The real "crime wave" is in Trumper-run red states

This is actually no secret. But corporate "news" media is awfully close-mouthed about it.

A new study again confirms it: Republican-led states have higher murder rates than Democratic ones. While your Tucker Carlson-watching uncle may be utterly convinced that Portland, Oregon, has been burned to the ground, or regaling his email lists with any number of tales he heard directly from Donald Trump's inflamed appendix, the truth of the matter is that the states with high violent crime rates tend to be led by conservative Republican politicians.

So then, which causes which? That's not clear, but the Yahoo! News writeup of the study provides a nice, terse summary of what we know does predict violent crime rates. They "are found in areas that have low average education levels, high rates of poverty and relatively modest access to government assistance," which not coincidentally describes much of the deep-conservative South. It may be that fear of violent crime makes Americans more conservative; certainly, anyone with a passing familiarity with Fox News knows that America's top conservative news source got that way with hosts that scream in bug-eyed terror over all the ways that you, personally, are in imminent danger of being murdered by immigrants, or bilingual people, or the Socialisms, or anyone who thinks American police are straight-up murdering too many of the people they come in contact with these days...

But the reality remains: If you want to reduce violent crime, you fix up the schools to raise education levels, you institute programs to lift people out of poverty, and you provide government assistance to make sure people are at least getting food and a roof over their heads. Since all of these are things that Republicanism is absolutely bug-eyed dead-set against in any form, in any venue, we're hardly going out on a limb by saying A leads to B leads to C. - Daily Kos