LIFE
before murdering 22 people, and the
President is a climate change sceptic,
as liberals never tire of pointing out.
For another, the Dayton shooter, who
murdered nine, was a self-described
‘leftist’ who praised Elizabeth Warren
and Antifa, the far-left protest group.
Incidentally, the terrorist who charged
an ICE detention centre with home-
made bombs and a rifle last month
was a member of Antifa and referred
to his target as a ‘concentration
camp’, echoing the words of Alexan-
dria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat-
ic Congresswoman. Yet Newsnight
didn’t ask whether the ‘inflamma-
tory rhetoric’ of Warren or Ocasio-
Cortez ‘inspired’ these nutjobs. No,
it bought into the line peddled by
Democratic presidential candidate
Beto O’Rourke — and countless
others — that all mass killings that
have taken place on Trump’s watch
have been by ‘white supremacists’.
O’Rourke described Trump as
‘stoking racism’ and claimed there’d
been a rise in hate crimes in every
year of his presidency. We hear sim-
ilar claims about the effect of the
Leave victory in the EU referendum,
but hate crime data is notoriously
unreliable. O’Rourke is referring to
the number of reported hate crimes,
which isn’t a robust measure because
various American agencies have
spent millions encouraging people
to report hate crimes and making it
easier to do so. To see whether the
overall level has increased you need
to look at whether unreported hate
crimes have gone up or down in the
same period. That exercise was car-
ried out by the Bureau of Justice Sta-
tistics in 2018 which found that while
reported hate crimes increased fromT
he BBC’s flagship news and
current affairs programme
wasn’t in any doubt about who
to blame for America’s latest bout of
mass shootings. Newsnight’s report
began with footage of Donald Trump
addressing the faithful at a rally. ‘This
is an invasion,’ he warned, referring
to the refugees massing on the Mexi-
can border. ‘When you see these car-
avans starting out with 20,000 peo-
ple, that’s an invasion.’ It then cut
to Emily Maitlis in the studio. ‘That
was in May,’ she said. ‘Today, Don-
ald Trump called on Americans to
condemn racism, bigotry and white
supremacy.’ She added that the Presi-
dent had made these remarks ‘with a
straight face’ and ‘with autocue pre-
cision’ — completely insincere, in
other words – and then pointed out
that he had not suggested any new
measures for gun control. She con-
cluded: ‘So how much should we align
presidential words and terrorist acts?
How should America react to a man
many blame for amplifying extrem-
ism in the first place?’
Those are good questions and it’s
a pity Newsnight didn’t take them
seriously. There are plenty of reasons
not to blame Trump for last week-
end’s slaughter. For one thing, the El
Paso gunman railed against climate
change alongside Hispanic immigra-
tion in the manifesto he published
104,400 to 107,900 between 2016 and
2017, unreported hate crimes fell
from 92,100 to 86,900, meaning the
total number actually fell in the first
year of Trump’s presidency.
If you look at the past ten years,
the total level of hate crime is declin-
ing in the US, as is the amount of rac-
ism and anti-immigration sentiment,
and Trump’s victory has done noth-
ing to reverse that. Sociologists at the
University of Pennsylvania published
a study this year showing that Amer-
icans have become less inclined to
express racist views since 2016, some-
thing true of Republican voters as well
as Democrats, and a Gallup poll in
June 2019 found 76 per cent of Amer-
icans believe immigration is a good
thing, the highest number to date. The
same trends are visible in the UK: the
population has become less racist and
more pro-immigration since the Brex-
it vote. The liberal narrative about
the toxic effect of the rise of far-right
populism turns out to be nonsense.
It’s incredibly hard to show that
inflammatory rhetoric, whether on
the right or the left, causes violent
crime. All we know for sure is that
violent crime across the world is
declining, something painstakingly
documented by Steven Pinker in The
Better Angels of Our Nature. For var-
ious reasons, most people have dif-
ficulty believing that and seize on
incidents like those of last weekend as
‘proof’ that we’re living in an increas-
ingly murderous age. That’s particu-
larly true of left-wing pundits and
politicians, who really should know
better, given their elite educations.
Trump may be a coarse, mean-spirit-
ed figure, but he’s not responsible for
these tragedies.No sacred cows
America’s shootings
aren’t Trump’s fault
Toby Young
MICHAEL HEATH
The total level
of hate crime
is declining
in the US, as
is racism and
anti-immigrant
sentiment