Democrats Blame Crime On Guns, Not Criminals In Manhattan House Judiciary Hearing

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee spent Monday’s Manhattan field hearing blaming guns, not people, for crime.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee spent Monday’s Manhattan field hearing blaming guns, not the criminals behind them, for the nation’s crime epidemic.

The committee held a field hearing in Manhattan as New York City deteriorates from an American centerpiece of capital ingenuity into a treacherous urban jungle where far-left prosecutors allow criminals to control the streets.

“Today’s hearing is about the administration of justice, and keeping communities safe, something that has always been a central focus of the House Judiciary Committee,” opened House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan.

The Ohio Republican went on to condemn Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for prioritizing political witch hunts over street safety. Bragg’s office unsealed the first indictment of a former president this month with 34 charges against Donald Trump related to 2016 hush-money payments to a porn actress.

“Rather than enforcing the law, the [Manhattan] DA is using his office to do the bidding of left-wing campaign funders,” Jordan said, outlining the crime statistics that plague Bragg’s New York City constituents. Major crime spiked 22 percent under Bragg’s first year in office, including a 30 percent rise in subway crime, according to the New York Times. The paper reported Saturday that less than 330 people were responsible for almost a third of all shoplifting arrests last year.

Democrats countered by scapegoating guns and declared the hearing politically motivated, given the Manhattan DA’s prosecution of the former president.

“It is shameful that the Republicans of this committee would use the pretext of violent crime to play tourist in New York and bully the district attorney,” said New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the Democrats’ ranking member. “It is particularly disgraceful that they would use this pretext after doing nothing, nothing to stop gun the gun violence that terrorizes our nation.”

Nadler called on lawmakers to “stem the iron pipeline” in reference to “the illicit flow of illegal firearms from states that do less to protect their citizens to New York and elsewhere.” Nadler also argued to move the committee’s hearing to Jordan’s home state of Ohio with claims that red states, not blue states, are at the center of the nation’s crime wave. Local officials responsible for the nation’s unsafe streets, however, are Democrats.

Nearly every Democrat on the committee followed suit and went after guns when it was their turn for questioning to a panel of witnesses victimized by criminals who used knives to rob and kill.

Among the witnesses who testified include Madeline Brame, whose veteran son was fatally stabbed nine times in 2018 and Jose Alba, a bodega owner whom Bragg charged with second-degree murder after fending off a violent robber in self-defense. Alba was stabbed by the assailant’s alleged girlfriend as he was forced to defend himself.

Brame told lawmakers Bragg’s office dismissed her pleas to prosecute those responsible for the murder of her son and treated her like “garbage.” Alba, whose charges were ultimately dropped amid public outrage, re-told the story of Bragg sending the bodega owner to Riker’s Island for nearly a week after the incident.

“I still don’t know why I was charged with murder,” Alba said, speaking through an interpreter. “Even though the charges were dropped, they should not have been brought against me to begin with. I’m now traumatized from the incident. I am not working because I am terrified for my life that someone in a gang will come after me for revenge.”

New York Democrat Congressman Daniel Goodman called the proceedings a “charade” to protect Trump. The remark provoked an interruption from Brame.

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Brame said. “This is why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party.”

New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who chairs the House Republican Conference, highlighted how it’s Democrats who obsessed over Trump at the hearing on crime.

“In addition to House Democrats belittling the victims here today, Democrats have politicized this hearing, mentioning Donald Trump 38 times. That number for Republicans is zero,” she said.

Several Democrats at Monday’s hearings stood on graves of children gunned down in schools that lacked proper security to demand stricter gun control.

“When Senate Republicans were finally motivated to action by the horrific slaughter of babies in Uvalde, did my Republican colleagues here join? No, not a single one of them voted for the bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” said Pennsylvania Congresswoman Madeleine Dean.

Bary Borgen, whose son was beaten in Times Square two years ago in an anti-Semitic attack, responded to the congresswoman by asking the obvious.

“Why isn’t anybody blaming the shooter?” Borgen said. “You’re blaming guns, no one blames the shooter.”

Borgen also blasted Nadler at the hearing for being dismissive of demands that his son’s perpetrators be given a fair sentence.

“You’re a Jewish New Yorker,” Borgen said to Nadler. “I called your office numerous times. I called Mr. Schumer’s office, another Jewish New Yorker, numerous times.”

“No one called us back,” Borgen added. “Neither one of you came out with a statement on my son’s incident, okay? You’re a Jewish New Yorker. You have Jewish roots here.”

Runaway crime in New York has proven to be a key liability for the state’s Democrat lawmakers. Republicans flipped four congressional districts in New York where crime was the prime issue, including a seat held by the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Sean Patrick Maloney, during last fall’s midterms in a lackluster year.

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

"I’ve come to believe he [Bill Klinton] needs a certain level of violence in this country. He’s willing to accept a certain level of killing to further his political agenda. And the vice president too. I mean, how much can you explain this dishonesty we get out of the administration?"