Be afraid. Be very afraid. THEY are coming to get you. And only WE can protect you from THEM. That’s the message the MAGA leaders are sending to their followers on a daily basis. It’s easier to manipulate the masses if you can make them feel fear. So naturally, they want people to believe that they are unsafe in their own homes and communities — that violent crime is surging. Or in the words of Former Guy, “skyrocketing out of control”.

Trouble is, the numbers don’t support that claim. Not even the numbers that he and others cite. So what do they do? They attack the numbers, of course. Or more accurately, the source of the numbers. Which means, for the most part, the FBI –and anyone who dares quote its statistics.

The FBI itself provided some fuel for this fire (by, ironically, striving for greater accuracy) when it released revised numbers for its 2022 report on crime in the U.S. , showing that its original report underestimated the frequency of incidents. This development came to my attention courtesy of an item by Media Matters covering the hyperventilation of Fox “News” over the revision, which, Fox averred, proved not only that the FBI was cooking the books, but that it had “rigged” the election for Kamala Harris — a nefarious plot carried out by (checks notes) revising its crime estimates upward just before an election.

And Fox wasn’t alone. Always in lockstep, the right-wing echo chamber dutifully and promptly repeated the story. And not just all over the U.S. Being presently in India, I get several Indian news sources popping up on my daily news feed. And guess what story got top billing the next day at Times Of India?

It’s clear that this is a meticulously seeded game of telephone, because the reiterations always used the same buzzwords, and quite often all of the same words, just reprinting the same screed. Just for fun, I even posed a query about the matter to AI, which, as I expected, simply regurgitated the same narrative with the same words. So it wasn’t at all hard to trace it all back to its source: Real Clear Investigations (affiliated with Real Clear Politics, a right-wing website thinly veiled as nonpartisan) and the piece’s author (drum roll please) John Lott. Hoo boy.

In case you’re not familiar with John J. Lott Jr. (Or is it Mary Rosh?), let’s just say that it’s supremely rich for him to accuse anyone else of tampering with evidence, since he’s built a cottage industry out of doing just that — primarily to promote the talking points of the gun culture (though unsurprisingly he’s also jumped on the lucrative bandwagons of election denial and climate science denial). At one point, when he was challenged to produce research to back up his claims, he responded that his computer files were erased when his hard drive crashed, and his paper notes were, um, somehow left behind when he moved. Doncha just hate it every time those two things happen in tandem?

It remains to be seen if he’s again going to claim that the dog, or Haitians, ate his homework here, but his little essay has a few problems. In the interest of space, let’s just look at a few of the most salient.

“Quietly”

That’s the word they all use, over and over and over. Quietly. The FBI made its changes quietly, quietly, quietlyyyyyyyyy. ( The New York Post cutely characterized it as a “stealth edit”.) It’s the Deep State. It’s a commie plot. It’s Jewish space lasers. Bwaaa-haaaa-haaaaa!!!

Well of course they did it quietly. How much fanfare does a government agency normally give to a post on its website? Did you expect them to announce it on a billboard, or place a commercial about it in the middle of MLB playoffs? You think this is Hunter Biden’s laptop or something?

Lott is proclaiming that obviously the FBI is rotten to the core because it didn’t have skywriters declare the correction and beg for forgiveness for being too human. Even more amusing, he’s slapping himself on the back for his cleverness in brilliantly ferreting out this top secret data — which the FBI itself had already made freely available to the public.

“Huge changes without explanation“

Lott’s piece includes the following passage:

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

Except there is an explanation, which the FBI has been rather transparent about. (See next section.) By the way, neither Moody nor Lott mentions it, but the “huge change” in 2021 was a revision downward — and it was significantly greater than the revision upward for 2022. Yet the FBI made that change , in 2023, just as “quietly”. Curiously, the MAGA crowd never uttered a peep about it. And by the most bizarre of coincidences, 2023 was not a presidential election year.

“Missing data”

That’s another phrase that’s a standard part of this talking point. And if it’s not a red herring, it’s at least a mackerel that’s very deep pink.

In one sense, it’s true that there were data missing from 2022. Because there always are. Every. Single. Year. The FBI relies on local law enforcement entities across the country to report their own figures, but it never gets 100 percent participation — usually it’s around 93 percent. But in 2021, the Bureau adopted a new reporting system, and in all the confusion (or just reluctance to try something unfamiliar), participation fell to 64 percent — at least timely participation. Local agencies still could submit after the report was published, and they did — hence the “huge changes”. The following year, the FBI began altering its procedure again, and now participation is back up to a normal level.

But in another sense, data were not missing, and never are. Because the FBI doesn’t just leave a big gaping hole for the localities that don’t report. Whatever else the Bureau people may be, they’re not amateurs. They extrapolate from the data they do have, and fill in the gaps with their best estimates. So adding new input won’t necessarily cause the crime rate to go up. Sometimes it will, as in 2022. Other times it will cause the crime rate to go down, as in 2021. There’s no reason to assume that the Bureau does this kind of thing deliberately, except that you’re the kind of person who assumes the Bureau does this kind of thing deliberately.

It’s especially misguided to claim, as Former Guy did, that the statistics were deceptive because they omitted some of the largest and most crime-infested cities, such as New York and Los Angeles. The trendy trope of “blue city crime” is mostly a mirage; and although L.A. is somewhat on the high-crime end, New York is consistently rated as one of the safest large cities in America. Omitting it, particularly since it’s the most populous city, certainly wouldn’t cause the crime rate to drop; if anything, it would have the opposite effect.

“Unreported crime”

This is another biggie — at least to the conspiracy theorists. For the rest of us, it’s a peeled balloon. Yes, there were indeed crimes that went unreported. There always are. Every. Single. Year. And nobody really knows just how many.

The Bureau Of Justice Statistics (BJS) makes a stab at finding out by conducting its National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) which, rather than relying on hard statistics, queries a representative sampling of the population about crimes they claim have been committed against them. And a significant portion of these alleged offenses are indeed unreported. But there are some caveats here.

For one thing, bear in mind that unreported also generally means unconfirmed. Which isn’t to say that all these incidents are just fabricated, but as we’ve seen with the Kleck survey of gun defense, self-reported episodes are subject to a tremendous amount of distortion. (The NCVS has presented its own version of gun defense claims, which totaled about 4 percent of the Kleck figure –and still about 100 times larger than anything that can be confirmed.) Relying on memory is always tricky. Some incidents that NCVS respondents relate don’t really qualify as crimes. Oh, and the NCVS figures cited by Former Guy and others actually apply to a span of more than one year. That can’t possibly be relevant, can it?

It’s not at all unusual for NCVS numbers (which are also “quietly” revised occasionally, with no media freakout) and FBI numbers to diverge considerably, though the divergence in 2022 was unusually wide — which just might indicate a bug in BJS machinery rather than FBI machinery. In any case, while they diverge from year to year, they tend to agree overall — to the effect that crime, and particularly violent crime, have been trending downward for years.

Here’s a graph of NCVS data for the past three decades.

And here’s a portion of the FBI tables for the past 18 years. (Yes, this is post-revision.)

That last column, bracketed in red, represents the number of violent crimes per 100,000 people. Three things to draw your attention to here. First, 13 of these 18 years had a drop in violent crime. Second, the rate over the entire span declined by more than 25 percent. And third, the year 2020 had a higher rate by far than any year of Biden’s presidency. (And that was a big jump from the previous year — while the NCVS, even with all its “unreported” crime, recorded a big dip for the same year!)

But the latter, contrary to popular spin, isn’t particularly important. Presidents have little to no influence on national crime — well, except for those who boost the number of crimes by committing dozens themselves. And vice presidents have far less influence — on crime, or anything else. But the MAGA gospel is that Kamala Harris personally opened the floodgates to let in millions of swarthy savages from down south, to sneak into your house and cut your throat, rape your sister, take your job, transgender your kids, barbecue your hamster, and help your potted ferns fill out ballots.

Yet it isn’t just that they want you to hate Kamala Harris (and every other Democrat who comes down the pike). They also want you to hate the FBI, at least until they can perform trans-species surgery on it. In a big irony (and there must always be a big irony with these people) they bolster their claim that the FBI is hopelessly corrupt and evil by bringing up J. Edgar Hoover — who was actually very much a kindred spirit. If Hoover were around today, he’d be Project 2025’s dream candidate to fill his own shoes.

It’s true, of course, that the FBI has its problems. But just because you can’t trust it 100 percent, does that mean you can’t trust it at all? If you don’t get your crime stats from the FBI, then from whom do you get them? Former Guy? Sean Hannity? Elon Musk? Tulsi Gabbard? Alex Jones?

MAGA propaganda is designed to erode all trust in all our institutions — government, education, science, entertainment, journalism, elections, everything — so they can all be more readily dismantled and rebuilt in the image of the Orange God. But more broadly, it’s designed to destroy trust in expertise in general — expertise on crime, science, medicine, everything. Because if the public doesn’t “trust the experts”, they are more susceptible to trusting the demagogues.