IGNORE THE PROBLEM; IT WILL GO AWAY: Leftist columnist freaks out over ad showing actual crime in America.
If you happen to be a baseball fan who has been watching the playoff games recently you may have noticed some intentionally jarring political advertisements popping up between innings. They depict some of the grisly crimes that have been captured on security cameras around the country recently as the ongoing crime crisis continues to spiral out of control. The advertisements ask voters to consider why this is happening and to take this critical issue into account when they vote next month.
One person who definitely noticed the advertisements was Will Bunch, the liberal author and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Having his baseball game interrupted by such “vile right-wing political ads” was clearly more than Mr. Bunch could tolerate, so he took to the pages of his newspaper this weekend to vent his fury at the “shadowy figures” behind the advertising campaign. Apparently, seeing images of terrible things that are actually happening on America’s streets today is an unwarranted disruption to the lives of ordinary Americans or something.
If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.
Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.
Bunch puts on his detective hat and figures out who is responsible for these advertisements that “marred” the “unbridled joy” of a Phillies game. Do you really need me to tell you who he determined was the culprit? It was the Bad Orange Man, of course! Well… it wasn’t Donald Trump specifically, but the group developing the advertisement, Citizens for Sanity, is the brainchild of what Bunch calls “the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump.”
Bunch, who caught “Defund the Police” fever in 2020, is angry that the GOP has revived the effective Nixon-era “Law & Order” playbook: Of Course Republicans Should Run against Crime.
Democrats and the media are trying to shame Republicans into giving up one of their strongest issues: being tough on crime. Will Bunch, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, says that Republicans are reviving “racist ‘Willie Horton’-style fearmongering” ads from their 1980s playbook. Similar accusations litter the airwaves on CNN and MSNBC. Fretting abounds in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Republicans should ignore this. Bunch has no evidence that the ads are fueling racist incidents or ripping up the social fabric. He objects that the ads are working: A “once seemingly dead-in-the-water Mehmet Oz has revitalized his Republican Senate campaign against Democrat John Fetterman — and suddenly the 2022 midterms are all crime, all the time.”
There’s a good reason for that. Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, ran as a progressive. His own office’s website reports that 49 percent of gun-possession charges and 66 percent of violent offenses were withdrawn or dismissed this year. Over 400 people have been murdered in Philadelphia so far this year; the city is on pace to break homicide records by the end of the year. Carjackings have skyrocketed. The atmosphere of lawlessness reached a crescendo in recent weeks as five teens were shot outside of Roxborough High School, one fatally. And Temple University graduate Everett Beauregard was shot in the back of the head by a complete stranger near Drexel. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman endorsed Krasner’s reelection campaign and embraced all of his soft-on-crime policies. George Soros’s political organizations spent nearly $1.7 million to elect Krasner as Philadelphia’s DA.
If Republicans can’t run against this unfolding disaster, then democracy itself is a joke. Berwood Yost, a pollster who directs the Franklin & Marshall College Center for Opinion Research, noted that Krasner is a huge electoral liability for Democrats: “He’s a direct tie to what Republicans would call ‘woke, soft-on-crime views towards the police’ — and those views are just not a popular position anywhere outside of Philadelphia.” Elections are for checking the positions of authority against the populace.
You know it’s an effective ad when YouTube labels the embedded clip “This video is age-restricted and only available on YouTube.” Click here to watch.