Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance did their best to tell the truth about crime: during the Harris/Biden years it has skyrocketed, and illegal alien criminals have made a substantial contribution. Simultaneously, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz and their Democrat/socialist/communist (D/s/c) media propagandists, have done their best to “fact check” Trump and Vance, claiming Harris/Biden are public safety wizards and their enlightened policies have dramatically reduced crime.

Even the FBI has done its best to gaslight Americans, consistently underrepresenting actual crime numbers, until realizing Joe Biden is irrelevant and they’d better make nice with the new sheriff in town, suddenly revised their statistics and lo and behold, crime, particularly violent crime, really has increased! Trump and Vance were right all along! 

We can be certain even those numbers are far too low because major blue state cities have stopped reporting crimes, not only to their citizens, but to the FBI. “Defund the police” policies and Soros prosecutors far more interested in prosecuting police officers and innocent citizens than criminals have emptied police forces, dramatically increasing crime rates. D/s/c politicians can’t admit that kind of failure, so they cover up crimes and don’t report accurate crime statistics, if they report them at all. 

Graphic: X Screenshot

In the wake of Trump’s recent NBC interview with a hostile Kristin Welker, NBC “fact checked” Trump and asserted crime was indeed down: 

Trump said that crime is rising sharply in the U.S. and blamed it on migrants.

“Look, our country is a mess,” he said. “We have the highest crime rate.” He later said “a lot of that is migrant crime.”

There is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the U.S., and crime broadly is down, according to the most recently available data.

Violent crime was down about 3% from 2022 to 2023, and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in September.The most serious crimes, murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, dropped an estimated 11.6% — marking the largest single-year decline in two decades.

Welker was apparently relying on FBI statistics prior to the FBI’s recent, very quiet, upward revision of crime. Welker was also apparently counting on Americans who experience crime of all sorts every day to believe NBC rather than their own lyin’ eyes and battered bodies. Strange expectations for people so fond of asserting “lived experience” as absolute proof for manufactured reality.

Fortunately, Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center does science the old-fashioned way: he does it honestly with factual, reproducible research. He also makes his methodology and data sets available, rare practices in these days of “trust the science” without evidence to inspire that trust.

At the beginning of this year, the media was running headlines like National Public Radio’s: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it.” “At some point in 2022 … there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” NPR claimed. But now the FBI has itself admitted its violent crime numbers were way off.

How far off? NBC isn’t even in the ballpark:

While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers show that total violent crime has risen by 55.4%. Rapes are up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during Biden’s term. Since the NCVS started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27% in 2006, so the increase under Biden was slightly more than twice as large.

The increases shown by the NCVS during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any three years, slightly more than doubling the previous record.

Other honest researchers have noticed:

“This FBI report is stunning because it now doesn’t state that violent crime in 2022 was much higher than it had previously reported, nor does it explain why the new rate is so much higher, and it issued no press release about this large revision,” said David Mustard, the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Professor at the University of Georgia who researches extensively on crime. “This lack of transparency harms the FBI’s credibility.”

Credibility? The FBI has remaining credibility? The same may be said about the media whose “fact checking” is obviously based on supporting current D/s/c narratives rather than telling the truth.

As a necessary first step on what’s going to be a long journey to restoring FBI credibility, FBI Director Christopher Wray has announced his resignation. Restoring media credibility may be impossible, but reporting narratives rather than reality will help as one by one, networks go bankrupt.

That’s a lived experience Americans look forward to having. 

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.