RUTHFULLY YOURS

Heather MacDonald: Today, I’m going to talk about the mass illegal immigration and its effect on American society. This summer the nation experienced a horrible murder in San Francisco. A young woman, Kate Steinle, was fatally shot by an illegal alien who had been deported five times already for various felonies. I wanted to deport him a sixth time, but was foiled in doing so by the San Francisco Sheriff, who alleged that this murderer should be let out.

As the country was trying to digest this information and what it meant for our immigration policies residents of Los Angeles, if they relied exclusively for their information from The Los Angeles Times, would have been largely clueless. Because The Los Angeles Times barely covered it. Only several days after Donald Trump had brought this to the national attention did the LA Times get around reporting what had happened and the underlying policy of sanctuary cities that led to it.

The unwillingness of The Los Angeles Times to report on this murder honestly is emblematic of how mass illegal immigration is distorting our cultural discourse and resulting in a whole series of taboos about what can be said in polite discourse.

Islamophobia is everywhere. Literally everywhere.

Like the mosque vandalized in Fresno on Christmas.

Fresno police say a lone suspect vandalized the Islamic Cultural Center in Northeast Fresno on Christmas morning. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case.

Except the Islamophobic incident turned out to be the work of… Asif Mohammad Khan, who had “posted on social media that Osama bin Laden was the “most inspirational person in his life.”

But surely the Islamophobic Houston mosque Christmas fire had to be real. It just had to be.

Mustafaa Carroll, who is the executive director for the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on law enforcement to investigate, citing a recent spike in vandalism to mosques that have prompted hate crime investigations.

“We urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” he said in a statement.

The campaign to deny the murder and shooting spike in many American cities continues apace. The latest effort is a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, which the press has hailed ecstatically as a refutation of what I and others have dubbed the “Ferguson effect”—the phenomenon of officers backing off of proactive policing and thereby emboldening criminals. In fact, the report confirms the Ferguson effect, while also showing how clueless the media are about crime and policing.

The Brennan Center researchers gathered homicide data from 25 of the nation’s 30 largest cities for the period January 1, 2015, to October 1, 2015. (Not included were San Francisco, Indianapolis, Columbus, El Paso, and Nashville.) The researchers then tried to estimate what 2015’s full-year homicide numbers for those 25 cities would be, based on the extent to which homicides were up from January to October 2015, compared with the similar period in 2014.

The resulting projected increase for homicides in 2015 in those 25 cities is 11 percent. (By point of comparison, the FiveThirtyEight data blog looked at the 60 largest cities and found a 16 percent increase in homicides by September 2015. On Monday, the Brennan Center revised its own estimate of the 2015 murder increase to 14.6 percent.) An 11 percent one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalent decrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs. Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11 percent increase as trivial. They employ several strategies for doing so, the most important of which is simply not disclosing the actual figure. An Atlantic article titled “Debunking the Ferguson Effect” reports: “Based on their data, the Brennan Center projects that homicides will rise slightly overall from 2014 to 2015.” A reader could be forgiven for thinking that that “slight” rise in homicides is of the order of, say, 2 to 3 percent. Nothing in the Atlantic write-up disabuses the reader of that error. Vox, declaring the crime increase “bunk,” is similarly discreet about the actual homicide jump, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. Crime & Justice News, published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, coyly admits that “murder is up moderately in some places” without disclosing what that “moderate” increase may be.

The news reports about the National Security Agency snooping on foreign leaders show a White House intent on abusing NSA capabilities for political purposes. As a veteran of the George W. Bush White House, I’m persuaded that had we done this, the Democrats in Congress would have called it a major scandal and held endless hearings designed to attack the administration.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument — and in order to avoid disclosing any classified information — that the United States has the capability to monitor telephone conversations and emails of foreign leaders. There are at least two kinds of communications that we should not monitor.

The first would be communications of our close allies — people like British prime minister David Cameron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, and top leaders of countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, France, and Israel. To snoop on them is a betrayal of trust, of the assumption that we are dealing with each other directly as close allies. Because they are close allies, if we want to know what they are thinking and doing, we should ask them — not spy on them as a matter of course.