'The Five' reacts to poll showing majority of US 'pessimistic' about country's direction
'The Five' discusses Democrats' talking points surrounding police
The panel on "The Five" sounded off Monday after another deadly weekend in the nation's major liberal cities.
Dozens were shot and some killed in Chicago, gunfire erupted in a popular Washington nightlife area, and a mugger beat an elderly man senseless in New York City.
In the latter case, the NYPD released the video of a mugger on a Citibike assaulting a 68-year-old man in New Lots, Brooklyn, stealing his valuables and leaving him wounded on the ground. The Detectives union blamed the city and state governments' for "failed" soft-on-crime laws that led up to the incident.
Host Greg Gutfeld pointed to the fact that much of the "defund the police" activism that has led to such chronic criminality is driven mostly by "White leftists" in groups like Antifa calling for defunding police on behalf of the minority community, while there have been reports of Black community leaders calling for more policing. One such leader in Brooklyn recently accused Mayor Bill de Blasio of "living in a fantasy world" on that account.
"[A]ctivists out there [are] talking about defunding more than anybody – and they don't have to live with the consequences," he said.
Host Dagen McDowell agreed, calling the dynamic another example of "soft bigotry."
"The soft bigotry that people on the left ignored this for the last year-and-a-half when it was hurting communities throughout major cities, particularly Black and Latino communities," she said, invoking a term coined in 2000 by President George W. Bush, denouncing the "low expectations" afforded students from impoverished or minority communities.
"But only when it arrives at their doorstep like the shooting down in D.C. did they start giving a flying damn about it," she added, referencing a shooting on 14th Street NW following which CNN reporter Jim Acosta – who had been dining in the area – notably took time to name-drop the posh French restaurant he was at when the shooting occurred.
McDowell went on to comment that the public "pessimism" around public safety concerns is amplified by Democratic politicians like Gov. Gavin Newsom claiming things that oppose the "reality" that everyday Americans are seeing. Newsom, she said, claimed crime in California is down in the long-term, while San Francisco and elsewhere are being hit with repeated incidents of theft and other crimes.
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President Biden, she noted, has claimed Democrats never said they wanted to "defund police" – despite Democratic lawmakers like Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and others championing that cause.
In addition, top Biden adviser Cedric Richmond, a former Democratic congressman from New Orleans, was fact-checked when he claimed to Fox News that congressional Republicans are the ones who have sought to defund law enforcement.
"The left: they're compulsively dishonest and also irretrievably stupid that they can't see what is in the face of every American," McDowell concluded.
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