Explaining MAGA’s Crime Obsession

Summary

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Bulwark Takes – “Explaining MAGA’s Crime Obsession”

Date: September 8, 2025
Hosts: Sam Stein (B), JVL (C), and Contributor/A (A), D (D, possible brief appearance)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Bulwark Takes unpacks the current MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement’s fixation on crime, racial profiling, and the Trump administration’s fusion of immigration crackdowns and law-and-order messaging. Sam Stein and JVL dissect recent Supreme Court actions enabling racial profiling in immigration enforcement, comment on hypocrisy within right-wing media, and discuss how amplifying crime stories serves the administration’s political aims. Throughout, the hosts critically compare public perceptions with reality and argue that underlying many of these tactics is outright racism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Supreme Court and Racial Profiling

[00:01–06:08]

• Decision on ICE “roving deportation units” in LA: The Supreme Court lifted a hold, effectively greenlighting more aggressive ICE actions based on racial profiling.
  • Sam Stein paraphrases Brett Kavanaugh’s view:

    “If someone is Hispanic, speaking Spanish and hanging out at a Home Depot, it makes common sense that they might be more likely to be here illegally and therefore send ICE after them.” (00:21)

  • The Court’s order lacked a detailed explanation. Kavanaugh’s concurrence downplays harm to legal residents:

    “As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens...” (01:29)

• Real-world consequences: JVL (C) cites multiple news headlines about U.S. citizens wrongly detained, including a pregnant woman going into premature labor due to improper ICE detention (01:48–02:22).
  • Criticism of Kavanaugh’s view as disconnected from lived experiences—JVL:

    “It is simply not the case. That in practice, what Kavanaugh believes to be true is what is happening universally. And so, like, I don't even know what to—it's like he's living in an alternate universe.” (01:57)

• Burden on Hispanic Americans:
  • Sam notes the implication that Hispanic-looking citizens must always carry proof of citizenship to avoid wrongful detention—calling out the privilege and safety assumed by white male justices (02:22–03:44).

Memorable Quote

• JVL:

  “To not understand the problems associated with racial profiling is beyond me.” (03:22)

2. Contradictory Supreme Court Standards on Race

[03:44–05:09]

• Hypocrisy noted: JVL observes that while the Supreme Court bars universities from considering race in admissions, it now allows law enforcement to use race as probable cause for detention.

  • “Colleges can't use anything that they may intuit about a person's race or ethnicity to bestow admissions. But agents of the state who carry weapons and are authorized to use lethal force can detain people...” (04:17)

  • Suggests both partisanship and racism are at work on the Court.

• Trump’s wins at the Court: Stein and JVL discuss Trump’s near-total victory at the Supreme Court on issues from agency heads to immigration—most often via “shadow docket” decisions (05:09–05:58).

3. Crime as Political Pivot

[08:18–14:00]

• Administration merges anti-immigration and tough-on-crime postures—most recently in Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about Chicago and the Department of War (08:18–09:53).
  • JVL references a right-wing pundit’s flip-flopping (Derek Hunter), and how Trump’s followers saturate social media with crime stories to justify military force in cities.
• Mark Caputo’s Axios piece:
  • MAGA world “is pivoting hard into crime”—amplifying crime videos, especially those depicting people of color, while decrying supposed media indifference (09:53–10:37).

  • “Everything's just crime, crime, crime... videos upon videos.” (JVL, 09:53)

Memorable Quote

• JVL:

  “They amplify it and then they turn around and say, why aren’t you paying attention to it? … It is a pivot.” (10:18)

4. Strategic Purpose Behind “Crime Panic”

[10:37–14:00]

• Crime as justification for military deployment: JVL theorizes the Trump administration aims to use “crime” to rationalize deploying troops to Democratic-leaning cities during elections, thus suppressing turnout marginally—potentially enough to sway close races (10:37–11:11).
  • “If you Moneyball this, I bet you can find ways in which … manages to flip the House.” (11:11)
• Deflection from weak economy:
  • Crime panic provides a new crisis to outrank economic bad news—also creates scapegoats (“Democrat-enabled criminals”) for any hardship (11:11–12:13).
  • Discussion of familiar playbooks: Not just about immigrants (like prior “caravan” scares), but about crime-laden cities seen as Democrat strongholds (12:51).
• Trump’s fabricated anecdotes: Trump’s assertion that D.C. is now miraculously safe, illustrated through a friend’s restaurant outings, ridiculed as disconnected from everyday reality (13:12–13:38).

5. Perception vs. Reality — Crime Levels

[14:00–17:28]

• Rejecting the “crime is up” narrative:
  • JVL (and Stein) argue it’s misleading to talk about an epidemic of crime—crime rates, even in troubled cities, are a fraction of what they were in the 1990s.
    • “No, don't give in to that. That's absolute bullshit. Even American cities where things are relatively bad are still infinitely safer than they were in 1990.” (JVL, 15:27)
  • FBI statistics confirm continued declines from 1990 to 2023.
• Media framing:
  • Sensationalist coverage, both by partisan pundits and mainstream networks (“if it bleeds, it leads”), distorts public understanding of crime risk (17:28).
• Racial targeting in crime narratives:
  • MAGA-aligned social feeds overwhelmingly showcase Black perpetrators—or, in special cases, trans people—rarely white criminals.
    • JVL: “Look at all the crime videos they're showing. Count the number of ones where the perps are white… I'm telling you, it's zero.” (16:39–16:43)

Memorable Quotes

• JVL:

  “This is the other thing I want to say, just if you please anybody listening to this, go look at some MAGA feeds on Twitter… Look at all the crime videos they're showing. Count the number of ones where the perps are white. … it's zero.” (16:37–16:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|---------|-------| | 00:21 | B (Sam) | “If someone is Hispanic, speaking Spanish and hanging out at a Home Depot, it makes common sense that they might be more likely to be here illegally and therefore send ICE after them.” | | 01:57 | C (JVL) | “It is simply not the case. That in practice, what Kavanaugh believes to be true is what is happening universally. And so, like, I don't even know what to—it's like he's living in an alternate universe.” | | 03:22 | C (JVL) | “To not understand the problems associated with racial profiling is beyond me.” | | 04:17 | C (JVL) | “Colleges can't use anything that they may intuit about a person's race or ethnicity to bestow admissions. But agents of the state who carry weapons and are authorized to use lethal force can detain people...” | | 09:53 | C (JVL) | “Everything's just crime, crime, crime... videos upon videos.” | | 10:18 | B (Sam) | “They amplify it and then they turn around and say, why aren’t you paying attention to it? ... It is a pivot.” | | 15:27 | C (JVL) | “No, don't give in to that. That's absolute bullshit. Even American cities where things are relatively bad are still infinitely safer than they were in 1990.” | | 16:37–16:43 | C (JVL) | “Look at all the crime videos they're showing. Count the number of ones where the perps are white… I'm telling you, it's zero.” |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:01–06:08] Supreme Court, ICE, and Racial Profiling
• [08:18–10:37] MAGA Crime Panic and Social Media Amplification
• [10:37–14:00] Political Motives: Election Suppression and Economic Diversion
• [14:00–17:28] Perception, Reality, and Racism in Crime Narratives

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Tone and Language

The conversation is unapologetically direct, critical, and occasionally profane, especially in its frustration with both the administration and the Supreme Court’s decisions. Both Sam Stein and JVL dismiss right-wing rationalizations and address the racialized underpinnings of the current scare tactics in plain, forceful language.

JVL: “Give me a fucking break. … It's all just racism, Sam. Like, I, I honestly.…” (15:53–16:00)

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Summary

This episode delivers a pointed, fact-based, and reality-checking breakdown of how the MAGA movement’s latest crime obsession is less about public safety and more about political strategy, racial scapegoating, and diverting attention from the administration’s shortcomings. By reviewing Supreme Court decisions, media coverage, and the deliberate stoking of fear, the hosts argue the crime panic is both cynical and effective—and urge listeners not to fall for it.

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Transcript

[A]

Hey, guys, welcome back to the Bulwark.

[B]

I'm Sam Stein, managing editor here. My bud, jvl. We are here to talk about crime and racial profiling and Trump. There was a couple things that happened over the weekend and then today, and then, of course, you address it in the triad. But I want to start with today. The Supreme Court decides that they're going to lift a hold on these sort of roving deportation units that the administration have been dispatching to Los Angeles. And basically they did it by saying that it's totally cool to racially profile. Some of the quotes in there from Brett Kavanaugh are amounted to saying, hey, if someone is Hispanic, speaking Spanish and hanging out at a Home Depot, it makes common sense that they might be more likely to be here illegally and therefore send ICE after them. And he said, look, if you discover after the fact that they're not here legally, just let them go. To me, this is just sanctioning racial profiling and to a lot of other people too, frankly. How'd you read it?

[C]

Yeah. So this is a Fourth Amendment case. And the, the argument against is these are unreasonable searches and she's. And seizures. And these are being conducted without any probable cause. And it is important to understand the Supreme Court released this decision without any explanation.

[B]

Right.

[C]

It was just, yeah, no, they can do it. Brett Kavanaugh, I guess, really wanted to get on the record with it, which is a weird thing to.

[B]

He did not offer a concurrence.

[C]

Yeah, I want to read something from his concurrence. As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Just read you some headlines. U.S. citizen detained by ICE in LA says she wasn't given water for 24 hours. U.S. citizen says she was arrested and jailed by ICE in San Francisco. U.S. citizens legal residents detained during Southern California legal raids, filing claims against the government. Pregnant US Citizen arrested by ICE went into labor prematurely in California Claim says it is simply not the case. That in practice, what Kavanaugh believes to be true is what is happening universally. And so, like, I don't even know what to. It's like he's living in an alternate universe.

[B]

Well, you'd have to play it out this way. If you are Hispanic or look Hispanic and you live in Los Angeles and you go to Home Depot, but you are a US Citizen from now on, you'd have to Bring your papers with you. You have to, right? Bring your citizenship. Whatever provision you couldn't leave, let's say you forgot to do it at that time. And they round you up and you claim to them I am a US Citizen, but they don't believe you, you are, until somehow you can get a lawyer on the phone or figure out a way to get your citizenship authenticated in front of them. And even then, it's unclear how long that will take. And that act of detaining you, putting you in a detention center, forcing you to actually get a lawyer, there are damages that are associated with that act that I'm not just fiscal lawyers don't.

[C]

Do these things for free. Sam.

[B]

Yes, I know, it's crazy. And so now you're basically saying to people you have this burden that you have to carry around unless you are stapling your citizenship papers to you at all times. And I'm not trying to be like a Dadai liberal about this, but it does strike me that the white male Supreme Court justice is the one who did this. He has nothing to worry about. He's not going to go out and get to danger. You know, it's. So to not understand the problems associated with racial profiling is beyond me.

[C]

So there, I mean, that is one way to read this, is that this is an out of touch lawyer up in his ivory tower who simply doesn't understand the way in which law enforcement conducts itself. Because this isn't a case of laws being enforced, it's just a case of LEOs being rogue. Except that Kavanaugh and this court also said recently that it was not acceptable for universities to take race and ethnicity as one of the factors they consider in making admissions. So as far as I can tell, colleges can't use anything that they may intuit about a person's race or ethnicity to bestow admissions. But agents of the state who carry weapons and are authorized to use lethal force can detain people based on. I mean, I don't want to like, be one of these people who are like, it's all racism, but I think it's all racism.

[B]

There's a fair amount of it, too.

[C]

I just don't understand legitimately what is another way to read that?

[B]

There is not really. It's hard to read it another way. Uh, the only, actually, the only other way. And it is still racism, but the only way is that it's a highly politicized Supreme Court that will just do whatever.

[C]

Well, that's fair. Yeah, whatever. Whatever the Trump administration wants, right?

[B]

And I was thinking about this. The, the, I mean, because Trump has obviously suffered some setbacks on the lower court level, but there's really been only one real setback. And I don't even know if you can qualify that big a setback for him at the Supreme Court level. And that was the Abrego Garcia order early on. That was vague enough that they kind of skirted it for a little bit. But other than that, he's pretty much gotten everything he could want from the Supreme Court. And a lot of this has been done on the shadow docket like you're talking about. But they've allowed him to fire heads of independent agencies. They've basically sanctioned almost all of his immigration stuff. The big questions are what will happen appropriations.

[C]

But they've seen undo congressionally created offices like usaid, which is again, an insane thing. It takes an act of Congress to create these things, but the President can unilaterally destroy them. What?

[B]

And so he's basically, basically been given that. That might, I guess, substantiate what the whole like, well, they'll just do what Trump wants and to do argument. But I do think race is obviously coming here.

[A]

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[B]

I actually want to shift to crime as an issue because this is, you know, I think the administration is merging these two things. Anti immigration initiatives and crime crackdowns. And that's kind of coming to a head in Chicago where over the weekend you had that napalm tweet that Trump put out. Or not a tweet, I believe, whatever, who the fuck cares?

[A]

I love to try it today because.

[B]

It got at something that's like bothering me. Why don't you tell about Derek Hunter, Saka and just the contradictions and lack of outrage from Derek Hunter and how that would launch the triad here.

[C]

Yeah. So there's this, this mouth breather named Derek Hunter. And back during the election campaign, he wrote an op ed for the Hill in which he was like, oh, Kamala Harris is lying to you about Trump sending the military after U.S. citizens. And it turns out, yeah, Trump, Trump sent the military after U.S. citizens. And he did it in Los Angeles. He has done it in D.C. he over the weekend threatened to do it in Chicago. And again saying Chicago is about to see why it's called the Department of War. Not saying, like the criminal underworld in Chicago. He's not saying the Moroni family. Right. Like just, yeah, we're going to make war against the, the US this, this great American city. Anyway, this seems like kind of a thing that maybe if I were Derek Hunter, I would be like in unbelievable shame over. But in fact, he has spent the last 48 hours doing like dozens upon dozens of tweets about crime. And our old buddy Mark Caputo, formerly the Bulwark now at Axios, had a big story about this today, where this is how MAGA and Trump is pivoting. They are pivoting hard into crime. And you are. I mean, you could see it in real time today by going to Twitter and looking at feeds like this guy, Derek Hunters and Charlie Horses. Everything's just crime, crime, crime, videos upon videos and demands of how. How dare they. Right. I'm sure you've seen this today, right?

[B]

No, it's the Charlotte video that they've been push, pushing, and it's horrible. Like, obviously, individual crime like that. And even more than individual, you know, if you have any collective issues of crime in a community, it's horrible. But what they do is they amplify it and then they turn around and say, why aren't you paying attention to it? Why aren't you? Why are you ignoring. Why does it make you mean ignoring it? So it is a pivot.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So this serves a few purposes for, for the administration. The first is which crime becomes a pretext to continue deployments of the military. Right. And that is my belief. Maybe this is wrong. My theory is that all of that stuff, the military is really aimed at softening the ground for November of 2026, when they are going to want to deploy military to high turnout, overwhelmingly Democratic areas, and attempt to shave, like, 300ths of a point off of turnout.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Right. Which in close elections, if you do it pretty smartly. Right. If you, if you Moneyball this, I bet you can find ways in which, you know, 300 of the percentage point here and there, like, manages to flip the House. And they know their plan for. For very thin margins. But the other thing it lets you do is right now, their big weakness is the economy. The economy is, like, really, things are not good. We are heading towards a recession. This allows the administration to posit that there is another crisis even more important than whatever economic bad news there is, and that's crime. And it even allows him. And this is funny because, you know, Trump will never admit that there's an economic crisis. I don't think, like, he'll just insist that everything's great even while we're in recession. But if he decides he does want to give a little ground on that, like, he has to, he can do it and then blame crime for it. He can say it's because of these criminals have stabbed us in the back and because of all the Democrats who have enabled them and who are on the side of the criminals. That's why right here, blah blah, blah.

[B]

Well, he can do that. He can also and he's done so far blame immigration obviously. Right. Like all the jobs losses they've said is just because we're kicking out the illegal immigrants. And you know, third line is that native born Americans are seeing job growth and so there's a duality to it. I guess I'm kind of curious because I'm trying to wreck my head about this in 2018, was that the caravan election where they warned about the caravans coming? I'm trying to remember.

[C]

I think it was. I can be wrong because I feel like they were all caravan elections for, for a stretch there.

[B]

The o care around election but I, they do this playbook. I think what's different about this is that it's not explicitly about immigrants.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But it's about, it's about cities that are become haven for crimes. I was watching Trump today speak about the D.C. situation at the prayer breakfast where everyone sees at this morning, it's like just man's on a different planet. He's like, I have a, you know, I have an anonymous friend who finally, after four years of never going out to eat at a restaurant in D.C. went out four times in a week and a half. So come on.

[D]

And he said, I haven't gone out in four years for dinner with my wife. The restaurants were all closing because people were afraid even if they're in the restaurant, it didn't matter, they were held up. You know, guys would walk in with guns into a restaurant and that's over, it's not happening, it's now safe. And this man said, I've gone out to dinner in the last week and a half, four times.

[C]

That's, that's helpful because D.C. restaurants are suffering. So it's good for his friend for helping prop up the local economy.

[B]

But like I do think there are people who, obviously there are people who believe that, you know, dc, Chicago, New York City are just, you know, hellholes, that if you left your house you would be stabbed. So I do think this is a message not obviously to the cities, it's to the people who are outside the cities who look at, you know, who have this perception of city life that is totally amorphous from reality.

[C]

Yeah, I, I want to do a little rant here. Is it okay? Can I just rant at you for a minute? So it drives me crazy that there are a lot of very well meaning people who hate Donald Trump who will look at this and will begin with, well, of course, we do have a crime problem.

[B]

I hate that too, actually.

[C]

I just reject this framing completely. I rejected root and branch because saying, like, there's a crime, that crime is bad is like saying that water is wet. All crime is bad. But guess what? There is always crime, always and forever. You cannot judge crime against some platonic ideal of, well, if we were Singapore, then maybe we'd only have two acts of graffiti every year, and there would be no murders. That's not reality.

[B]

The chart you put in your piece is unbelievable. I'm looking at it right now from the FBI, the report of violent crime rate in the United States from 1990 to 2023. Now, you had the air pointing to the rate in 2020, but I'm looking back at 92, 93, and, like, people don't remember. Like, that actually was a time when you would go into New York City and be, like, legitimately be scared. Times Square was just peep shows and, you know, vagrants.

[C]

The era of Bernie Getz. Right. And the means that the Charles Bronson movies and the. The Clint Eastwood vigilante movies.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But my point is that I. I, no serious person should judge crime in any way other than relatively. Like it has to be judged relative to recent American history and context. And to. To give in to the framing of, well, crime is a problem. No, don't give in to that. That's absolute bullshit. Even American cities where things are relatively bad are still infinitely safer than they were in 1990. And guess what? Your parents and my parents went around Chicago and New York all the time in the 90s, and they were fine, too. Like, it, you know, this is. Things are okay, and this weirdness of, like, you know, hey, we're not afraid of polio. We're not gonna get our kids vaccinated, but I don't want to set foot in the Bronx. Give me a fucking break. It's. It's all just racism, Sam. Like, I, I honestly. And this is the other thing I want to say, just if you please anybody listening to this, go look at some MAGA feeds on Twitter or on YouTube. Do that over the next 24 hours. Look at all the crime videos they're showing. Count the number of ones where the perps are white.

[B]

Yeah, it's not. You won't see any.

[C]

Because I'm telling you, it's zero.

[B]

Zero. It's zero.

[C]

Unless. Unless there's a person who commits, like, assault or murder, who's trans, in which case they can finger them. No, but Otherwise it is this weird, it's this total racialist vision. That guy, Derek Hunter, he, like, he's even posting, you know, pictures of assaults and, and, you know, videos of street fights from France because it's like anything to find places where there are black people hitting other people.

[B]

Remember the whole reason knockout game bad that happened. Yeah. And that would, to me stood out as like the, the epitome of what happens here, which is legitimately horrifying thing, but like, maybe, you know, a handful of people were affected by it and yet it consumed Fox News for weeks upon end. I guess it makes good tv, makes good politics for them too.

[C]

That can. I said the other, the other thing is so weird about this, Sam, is that the, this idea that like the media is covering up crime. We are in like year 45 of if it bleeds, it leaves, which is, you know, just crumb all the time. Any local newscast anywhere in America. And at 11 o', clock, it doesn't matter if they, if somebody discovered cold fusion that day, they're going to lead with whatever murder happened, you know, in the nearest city. Like, this is.

[A]

No, no, it's all relative.

[B]

It's like, you know, what is the number of people who die from car accidents every year? Exponentially more than, you know, what you get in the inner city crime spree. So it's like, yeah, the priorities, priorities are wrong, the coverage is wrong, but it's where we are and Trump's playing it. Jivia, always, always uplifting to talk to you. Yeah, appreciate it, buddy.

[C]

Yeah, it's, it's great.

[B]

Subscribe to this video, guys. Click like, we appreciate that too. Talk to you later.