Who needs evidence? Not the hosts of Fox News’ The Five. “Innocent people attacked on the street or dragged out of cars, beaten. Double-digit jumps in shootings and murders,” said Greg Gutfeld on Tuesday, in an impressive little monologue that attempted to link the excesses of cancel culture with the “mob justice” that ostensibly prevails in America’s streets. (You will also hear a lot about “cancel culture” this week at the RNC.) When the show’s designated Democrat, Juan Williams, cited statistics showing that the crime rate in America has been declining for decades, Gutfeld refused to back down. “You’re, like, saying, hey, I just noticed that the common cold is in decline, even though cancer and heart disease has jumped 400 percent,” he said. “Every liberal who downplays this should have the stones to walk through these neighborhoods when it’s dark.”

“Pray for Portland,” said co-host Jesse Watters later.

Pray for New York City too, the president’s hometown, which according to Fox News has all but devolved into a scene out of Death Wish 3. “Thanks to Democrats and BLM, New York City is looking like it did in the pre-Giuliani era, where even the most depraved criminal acts were met with a shrug,” said fill-in host Raymond Arroyo on the Aug. 13 episode of The Ingraham Angle. His guest, former NYPD commissioner and convicted felon Bernard Kerik, blamed New York’s “radical left-wing mayor” for the “riots that have devastated the city” and announced that “people are moving out of New York City because they’re scared to death.” Kerik cited no evidence for his claims. While gun violence has surged in New York this summer, a recent New York Times analysis found that “the state’s new bail law and the mass release of inmates from city jails in recent months because of the coronavirus outbreak played almost no role in the spike in shootings.”

A vote for @JoeBiden n @KamalaHarris is a vote 4 a socialist/communist America. It’s a vote for open borders and sanctuary cities,n a vote for mob rule and continued riots,arson, death and destruction.
Bring back @RudyGiuliani and @BernardKerik to NYC it’s time for bill to resign pic.twitter.com/Em0zCYUmtf

— Vincent Mancini (@Vincent22900587) August 16, 2020

Publicly stoking suburbanites’ fears of the city and the “thugs” therein has been one of Trump’s favorite tactics since at least 1989, when in the wake of the “Central Park jogger” case he placed reactionary newspaper advertisements saying “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY AND BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” and arguing that New Yorkers were experiencing “the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.” Thirty years later, Trump’s tactics haven’t changed.

And if you think New York is bad? Allow Fox News to tell you about Baltimore.

“Murders rising, violence spiraling out of control, community suffering—look at the city of Baltimore,” said Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Five years after the anti-police case with Freddie Gray riots, Baltimore keeps getting worse and worse, run by liberal Democrats for decades and decades.” Hannity then played a campaign ad by Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik, in which the candidate blamed Democratic policies for the boarded-up houses, “crumbling infrastructure,” and alleged blight in the neighborhood she was using as a backdrop.

The Klacik ad, which also deemed Baltimore one of the “top five most dangerous cities in America,” has been getting a lot of airtime on Fox, as has the candidate herself. Gutfeld also mentioned Klacik’s ad on the Tuesday episode of The Five. “She did a campaign ad for herself, just by walking through Baltimore. She just walked through Baltimore to show you the consequences of liberal rule,” he said. In a recent editorial, however, the Baltimore Sun called it “ludicrous and overly simple to blame the city’s ills on party affiliation” and noted that the ad was intended to cast Baltimore in “the role of Urban Horror and to scare people who have never been here, will never visit and likely will never realize that, overall, average household income in the 7^thDistrict is above the national average.”

But accuracy isn’t the point, as the Sun notes. “Ms. Klacik’s part is to be a political stalking horse, to at least blunt Black support for Democrats on behalf of Mr. Trump,” the editorial board wrote. And, sure enough, Klacik will speak during the first night of the RNC. “So, in other words, you’re going to offer a warning: If you want what happened to Baltimore to happen all across the country, elect Joe Biden, is that you’re gonna say?” Steve Doocy asked Klacik on Fox & Friends on Monday. (“Uh, pretty much, yeah, basically,” Klacik said.) She is scheduled to speak alongside such other law-and-order luminaries as Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who pointed guns at peaceful protesters during a march earlier this summer; and Andrew Pollack, whose daughter was killed in the Parkland school shooting two years ago.

Pollack recently tweeted that “@JoeBiden doesn’t care about your children. He wants criminals walking the same halls as them. He wants to take cops out of schools to leave them defenseless. @realDonaldTrump is the only thing standing in the way of stopping school shootings. Watch me on Fox & Friends.” I did. He told Pete Hegseth that “teachers and students would be a lot safer with a President Trump for another four years.”

Fox News hasn’t just been testing out these grim themes for the GOP. It’s been working them out with the president himself. “You see Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco. One thing they all have in common, Mr. President, is they have been run by liberal Democrats for decades,” Hannity told Trump during an Thursday interview on his program. “And the last time you were on this show, you said you’re begging them to help restore law and order. What’s the status?”

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“We could do it so quickly,” said Trump, going on to talk about violence in Portland and how cops across America have been hamstrung by Democratic diktat. “And you talk about suburbia. You know, we’re all saying about suburban women. The fact is, they’re going to really want to support me, because we’re for law and order. We’re for safety and security. And Biden is not.”

There’s the cloddish desperation of the strategy, summed up by its designer. Fear of the other, illustrated by ghoulish warnings of urban chaos, are about all the Trump campaign has to offer at this point. In a rational world, not even the lowest-information voters would find this case persuasive. After all, Trump and the Republicans are currently in powerand thus ought to be held accountable if the world has indeed gone to hell under their watch. But this is not a rational world. The GOP will depend on this strategy anyway: It’s worked before, after all. Lock your doors, Americans; you’re in for a bloody week.

• 2020 Campaign
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(责任编辑：行业动态)