right.
So they smear him.
They attack his prisons.
They twist the story becauseit's never been about human
rights.

(14:51):
Democrats like all terrorists,use people as pawns human
shields, and it's all aboutpower.
Here's the bottom line.
El Salvador's becoming safebecause its leaders got serious,
strict justice works.

(15:12):
It works in Japan.
It works in El Salvador and itwould work here if the left
didn't fight it.
Every step of the way, they wantopen borders, soft on crime laws
and rising chaos because chaosgives them control.
They don't want you to know thatorder is possible.

(15:34):
They don't want you to rememberthat Trump's plan was working
and they definitely don't wantyou asking if El Salvador can do
this.
Why can't we?
Don't leave just yet because wehave a new feature for you.
It's called today's massshooting.

(15:54):
As we hear in the news, wheneverthere is a true mass shooting,
America has a mass shootingevery day, so you should hear
about some of these tragicevents that make America a third
world country.
Speaking of the world, let's sayhello and welcome to our
listeners in Ireland, Ghana,Sweden, Finland, the Ukraine,

(16:14):
and Israel, and of course thatother third world country to the
North Canada where seal huntingseason is about to come to an
end.
Of course, we're only joking.
Canada stopped clubbing babyseals before the Berlin wall
came down, but we do have tobust their chops a bit.
And so we're resurrecting ourseries.
Are you a third world countrywhere you get to pretend that

(16:38):
you live in the greatest countryin the world and hear what the
rest of the world would sayabout you if you did?
All in fun, all with thegreatest respect for our
community of nations, which arealmost as good as the US and now
today's mass shooting.
They call it a mass shooting,but the only death came from a

(17:00):
car.
Okay folks.
Today we're diving into anothertragic event, not to mock the
victims, but to shine a brightunflinching light on the people

(17:23):
exploiting them for politicalgain.
Because while a man lost hislife in Savannah, Georgia on
March 18th, it wasn't from gunviolence, it was from getting
run over by a car.
Yet somehow this made it intothe gun violence archive as
another mass shooting.
Why?
Because when your database isrun by a professional drama

(17:46):
queen like Mark Bryant, the goalisn't clarity, it's clickbait.
Let's break down what actuallyhappened in this story, a man
opens fire and hits five people.
Sounds horrifying, right?
Because when most people hearthe words mass shooting, we
picture the worst.

(18:07):
A lone gunman walks into aschool, a movie theater or a
mall starts shooting strangersat random with the cold
calculated intent to kill asmany as possible.
It's chaos.
It's terror.
It's the stuff of nightmares,and rightly so, but this,

(18:27):
according to TV Station, WSAV,all five victims survived.
In fact, police said theirinjuries were not life
threatening.
This wasn't some ideologicallydriven rampage or hate fueled
slaughter.
It was criminal recklessness,very likely tied to a personal

(18:49):
beef or gang disputes.
Still dangerous, stillunacceptable, but it's not what
the public thinks of when theyhear mass shooting.
Then comes part two of thestory, the real Tragedy.
During his getaway, the suspectleads police on a high speed

(19:10):
chase, and in the process hekills an innocent bystander.
That Chase ending in theunfortunate death of 16
60-year-old, excuse me, DarrenLewis here, the suspect crashed
into his car at a very highspeed while driving in the wrong
lane.
Now this morning, GSP officialstelling us that the suspect

(19:31):
involved in this crash isKenneth Gordon.
The same suspect in the Westlakeapartment shooting.
Early yesterday morning leavingfive people injured.
Gordon has previously beencharged three other times for
fleeing or attempting to elude apolice officer along with
reckless driving.

(19:51):
Let that sink in.
The only person who died in thisentire incident.
Died in a car crash.
So naturally.
Mark Bryant, founder of the GunViolence Archive, a man whose
greatest skill appears to bemanipulating numbers to terrify
suburban moms classified this asa mass shooting.

(20:12):
Why?
Because five people were hitwith bullets regardless of the
context, severity, or intent.
Doesn't matter that it waslikely a gang feud.
It doesn't matter that no onedied from gunfire.
Doesn't matter that the actualfatality was a vehicular
homicide.

(20:34):
Brian's methodology is simple.
If a trigger gets pulled andfour or more people are wounded,
even if it's a turf war in aparking lot and nobody dies,
it's a mass shooting full stop.
But this isn't data, it'snarrative building.
So let's talk about the manbehind the curtain.

(20:54):
Mark Bryant.
Bryant is not a criminologist.
He's not a law enforcementofficer.
He's not even a data scientist.
He's a retired IT guy with agrudge and a website.
And thanks to the media'slaziness, that qualifies him as
the nation's top authority ongun violence.

(21:15):
CNN quotes him, the Democratscite his statistics Meanwhile,
Bryant's criteria are so absurd.
If five drunk idiots shootthemselves in the foot at a
backyard barbecue, he'll call ita mass shooting.
And the media, they eat it uplike pigs at a trough, another
mass shooting today.

(21:36):
Gun violence epidemic baneverything.
But here's what they don't tellyou.
The vast majority of the massshootings in the gun violence
archive are not schoolshootings, not workplace
massacres, not random acts ofterror.
They're just criminal violence,often gang related, and most
don't even involve a singledeath, but saying five people

(22:00):
got non-fatally shot in a gangconflict, doesn't move the
needle on donations or get you abyline on M-S-N-B-C.
So instead the headline becomessixth mass shooting in 24 hours,
even if the actual casualty wasfrom a hit and run.

(22:20):
Now again, none of this is todownplay the pain of the
victims.
Darren Lewis didn't deserve todie The people who were shot
didn't deserve to get caught upin the violence either.
But if we want real solutions tocrime, we need real data.
Mark Bryant isn't giving usthat.
He's giving us propaganda with abody count so next time you hear

(22:43):
there was a mass shooting today,ask yourself, who pulled the
trigger, who got hurt, and whobenefits from the panic?
Because it sure isn't thepublic.