REVERSE DEATH WISH STILL LIBERALS' FAULT!

Remember when Bill de Blasio, promising to stop stop-and-frisk, was elected Mayor of New York in 2013, and all the wingnuts were insisting the City would suffer a 70s crime wave as a result? (Which I hoped they were right about, because then maybe I could afford to move back.)

At City Journal Bob McManus raved about Bernie Goetz and Sonny Carson and murmured with a flashlight under his chins, "History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it whispers warnings. The wise will pay heed." "Mayor Bill de Blasio’s radical dreams are leading straight to chaos," moaned his colleague Myron Magnet.

When the cops were mad at de Blasio in 2014, fedora clown Jazz Shaw called for de Blasio to resign, claiming he had "open[ed] the door to anarchy." "Everyone loves a little nostalgia," said Susan L.M. Goldberg. "It's just too bad for New York that de Blasio favors the era of Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon. Still thinking of watching the ball drop this New Year's Eve? Join the rest of us celebrating from the safety of our own homes."

And there were endless "Welcome to de Blasio's New York" fart-bubbles from assholes like John Podhoretz, and ooga-boogity one-liners like "DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK LOOKING MORE AND MORE LIKE TAXI DRIVER" from gomers and hayseeds.

Well, here it is almost 2018, de Blasio has been re-elected, and crime in the Apple is the lowest it's been since the 1950s. (The numbers were going down throughout de Blasio's tenure -- which you could tell because reporters started talking about how stop-and-frisk actually stopped before he became mayor, something you would never have heard had crime gone up.)

With their doomsday scenario in ruins, what's the play for lawn-order conservatives now? Fox News yesterday:

Does Trump deserve credit for drop in violent crime?

Ha ha, of course. But for the "intellectual" take, let us attend the first City Journal hack out of the bunker, Heather Mac Donald:

Cop critics who assiduously ignored the 20 percent increase in the national homicide rate over the previous two years have suddenly become enthusiastic purveyors of crime statistics.

Back when you libtards were made out of straw and called I.M. A. Stupid Libtard, you didn't like statistics! Well, Mac Donald has some stats for you -- New York's safer because it has fewer black people!

New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps...

And by "drug dealers and pimps," Mac Donald means African-Americans (and she's shockingly up front about it):

The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent. Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks...

A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker...

Yeah yeah, Racist Aunt, except in 1980, at the height of Death Wish Woo-hoo, black people made up 25% of the City’s population and today, it’s… also 25%. So, WTF? I guess maybe she means the shooty-stabby blacks all moved to neighborhoods where they don't have fancy restaurants. Anyway forget that, because Mac Donald rejoices that fewer cops are getting shot, which she imagines must make "libertarians and the anti-cop Left" mad, and for which of course she can't possibly credit the Mayor:

It is too soon to know definitively if the animus toward officers has fallen and if any such fall is behind the welcome drop in officer slayings. But without question, there has been a sea change in rhetoric and policy from the White House. Trump and Sessions do not take every opportunity to accuse the cops of systemic and lethal bias — yet when the facts warrant, the Sessions Justice Department has vigorously prosecuted and denounced cops who violate their oath of office. Sessions and Trump have repeatedly voiced their support for law enforcement, without coupling that support with a denunciation of phantom police racism.

So the intellectual wingnut perspective is essential Fox News': All good things flow from Il Douche! Well, why wouldn't they: Their base of Godly Country Folk and Righteous Suburbanites despises New York anyway, and are only interested in it as a symbol of the foul consequences of Other-loving. When stories like the New York crime drop make it apparent that in the Big Wicked Cities people of different races and creeds can actually live close together in relative harmony and comfort, they may become confused, and led to wonder whether there's something wrong with their own way of life, in which they can't be comfortable unless insulated from their fellow citizens by miles of waste space, opioids, and guns. That's where the MAGA fantasies come in most handy, assuring them that any way of life they weren't born into has to be wrong, despite the evidence.