Donald Trump - 1989

[noluck-boston.livejournal.com]

This ad was in reference to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case

Tia and I had a healthy back and forth on this. I felt it was a fail, due to the fact that he is advocating the death penalty, and the teens convicted were found to be wrongly so later. Tia - "at the time he did that, the NYC police force was pretty depleted, they had problems (the NYPD), and the city had a lot of crime issues....he WAS viewed as a 'good guy' in that situation"

So Its a wash. I will let you all decide.

Comments

[cuddyclothes.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEEEK

[rejectomorph]

There's more than luck for noluck_boston, who wins all the points.

There were two major causes for the rapid increase in crime beginning in the 1960s. One was demographic. A majority of crimes are committed by males between the ages of 16 and 35. The baby boom (1946-1964) greatly increased the percentage of the population that fell into that crime-prone demographic beginning around 1963. A considerable crime increase during that period was entirely predictable for anyone putting together those two facts.

But there is solid and ever-increasing evidence that a second, more obscure force was at work, and was even more influential: widespread lead poisoning, due to the common use of leaded gasoline (that link is to a brief article in the respectably capitalist Forbes Magazine where, ironically, you are apt to see an ad about Trump alongside the article. The article has a link to the much longer original article in Mother Jones which, I would hope, will be Trumpless.)

Even as a college dropout in the 1970s, I was aware of the demographic issue, and somewhat aware that the toxins we had been dumping into the environment throughout the 20th century were having deleterious effects on people, and those effects included many that were psychological and had significant sociological ramifications. But even I did not then know the extent to which leaded gasoline was a factor in the deterioration of the social fabric, so maybe I should give Trump a pass on that. But there's no way I can give him a pass on the demographic issue, as it was well known at the time.

Trump and his ilk used crime as a cudgel (one of many they wielded) to beat Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, and even Roosevelt's New Deal programs, which had long since proven their value to society, and all Progressive legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I can't tell you how many times I heard members of the SILENT MAJORITY (as they usually styled themselves while SHOUTING at everybody) claim that those people were lazy, shiftless criminals who didn't deserve civil rights. It was a deranged view, to be sure, and I have since developed a suspicion that many of the people who spouted such things were themselves victims of mental and emotional deterioration due to their exposure to environmental toxins such as lead. They had simply been turned into intellectual criminals instead of becoming ordinary street criminals. Many of them still are, and have gotten age-cranky to boot.

I don't believe that many of the mouthy (and typically very ignorant) silent majoritarian members of the public were aware of the influence of the demographic shift on crime, let alone the role of environmental deterioration in rising crime and other social phenomena— but many of the grandstanding demagogues who fed their outrage must have known about the demographic issue, and at least some of them must have known even more than I did about the environmental toxins that were at work, especially since some of them probably worked for (or had investments in) the companies that were spewing the stuff, and were being paid to not talk about it.

And so I can only see Trump's ad as yet another example of his shameless, self-serving opportunism. I consider it a truly massive Trump fail, just as leaded gasoline was a massive financial-industrial complex fail.