We just crossed 2 million friends on YouTube. When I started uploading every Tuesday back in June of 2023, there were just 10,000 of us here. Now two years later, this community has grown beyond anything I could have dreamed. What’s made this whole thing special isn’t the numbers, it’s the people. From coming out to live shows, to stopping me on the street to share what a set meant to you, to showing up every single Tuesday night in the live chat you’ve turned stand up into something bigger than the stage. This milestone also reminds me what consistency in creativity and artistry can do. Upload after upload, week after week, it’s been about showing up and trusting that growth comes from staying true to the work and to the people you’re making it for. Next week I’ll be hosting @TheDailyShow Tuesday through Thursday, and to get to share that with you all feels like another step in this same journey. None of it happens without this community. From 10k to 2 million thank you for making this possible, and for growing this community together💐 —Josh
there are people who find it in order to share it with people who need it. There is a fine video in this post, and a link to another blog that is oh-so-nice; I saw great news about bottle-nose porpoises, and even a headline for a story in the US. Please care for your health, and let yourself see there are good things happening. Some of them, readers can support. 💖
New preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows a sharp drop in violent crime in the first half of the year — more than 25% in some communities — as the COVID-era crime wave recedes.
Why it matters: The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.
It also gives Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor in San Francisco and California attorney general, a potent defense against attacks from the right on crime.
By the numbers: An Axios analysis of data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found an overall 6% decline in violent crime among 69 cities during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.
54 of the 69 major cities in the report saw drops in violent crime — defined as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — in the first half of 2024, according to the Axios review.
Columbus, Ohio, experienced the largest percentage decline in violent crime in the nation, with a massive 41% drop so far in 2024. Omaha, Nebraska, was second with a 30% decrease.
Miami and Washington, D.C., so far, have seen 29% declines in violent crime.
Austin, Texas, saw a 28% drop, followed by New Orleans with a 26% decrease. Both cities have been under fire for rising crime rates in recent years.
The intrigue: The Axios review also found that the number of homicides in the 69 reported cities fell by more than 17% during the first half of 2024 compared to the last period last year.
Boston experienced a dramatic 78% drop in homicides.
Philadelphia was among others that saw a big fall in homicides, with a 42% decrease in 2024.
Between the lines: The Major Cities Chiefs Association’s preliminary data did not include New York City — the nation’s largest city — since it did not submit violent crime numbers to the organization for the first half of 2024.
Data from New York City, which is released on its own website, couldn’t be compared to other cities in this report.
The NYPD’s communications team — seeking to shape discourse around crime in New York — has taken a substantially more aggressive stance with politicians, the media and members of the public this year.
State of play: President Biden immediately seized on the new preliminary violent crime numbers showing a decline to tout the Our American Rescue Plan’s assistance to police and gun violence legislation.
“Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office,” Biden said in a statement.
“I will continue to urge Congress to fund 100,000 additional police officers and crime prevention and community violence intervention programs, and make commonsense gun safety reforms such as a ban on assault weapons.”
The other side: Trump has repeatedly posted misleading claims on social media that Harris has helped freepeople the Trump campaign described as dangerous criminals, according to the Washington Post.
“Harris is a pro-criminal extremist,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Post.
Trump also has falsely claimed that many migrants who have or are trying to cross the border are coming from mental institutions and will commit violent crimes in large numbers.
Reality check: An Axios review of crime data along the U.S.-Mexico border found that those cities have some of the nation’s lowest violent crime rates.
The bottom line: Facts and data about crime are important, but history shows political campaigns can ignore the facts to exploit people’s fears about crime to change the narrative.
"New preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows a sharp drop in violent crime in the first half of the year — more than 25% in some communities — as the COVID-era crime wave recedes." https://t.co/BMjVxot8FU
Happy Monday all. I had a hard time writing this morning. So much has happened since I last wrote to you on Saturday. Where to begin? We should all be grateful the shooter missed, and that Donald Trump is safe and unharmed. Democracies resolve differences at the ballot box and not with bullets. I have no idea how the shooting will impact this election, or what happens next. Polls conducted last week found the election close and competitive, with neither side having a clear advantage. Today Biden is at 270 Electoral College votes in the 538 forecast despite lingering and legitimate concerns about his candidacy. As I said in my video overview of the election from late last week we can and should win this election, but we need to stay together and not give into fear, factionalism or red wavy Trump has superpowers thinking.
So let’s start today with this reminder:
In the last few months we’ve gotten repeated and powerful confirmations of the success of the Biden Presidency – inflation *fell* last month and is running at the Fed’s target rate over the past six months, crime and murder rates are way down, gas prices are down, the flow to the border is down. We’ve had the strongest economic recovery of any advanced economy in the world, the best job market since the 1960s, the lowest uninsured rate in American history, the deficit is trillions less, the Dow has broken 40,000 and all three indices continue to hover in record territory. Domestic oil, gas and renewable production continue to be at all time highs leaving America more energy independent than it has been in decades. The Wall Street Journal has called the American economy the “envy of the world,” and the Economist recently wrote about the unprecedented start up boom America is experiencing right now. Biden’s big three investment bills have dramatically accelerated the energy transition necessary to combat climate change and will be creating opportunities and jobs for our workers for decades to come. The President has reinvigorated the Western alliance, been an historic champion of democracy and freedom, and campaigned to help successfully defeat the fascists in recent European and French elections.
Joe Biden promised to make things better for all of us, to get us successfully to the other side of COVID. And he has. He has been a very successful President for America and virtually everything you will hear this week at the GOP convention about the Biden Presidency will be lies.Subscribe
Here’s Governor Josh Shapiro this weekend celebrating the life of Corey Camperatore who was killed at the Trump rally on Saturday: (video on the page)
Here’s a passage from David Frum’s powerful new essay in The Atlantic this morning (gift link):
When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.
After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”
Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.
Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.
It is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.
Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.
We enter the GOP’s Convention week with a few things still being true:
Trump is a rapist, fraudster, traitor, felon and the ugliest and most dangerous political figure in our history
And this is what his fascist party wants to do if back in power:
They want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. Americans to lose even more rights and freedoms. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist’s baby to term, and for more women to die on operating room tables. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Huge new tariffs which raise prices on everything, and wreck the global economy which has made us prosperous. Big new tax cuts for their wealthiest donors and less for everyone else.. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time.
Matt Carriker of Demolition Ranch
The yound man who shot at Donald Trump on Saturday was a registered Republican wearing a Demolition Ranch t-shirt. A central reason he was successful at getting his shots off is that, unlike almost every other nation in the world, here in the US a 20 year old can legally carry a high-powered rifle in public within several hundred feet of a Presidential candidate and there is nothing law enforcement can do until he fires his weapon. Far right ideologies made Saturday’s shooting possible, and easy enough even a kid could do it. Violence is their goal, their aspiration, as is the ending of “law and order” and democracy itself. And here we are at a remarkably dangerous and consequential moment in our history.
Scottie's Playtime 