Rage-Inducing Lazy Dishonesty

or, "what happens when you try to read the newspaper"

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch is outraged:

Here’s how Bunch depicts those vile ads:

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.

Unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest! A crime ad that talks about bloodshed and death! These are vicious lies, Bunch explains, and it’s just like what the Nazis did, because powerful people with money are paying for this hateful propaganda:

The world has seen this before. When fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism rose across Europe in the 1930s, large corporations and their rich investors who one might have hoped would have been revulsed by the ugliness, violence and racism of such movements instead hopped on the bandwagon, supporting some of the worst dictators. It took decades for corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and IG Farben successor Bayer to apologize for supporting Germany’s Nazi government. In 2020s America, it feels like the cycle is just starting.

Can you believe the absolute fascists on the political right have the gall to claim that there’s a lot of violent crime in American cities right now? Oh, and by the way, here’s something else you can read in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a story that isn’t quite a month old:

Here’s what that story says:

Day after day, hour after hour, Philadelphians are being shot at a pace unprecedented in city history.

Last year, more than 560 people were killed in homicides — the overwhelming majority by guns — and another 1,800 were wounded by bullets. It was the city’s most violent year ever.

This year’s pace has been worse.

This summer alone was the deadliest on record. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, nearly eight people on average were shot every day — a rate more than twice that of five years ago. More women and children were shot than ever before.

Or take this one, a story that appears directly beneath Bunch’s column if you keep scrolling down:

It’s disgusting that these vile and dishonest political advertisements are falsely claiming there’s a lot of violent crime, he writes. From Philadelphia. In 2022.

Brutally stupid. I mean, so stupid and dishonest it actually makes my blood pressure rise. Do you have to be a sociopathic idiot to land a newspaper column, these days? What can this idiotic dishonesty possibly hope to accomplish?