Speaker 1: So we alsold the images out of Philadelphia when young
Speaker 1: people looted and ran stacked Ohahua store in the city's
Speaker 1: northeast side, including outside of the parking lot, with large
Speaker 1: groups engaging and fighting with each other, just complete lawlessness.
Speaker 1: In the city of Philadelphia. At least twenty people were
Speaker 1: shot four deaths over the weekend. Chicago, almost forty people
Speaker 1: were shot this weekend. This last weekend, seven were killed.
Speaker 1: So what's happening in America cities? How has it gotten
Speaker 1: this bad? And how did we arrive at this place
Speaker 1: where somehow criminals are the victims. People put up statues
Speaker 1: of George Floyd, a guy who put a gun to
Speaker 1: a woman's stomach as him and his friends robbed her
Speaker 1: in her house. Kamala Harris, our own vice president, told
Speaker 1: Jacob Blake, who had showed up at a woman's house
Speaker 1: to re victimize her in Wisconsin then pulled the knife
Speaker 1: on police officers. Kamala Harris told him that she's proud
Speaker 1: of him. So how did we get to this place
Speaker 1: where criminals are somehow the victims and in the instance
Speaker 1: of George Floyd, we're actually lionizing them. And how responsible
Speaker 1: is someone like George Soros and getting these d A
Speaker 1: s elected. We're gonna ask all these questions to Heather
Speaker 1: McDonald that you know her. She wrote that book with
Speaker 1: the War on Cops. It's an incredible book. She's an
Speaker 1: author of seven, several books in fact, always smart, always sistaining.
Speaker 1: She's also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a
Speaker 1: contributing editor of the Institute's City Journal. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: ask her about all these things. And this is obviously
Speaker 1: becoming a big issue heading into the midterm elections as well.
Speaker 1: So how is that going to play out? So all
Speaker 1: these questions to Heather McDonald, you're gonna want to listen
Speaker 1: to this. She's always great, always smart, always insightful. Here
Speaker 1: she has Heather McDonald's Heather, I talked to you. I
Speaker 1: think it might have been maybe a year ago about
Speaker 1: some of these issues. But it doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: letting up. This crime sweeping America. You know. Senator Ted
Speaker 1: Cruz just tweeted talking about violent crime levels and Democrat
Speaker 1: runs cities like Baltimore, l A, Philly, d C. New
Speaker 1: York all on track to beat their two thousand one
Speaker 1: violent crime levels. You know, violent crime up in cities
Speaker 1: like New York. I think forty from last year is
Speaker 1: what he tweeted. How bad is it right now in
Speaker 1: American cities? Well, it's very bad. It's particularly bad depending
Speaker 1: on where you live. The fact remains, Lee says. It
Speaker 1: always has been the case that the vast majority of
Speaker 1: violent street crime is committed in minority neighborhoods against minority victims,
Speaker 1: committed by minority perpetrators. But since the George Floyd riots,
Speaker 1: not only has UH the homicide and drive by shooting
Speaker 1: rates in those inner city neighborhoods just gone up massively,
Speaker 1: but it is also spreading into safer neighborhood We saw
Speaker 1: last year places like Chicago that established police presence at
Speaker 1: designated hours at gas stations in the suburbs because people
Speaker 1: were getting car jacks. You could go and fill your
Speaker 1: tank when despite the high prices, you get ripped off
Speaker 1: that way, but at least your car wouldn't be stolen. Uh.
Speaker 1: And people are getting robbed on in restaurants, you know,
Speaker 1: their their their watches are being stolen. And there's also
Speaker 1: just an appalling level of gratuitous violence that the knockout
Speaker 1: game has been resurrected where where inner city youth are
Speaker 1: coming up and just bashing people on the back of
Speaker 1: their heads. Uh. The anti Asian violence is particularly egregious.
Speaker 1: The mainstream media and the Biden administration have a phony
Speaker 1: narrative that this is all white supremacy. Uh. If you've
Speaker 1: seen any of the videos of these anti Asian hate
Speaker 1: hate attacks, they're almost exclusively committed by blacks. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: so you have a rapid disintegration of social norms and
Speaker 1: the rightful expectation of safety that all Americans deserve to
Speaker 1: bring when they go outside. You know, you look at
Speaker 1: a lot of these cities, like, for instance, I used
Speaker 1: to live in the West Village in New York. It
Speaker 1: was a pretty safe city, right, So crime seemed even
Speaker 1: more specific to certain neighborhoods. If you avoid those neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: you're largely okay. As you just mentioned, a lot of
Speaker 1: these cities like New York, Chicago, it's seeping out into
Speaker 1: the suburbs, is expanding. Why why do you think that's
Speaker 1: happening just because we've given such a green light to criminals.
Speaker 1: Why not? You know, you can you can expand your
Speaker 1: range of victims. Uh. And there's just a sense of
Speaker 1: entitlements these, you know, I would say, I go back
Speaker 1: and forth in my mind over this, Lisa, which is
Speaker 1: worse the mass looting, the mass retail theft, or the
Speaker 1: or the physical violence and in it are Arguably it's
Speaker 1: the mass looting that is even more disturbing as to
Speaker 1: what's happening in our society because the one of the
Speaker 1: primary missions of government is to protect property. Not because
Speaker 1: you know, we're greedy or or you know, fiendishly averages
Speaker 1: are capitalistic. It's because property is what human beings create
Speaker 1: when they go about the miracle of trade and commerce.
Speaker 1: And if you can't secure property, if the government cannot
Speaker 1: secure property, it has no legitimacy left. And and that
Speaker 1: is now absolutely pervasive. Here in New York. You can't
Speaker 1: buy a tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste is locked up.
Speaker 1: The criminals aren't. The most trivial items of daily youth truth. Toothpaste,
Speaker 1: shaving cream, lotion are all locked up behind plexiglass barriers
Speaker 1: because the shoplifting problem is so great and stores would
Speaker 1: rather this, you know, make make it very difficult for customers.
Speaker 1: If not closed down entirely, then a cost shoplifters and
Speaker 1: be inevitably accused of racism. Do we have any idea
Speaker 1: what the net economic impact of all this is? You know,
Speaker 1: we look at places, you know, companies like Starbucks announcing
Speaker 1: its closing sixteen locations, and some of these major cities
Speaker 1: like DC, Seattle, Los Angeles, Philly. The list goes on.
Speaker 1: McDonald's chief executive officer recently, you know, warned about crime
Speaker 1: gripping Chicago at being an issue for his company. We've
Speaker 1: seen companies or financial groups like Citadel heading out, heading
Speaker 1: to Miami leaving Chicago. Do we have any idea what
Speaker 1: the economic impact has been on some of these cities
Speaker 1: because of crime and not being able to get it
Speaker 1: under control. Well, it certainly is in the hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars, I would think. And it's of course
Speaker 1: the business owners that suffered the most that lose customers
Speaker 1: when people go online. You know, why why go to
Speaker 1: Dwayne Read or Walgreens and have to wait for somebody
Speaker 1: to come and unlocked your toothpaste if you can just
Speaker 1: buy online. You've got a white flight going on like
Speaker 1: crazy from cities where all these progressive liberals won't talk
Speaker 1: about crime because they think it's racist to do so,
Speaker 1: but they're voting with their feet. Uh. So you have
Speaker 1: a redistribution, but it's it's really hurting uh inner city corps.
Speaker 1: And we saw the reverse happen in New York City
Speaker 1: in the in the under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, where he
Speaker 1: threw proactive constitutional color blind policing brought crime down, and
Speaker 1: it continued to go down until we had married to
Speaker 1: Blasio and the George Floyd rights to be ultimately crimed up.
Speaker 1: The economic power of that was massive. The tourism industry
Speaker 1: came back, restaurants you know, started up all over the city. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so you can just put that in in reverse
Speaker 1: gear and understand how it affects things where people are
Speaker 1: worried about staying out light late and taking the subway home.
Speaker 1: You know, you're not going to go to that late
Speaker 1: night show. If you're worried about that, You're not gonna
Speaker 1: stay around at a restaurant or go out to a restaurant. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you if you don't want to pay cab fare
Speaker 1: and and fear that the subway you're gonna get bashed
Speaker 1: or pushed into the into the tracks. I wouldn't take
Speaker 1: the subway in New York. I lived there for three years.
Speaker 1: I used to take the subway every single day to
Speaker 1: work to Fox or not every day, but most days
Speaker 1: to the Fox headquarters in Midtown. I took it every
Speaker 1: single day. I never really worried about it. Mean, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't take it super late at night. I wouldn't take
Speaker 1: it if I had been, you know, drinking at all
Speaker 1: with friends. But I always felt safe. I wouldn't take
Speaker 1: it now. And that seems to be the sentiment of
Speaker 1: most of the people I talked about I talked to
Speaker 1: in the city. Absolutely. I just got back to New
Speaker 1: York from California, and I'm really, I'm really making that calculation.
Speaker 1: It's so much easier to use than surface streets. But
Speaker 1: there's just been such a regular string of a violent
Speaker 1: crime in the subway ways, and you just think, is
Speaker 1: it Is it worth it? And and this was another
Speaker 1: sign of the rebirth of New York. And I could
Speaker 1: get out at my local subway stop on the Lexington
Speaker 1: Line at at eleven PM and there'd be people pouring
Speaker 1: out because they felt safe about staying late at work
Speaker 1: or work going out for drinks. That's not happening now.
Speaker 1: I can guarantee you well, and you got to this earlier.
Speaker 1: But we're in this weird time where the left almost
Speaker 1: sees criminals as if they're the victims. Yeah, we've put
Speaker 1: up statues of George Floyd. You know, Kamala Harris told
Speaker 1: Jacob Blake, who showed up at a woman's house to
Speaker 1: re victimize her pulled a knife on police, that she
Speaker 1: was proud of him. How do how do we arrive
Speaker 1: at this place where not only are criminals somehow the victims,
Speaker 1: but in the instance of George Floyd, were lionizing them. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to broach a very difficult topical, Lisa, which
Speaker 1: is race. And it's something that well meaning Americans just
Speaker 1: don't want to talk about. You know, we're the opposite
Speaker 1: of white supremacists. Uh we we don't want to say
Speaker 1: the obvious. It's because the vast majority of violent street
Speaker 1: criminals are black into a lesser stent Hispanics and well
Speaker 1: meaning Americans turn their eyes away from that reality, and
Speaker 1: we are unwinding law enforcement in the name of avoiding
Speaker 1: so called disparate impact, which is the fact that if
Speaker 1: you police in a color blind neutral fashion, you will
Speaker 1: have a negative disparate impact on black criminals because their
Speaker 1: rates of crime among blacks is so much higher. For example,
Speaker 1: in New York City, blacks are the population, but they
Speaker 1: commit about three quarters of all drive by shootings. If
Speaker 1: you add Hispanic drive by shootings to that, you account
Speaker 1: for virtually all drive by shootings in the city. All
Speaker 1: whites are not committing drive by shootings. That is the
Speaker 1: reality in every single American city. And so we've decided
Speaker 1: that rather enforced the law. If if if arresting those
Speaker 1: retail all theft vandals, the people that are walking into
Speaker 1: stores with with trash bags and just filling them out
Speaker 1: and filling them up and strolling out, uh, that will
Speaker 1: result in disparate arrest of minority shoplifters. We've decided we'd
Speaker 1: rather not enforced the law. We'd rather not increase so
Speaker 1: called mass incarceration of blacks, which is not mass. It
Speaker 1: is incarceration, It is not mass, It is not disproportionate
Speaker 1: to the crime rate in our country. Nobody wants to
Speaker 1: acknowledge that. Uh. And so if there were not racial
Speaker 1: disparities and incarceration in police saying, we would not be
Speaker 1: unwinding the law system. We would say, block them up
Speaker 1: and throw away the key. But it's because of our
Speaker 1: understandable guilt about racism in the past in this country
Speaker 1: that we are turning our eyes away from what's happening
Speaker 1: now in the streets and and the irony, Lisa, you know,
Speaker 1: the AFT the mainstream media, the New York Times just
Speaker 1: routinely put scare quotes around the crime. You know, they say,
Speaker 1: all these conservatives they're talking about crime, you know, little
Speaker 1: little air quotes being being ironizing the topic, as if
Speaker 1: this is all just a figment of the racist conservative imagination.
Speaker 1: When they dismiss this current crime increase, which is what
Speaker 1: they're doing. What they're saying is to us, black lives
Speaker 1: don't matter. We were not gonna we're not going to
Speaker 1: acknowledge that there's this massive homicide increase because we're we
Speaker 1: to do so, we'd have to acknowledge black on black crime.
Speaker 1: So they're basically saying, don't pay attention to it, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. Well, it does matter because there are thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of hard working, law abiding residents of inner
Speaker 1: city neighborhoods who deserve police protection, who are terrified to
Speaker 1: go out, especial stually the elderly, and we're turning our
Speaker 1: backs on them too. Well, that's also I mean, if
Speaker 1: you look at who the victims are, aren't they predominantly
Speaker 1: minorities and a lot of these cities, yes, absolutely, So
Speaker 1: it's like you think they would care about them, you know.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying for for
Speaker 1: for the media, for the New York Times to to
Speaker 1: scoff at the idea that crime has gone up and
Speaker 1: to say, oh, this is just some sort of conservative
Speaker 1: talking point. They are essentially saying black victims don't matter,
Speaker 1: that we don't think there's a crime increase. To to
Speaker 1: to deny the crime increase means denying that thousands more
Speaker 1: blacks died in homicide were killed by homicide in two
Speaker 1: thousand and even more. You can't have it both ways.
Speaker 1: You can't say black lives matter and then say we're
Speaker 1: not going to be concerned about this crime increase. Click
Speaker 1: commercial break more with Heather McDonald. On the other side,
Speaker 1: how responsible is George Soros and getting some of these
Speaker 1: das elected for the increase in crime in America cities? Well,
Speaker 1: I think he's very responsible for getting these these progressive
Speaker 1: das elected who are saying they're not going to enforce
Speaker 1: a whole host of laws because those laws have a
Speaker 1: disparate impact on black Again, Lisa, I can't stress enough
Speaker 1: the the ruling principle in our world today is avoiding
Speaker 1: disparate impact. That's everything that you see that's going on
Speaker 1: in the criminal justice system today, it is driven by
Speaker 1: disparate impact. Soros has put these guys in, uh you know,
Speaker 1: they're saying, we're not gonna we're not gonna prosecute churnstyle
Speaker 1: jumping in the subway systems because that has a disperate
Speaker 1: impact on blacks. We're not gonna uh prosecute theft larceny
Speaker 1: because that has a disperate impact on blacks. They're even
Speaker 1: not prosecuting resisting arrest, which is the natire of civilization.
Speaker 1: If you're not going to punish people who disobey cops,
Speaker 1: then there is no more civilization. So that's a very
Speaker 1: big factor of the lack of prosecution so that there's
Speaker 1: no criminal consequences. But I would say responsibility also rests
Speaker 1: with Joe Biden and the rest of the democratic establishments.
Speaker 1: Biden is still harping on his racism and white supremacy
Speaker 1: defines this country. Theme Uh. He is. For maybe the
Speaker 1: less couple of months, he has not been as explicit
Speaker 1: about saying, uh criminal justice system is racist. But that's
Speaker 1: been a constant refrain, both as a candidate for president
Speaker 1: uh and and since the day he took office and
Speaker 1: ever since. He keeps bashing the cops as racist. And
Speaker 1: and when they hear that, if they're being told that
Speaker 1: they're racist for going into minority neighborhoods and making stops
Speaker 1: of of known gang bangers, not surprisingly cops are gonna
Speaker 1: do less of it because policing is political, and they're
Speaker 1: getting the political message that this is not what's wanted
Speaker 1: in society. So the cops have backed off, and that's
Speaker 1: allowed again the criminals become emboldened well. And also just
Speaker 1: not having enough police officers and a lot of these cities, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I was reading in you know, Chicago, something
Speaker 1: like nine hundred officers had left the Chicago Police Department
Speaker 1: between January and October of one while only fifty one
Speaker 1: joy And and you know, I know we talked about
Speaker 1: this the last time You're on about this issue arising
Speaker 1: and so many of the city, So how big of
Speaker 1: an impact is that happening of police officers just being
Speaker 1: like to your point of after, you know, just getting
Speaker 1: beaten up so badly being like, you know what, I'm out,
Speaker 1: Like I don't need this. I'm gonna go into a
Speaker 1: different career field or move to a safer city, like
Speaker 1: I'm out. Oh, it's huge. Minneapolis is down a third
Speaker 1: since George Floyd Race riots. Um, and you know the
Speaker 1: burning down of the of the third precinct in Minneapolis. Uh,
Speaker 1: there is a total recruiting crisis in this country. You know,
Speaker 1: everybody's trying to poach everybody else. But I don't know
Speaker 1: a single police department that isn't facing the difficulty of
Speaker 1: trying to replace the officers who have took off and
Speaker 1: and they just can't do it. Uh. You know that
Speaker 1: you can offer larger salaries all you want, but if
Speaker 1: people are getting excrement thrown at them, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: when they try and make an arrest or rocks and
Speaker 1: bottles and people cursing at them, that's not really a
Speaker 1: profession of choice that anybody would go into. Who has
Speaker 1: a choice. Well, and it looks like the left isn't
Speaker 1: slowing down with some of this stuff. I mean, the
Speaker 1: state of Illinois's has a law going into effect I
Speaker 1: believe in two thousand, twenty three January one two three,
Speaker 1: ending cash bail in the state. And it's ironically named
Speaker 1: the Safety Act, which is clearly not uh, and what
Speaker 1: it's being called is the Purge Act. You know, what
Speaker 1: kind of impact do you think that is going to
Speaker 1: have when Illinois specifically looking at you know, the Chicago
Speaker 1: area is already just with crime and murder. Yeah, well, Uh,
Speaker 1: the Illinois legislature is a real problem. Uh. It used
Speaker 1: to be Rama Manuel in his his police chief used
Speaker 1: to say, we need stronger gun laws here to prosecute
Speaker 1: illegal gun possession and use of guns in in crimes,
Speaker 1: and we need longer sentences. And the Illinois legislature in
Speaker 1: Springfield would inevitably block that in the name of disparate impact.
Speaker 1: Because if you prosecute gun criminals at a higher rate,
Speaker 1: you're going to have a disparate impact on blacks. Blacks
Speaker 1: in Chicago, or a little under third of the population,
Speaker 1: they commit about eighty percent of all murders and drive
Speaker 1: by shootings. If judges and prosecutors have no mechanism for
Speaker 1: holding people who have a very high, high likelihood of
Speaker 1: um committing another crime while awaiting trial that that does
Speaker 1: add to the criminal burden. Quick break more on the
Speaker 1: crime problem. At what point do people wake up politically?
Speaker 1: You know, you do look at this race between the
Speaker 1: Attorney to General Tis James against Republican challenger Michael Henry.
Speaker 1: I mean, he looks like he's potentially in the margin
Speaker 1: of error. I think it looks like or you know,
Speaker 1: you've got Lee Zelden running against Governor HOCl Yeah. At
Speaker 1: what point do people wake up politically and realize that
Speaker 1: they're just gonna keep getting this if they elect some
Speaker 1: of these liberals in these cities and givenatorial races. Lisa,
Speaker 1: I defer to you on that one. I am just astounded.
Speaker 1: I am utterly astounded that there continue to be races
Speaker 1: where the left winds. Whether it's in in Venice Beach,
Speaker 1: in in Los Angeles, or the failure of the recall
Speaker 1: of George Gascon, I do not know. And it seems
Speaker 1: to be that the left will just define deviance down
Speaker 1: and define its own tolerance down in order not to
Speaker 1: have to face the fact that their philosophy has been
Speaker 1: a total failure. And so they'll just say, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's another you know, twenty vagrants on my street
Speaker 1: shooting up drugs in front of my children. That's just
Speaker 1: what it is means to live in a city today.
Speaker 1: Heaven forbid. I say that the police actually should move
Speaker 1: people on, that they should not allow this, that the
Speaker 1: law abiding residents deserve to be the primary focus of
Speaker 1: public policy, not the deviant, not the anti social. And
Speaker 1: yet I see again and again, Uh, people still willing
Speaker 1: to put up with this. So we'll see. I mean,
Speaker 1: I frankly, I hate to jinx the racer or be negative,
Speaker 1: but in in Los Angeles, Rick Caruso should be a
Speaker 1: shoe in as mayor. He's a got an extraordinary record
Speaker 1: as a uh developer of of shopping malls. He's got
Speaker 1: an exquisite sense of taste and design. And yet uh,
Speaker 1: the career politician Karen Bass is out polling him there
Speaker 1: and and Los Angeles looks like hell at this point.
Speaker 1: If they don't, if if people continue to tolerate this,
Speaker 1: I I just I shake my head because you would
Speaker 1: think that at some point self interest takes over the
Speaker 1: preening sense that oh, I'm being so virtuous by allowing
Speaker 1: people to decompensate on the streets, and uh, rob everybody
Speaker 1: else blind one of you know, you've got John Fetterman
Speaker 1: running for SENNA in Pennsylvania who's previously called for mass
Speaker 1: release a prisoner, specifically one third of the statewide criminal population.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's it's it's sort of boggles the mind.
Speaker 1: But I think what's really sad to me is just
Speaker 1: I just don't understand how we got to a place
Speaker 1: where we're so desensitized to the loss of life. Like
Speaker 1: one of my really really good friends, Gianno Caldwell lost
Speaker 1: his little brother eighteen in Chicago. Look at over the
Speaker 1: week as his little brother was only eighteen years old.
Speaker 1: I mean, you look at even just over the weekend,
Speaker 1: there's forty people shot, seven killed in one week. It's like,
Speaker 1: how did we arrive as at a place in society
Speaker 1: where we're just so desensitized to the loss of human life. Well, Lisa,
Speaker 1: it's it's because the left actually is racist. The people
Speaker 1: that are being shot every weekend in Chicago, in Minneapolis
Speaker 1: and Baton Rouge in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black. You know,
Speaker 1: you it is spreading, It is spreading, and at some
Speaker 1: point black kids are gonna, i mean white kids rather
Speaker 1: going to start getting gunned down. But basically, uh, the
Speaker 1: politicians and democratic politicians turn their eyes away from this
Speaker 1: black on black slaughter. It is amazing. The only people
Speaker 1: talking about it are white conservatives. It's it's remarkable that's
Speaker 1: the only people talking about it. We're the ones that
Speaker 1: are supposed to be the white supremacists. No excuse me,
Speaker 1: you people who are who are pretending this is not happening.
Speaker 1: You are turning your backs on black victims. What steps
Speaker 1: should these cities take to reclaim their city? You know,
Speaker 1: what what steps should these leaders take to you know,
Speaker 1: rid their cities of this crime and this violent crime
Speaker 1: that we're saying, what do you think the most important
Speaker 1: steps would be the most important step is to say
Speaker 1: to the police, we expect you to go where the
Speaker 1: crime is. We expect you to use your your legitimate
Speaker 1: power in a constitutional matter, in a color blind manner.
Speaker 1: But if you generate disparate stop and arrest statistics, which
Speaker 1: you will, if you are fighting crime where it is happening,
Speaker 1: we will not come after you and accuse you of racism.
Speaker 1: We know that you cannot police it's constitutionally in this
Speaker 1: country without having a disparate impact on blacks. And that
Speaker 1: is because you're trying to save black lives. Officers have
Speaker 1: to believe that they're not going to be attacked. UH.
Speaker 1: We have to support them when they're forced to use
Speaker 1: uh lethal force because somebody is resisting arrest and and
Speaker 1: putting them in the fear of their lives. Uh And
Speaker 1: and so we know how to do this. This is
Speaker 1: how you fight crime. There's three things you do. You arrest,
Speaker 1: you prosecute, and you incarcerate. We are not doing any
Speaker 1: of them, and it's no surprise that crime is going up. UH.
Speaker 1: Incarceration is not an end in itself. It's not ideal.
Speaker 1: We all wish we didn't have to do it. But
Speaker 1: the alternatives that the left cause it's all the time
Speaker 1: of well, we're just going to do more welfare services
Speaker 1: and do diversion and keep people in the community. Those
Speaker 1: programs don't work. They have not worked since the sixties
Speaker 1: and seventies when we tried them, and they're not working now.
Speaker 1: It is very hard to rewire somebody who has spent
Speaker 1: the first twenty years of his life in a dysfunctional
Speaker 1: home with single mother, series of boyfriends going through the house.
Speaker 1: If we knew how to do it, it would be great.
Speaker 1: It would be great if we could empty the prisons,
Speaker 1: but we we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
Speaker 1: And so now you don't get a second chance, You
Speaker 1: don't get a benefit of the doubt. We are we
Speaker 1: should start giving the benefit of the doubt to the
Speaker 1: law abiding, to those who respect everybody else's property, not
Speaker 1: to those who violated. Well, I think we really need
Speaker 1: to have a revival of the family and the importance
Speaker 1: of you know, encouraging families, encouraging both parents to stick
Speaker 1: around and be there for their kids and you know,
Speaker 1: to to raise good kids. Were Republicans wrong to embrace
Speaker 1: criminal justice reform? They were wrong to have embraced the
Speaker 1: rationale in which it was done. They were very wrong
Speaker 1: to for Trump to say, oh, yeah, this is racist.
Speaker 1: The reason that Alice, whatever her name was, is in
Speaker 1: prison was because the criminal justice system was racist. No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. It was the Black Cock Congressional Black Caucus
Speaker 1: that said, we need higher penalties for crack cocaine because
Speaker 1: crack cocaine is the worst oppression that this this UH
Speaker 1: community has experienced in slavery. Uh, you know, can we
Speaker 1: can we fiddle with with penalties here? And they're sure,
Speaker 1: I'm willing to do that. But what But when you
Speaker 1: say that you're doing it in the name of fighting racism,
Speaker 1: that's where things get very bad, because that then becomes
Speaker 1: the excuse for unwinding everything else. Is there anything else
Speaker 1: you'd like to leave us with before we go, Heather, vote? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, do not think that that the country can
Speaker 1: be saved under the present political leadership. And uh, you
Speaker 1: have to if you have a close race in your
Speaker 1: in your jurisdiction, you have to vote. If it's not
Speaker 1: a close race either way, you know, if if Republicans
Speaker 1: look likely to win, vote if they don't vote anyway, Like,
Speaker 1: just get the bodies out there. This thing can be
Speaker 1: turned around. Giuliani did it. It's not rocket science. The
Speaker 1: question is do we have the will to do so?
Speaker 1: I think that's the question. And hopefully people heed your
Speaker 1: your warning and your words and and get out and
Speaker 1: vote in November and encourage their friends and family to
Speaker 1: do the same. There's a lot on the line this November.
Speaker 1: Heather McDonald, thanks so much for joining the show. Always insightful,
Speaker 1: uh and always honest. I appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Lisa I appreciate talking to you.
Speaker 1: Thank you. So that was Heather McDonald, the interesting conversation.
Speaker 1: She's great. I've had her on before. She's so smart.
Speaker 1: All her columns are smart. She's written a ton of
Speaker 1: books as well, which are obviously all really well done
Speaker 1: and including The War on Cops. So appreciate her time.
Speaker 1: Appreciate you guys listening every Monday and Thursday. But you
Speaker 1: know what you can do. You can listen throughout the week.
Speaker 1: I also want to thank John Cassio, my producer, for
Speaker 1: putting it together. Leave us five stars, leave us review.
Speaker 1: I love reading those um and please share with your
Speaker 1: friends and family. Thanks so much for listening.