Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, Sept. 5, 2025 “American Carnage -But Only in Blue States”

A Liberal Dose

“American Carnage -But Only in Blue States”

Troy D. Smith

Last October, on the first of two trips I took to the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina to deliver donated food supplies after the hurricane, one of my undergrad students volunteered to come along to help load and unload. This was, of course, a wonderful thing for him to do, and speaks highly to his character. We had about a four-hour drive each way, which gave us plenty of time for conversation. We talked about many things, and it was very enjoyable.

At one point, the topic of conversation turned to places he would like to visit, and New York City came up. He hesitated on that one, though, because (he said) he knew that the city was unbelievably violent, and that the murder rate was through the roof and getting worse every day. I asked him where he got his information, and he said it was all over the news. Of course, it was NOT all over the news -it was only all over CONSERVATIVE news outlets.

I told him that I lived in New York City in 1988 and 1989, and that back then it WAS a very dangerous place, much like what he was describing, and that when I was his age and living there I’d had about a half-a-dozen threatening and potentially violent encounters. However, I pointed out, my wife and I had recently spent a week there -so I could show her the neighborhoods where I lived and worked -and I had been amazed at how SAFE everything seemed. I did not feel endangered once the whole week, and 35+ years ago there had never been a single week when I had not.

“Well,” he said, “you must not have been in the right parts of the city.” I responded that I was in the exact same parts where I had felt so unsafe in the 1980s, and that the change was undeniable and incredible. I looked up the stats after our conversation- the last year I was there, 1989, there were 1,905 murders. That was the second-highest in the history of the city -the first highest was the following year, 1990, when it reached 2,245. Know how many there were in the past year? 375. One-fifth as many. Despite my personal, eyewitness experience, my student did not quite buy my assertion that the city was generally much less dangerous and I would feel perfectly safe living there now.

Another story. Last year I had a grant to do a crime statistics study, and was able to hire several of my students to work on it. At one point I overheard their conversation in the computer lab; one of them, who had identified himself as extremely conservative, was confused by the results they were finding. “These numbers must be wrong,” he said, “they’re way too low, everyone knows we have been in a huge crime wave the last few years.” “Where did you hear that?” his classmates asked, and he replied, “it’s been all over the news.” “No it hasn’t,” they said, and one of them added, “you should get better news sources.”

Another story. My wife and I are close friends with a couple who live in Los Angeles, and talk with them on the phone often. I would describe this couple as moderate, slightly right-of-center. The husband works in the entertainment industry and the wife is a police detective. A few months ago we called them while the protests were going on -at the point of our conversation, Trump had mobilized the National Guard, and within a week afterwards he had sent in the U.S. Marines. You may have heard one of his spokespeople last week saying he had rescued the city from complete destruction despite the mayor and governor trying to refuse that.

During our conversation with our friends that particular week, I asked if they felt safe. The response from these folks (that I am pretty certain voted three times for Trump) was that, if they hadn’t seen so many news items and video on conservative networks, they would never have even known anything was going on. The protests that triggered Trump’s response were in one small neighborhood. They were honestly flabbergasted that the military was being sent in.

You may have noticed a theme -I have. People who follow the president’s social media and/or watch conservative news outlets have a vastly misinformed idea of how dangerous the world around them is. They have a vision of, as Trump put it in his first inaugural address, “American carnage” which the rest of us don’t experience. This is managed by finding isolated incidents and amplifying them over and over, making it look like that is the norm -when the facts indicate differently.

President Trump followed up the military occupation of Los Angeles with the military occupation of Washington, D.C. He is now ramping up to do the same in Chicago, and has indicated Baltimore will be next. D.C., by the way, has their lowest crime rate in thirty years, and the crime rates in Chicago and Baltimore have been steadily falling. Of course, even one violent crime is unacceptable, especially if it involves you or a loved one -but the numbers do not support a need for practical martial law.

Know where the crime rates are much higher than in those cities? New Orleans. St. Louis. Memphis. Have you heard any threats to send the military to occupy those cities? Of course not -they are in red states. Trump and his supporters have convinced a good portion of the country that “American carnage” is unfolding in specifically BLUE cities and states, and so far every one of those cities has a Black mayor.

Gee, I wonder what that could all mean?

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE