Jay Ashcroft flopped when faced with the most dreaded predicament amongst grandstanding blowhards: a follow-up question
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s attempt to justify his ludicrous threat to have President Joe Biden removed from the state’s electoral ballot spiraled into chaos over the most basic of questions: “How so?”
During a Monday interview with CNN’s Boris Sanchez, the Republican was asked how he justified his threats to have Biden removed from the state’s ballot in retaliation for recent attempts to remove Trump from state ballots on grounds that his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election constitute insurrection. The constitutionality of such a removal will soon be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
“What would then be your justification for removing Joe Biden from the ballot in Missouri. Has he engaged in your mind in some kind of insurrection?” Sanchez asked.
“There have been allegations that he’s engaged in insurrection,” Ashcroft replied. He was then met with the most dreaded predicament amongst grandstanding blowhards: a follow-up question.
“How so?” Sanchez asked, prompting Ashcroft to demand that Sanchez stop interrupting him. “You can’t say something like that and not back it up,” Sanchez countered.
“You interrupted me before I could back it up,” a flustered Ashcroft complained. “Are you scared of the truth?”
Finally, something I can speak to, crime!
Most large cities follow the trend where the city center is higher crime than the surrounding areas, because crime is strongly correlated with population density and poverty. St. Louis crime follows the exact same trend.
However, in other places the city center + surrounding areas are considered to be one political entity, the higher crime stats in the city center are “diluted” by the lower crime stats in the surrounding area.
In St. Louis, the city is a distinct political entity from the county. As a result, the amount of “dilution” is much less than in other areas, leading to St. Louis City having an abnormally high crime rate per capita, and St. Louis County having an abnormally low crime rate per capita. If you combine the City + County crime stats, you get a picture that looks very much like all the other rust belt cities (Philly included).
There are other factors as well. For example- St. Louis City is not a residential city- very few people actually live downtown compared to its size, and there is much less night life and nighttime activity compared to other cities of our size. In the 2020 census, just 5400 people lived in the “Downtown neighborhood.” This is a commuter area that might have 200,000-300,000 people moving through it on a daily basis. When you look at the crime stats for Downtown on a per-capita basis, they’re computed against a population size of 5,400, even though there are 50 times that many people using the area. If Busch Stadium sells out a game they seat 60,000 people- more than 15 times greater than the recorded permanent population of the area. All these effects are true for the larger St. Louis City crime stats as well. The population of the city is only 300,000 or so, but there are 200,000 people or more that commute to the city every day.
And every city is different, criminologists and the FBI consistently and adamantly say that crime stat comparisons across different locations are not meaningful. Despite that, people love to compare crime stats and find out what city is most dangerous or the homicide capitol because they can’t stop themselves.