The View Co-Host Joy Behar Claims Crime Is “Going Down” Under Biden

Does gaslighting still represent an effective debate strategy in 2022, or does the public understand how the tactic works?  We’re about to find out this month as the midterm elections approach, but for now the political left has decided that instead of addressing the numerous problems that have arisen nationwide on their watch, they would rather pretend that those problems don’t exist and anyone that says they do is a liar.  

The View’s Joy Behar is leaping into action to save Democrats, arguing that the nationwide spike in crime is not real and that the numbers have been inflated by the Republican party.  Behar once again tried to distract from the main issue by mentioning the Jan 6th riot and suggests that protesters “tried to kill the vice president,” even though there was not a single death at the event attributed to the protesters.  She then states that crime has actually gone down under Joe Biden.  

“Republicans now, coming up to the next election all they do is talk about crime, crime, crime…I looked it up, murders in major cities have fallen by 4% so far in 2022, compared with the same period a year ago. So crime is not on the rise, it’s actually going down under Joe Biden.”

Behar does not cite the specific source for this optimistic data, nor does she outline the context.  Though, one can already see a highly dishonest spin on display in her comments.  

For example, she seeks to conflate all crime with a single stat – Murder rates in major cities.  Americans are not only concerned with one type of crime, they are concerned with an increase in all types of crime.  According to data from Axios, overall violent crime rates are actually up 4.2% from January to June of this year. 

While homicides rates did fall 2.4%, Behar should have taken into consideration the fact that they skyrocketed from 2020 through 2021, in almost exact parallel with the BLM riots and the covid lockdowns.  The drop in 2022 does not erase the gains from the past two years.

This is much like Joe Biden making the claim that gas prices went down on his watch.  Prices actually doubled on his watch, and then fell slightly the past few months as he continues to dump oil from the US strategic reserves onto the market.  When it comes to statistics, everything is about context.   

The downfall of the gaslighting methodology is that it is usually only effective against individuals, not an entire population.  You can’t tell millions of people that they are not suffering from increased crime while they deal with the effects on a daily basis.  They’re going to call you out for lying, and they certainly aren’t going to vote for your candidates at election time.  The frog in the pot strategy doesn’t work when the water is already boiling.  

Even CNN, citing a poll from Gallup, recently admitted that Americans are more worried about crime today than at any other time this century.  And the majority of areas facing rising crime are in large cities controlled by Democrat politicians.    

Separating the Dems from the spike in US crime is truly an impossible task after years of blind support for the BLM/Antifa riots and calls for defunding the police.  Behar’s misrepresentation of the statistics underscores a long running trend of political leftists ignoring inconvenient truths, from rising crime, to rising inflation, to rising public discontent over extreme social policies.  Pretending as if all is well is no longer an option.