Article without paywall: https://archive.is/2025.09.08-113402/https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/09/08/mississippi-republican-states-police-cities/
Other red states have made similar moves in blue cities even as crime in those cities has decreased sharply from pandemic-era highs. And now President Donald Trump is borrowing from the playbook, sending federal agents and National Guard troops to patrol the nation’s capital and threatening to do the same elsewhere.
“It’s part of the narrative that these cities are incapable of administering public safety even though crime is on a downswing since the pandemic,” said Jorge Camacho, an associate research scholar in law at Yale Law School. “You still need a foil to blame for problems that are real and imagined. I expect to see that wielded for the foreseeable future.”
Fuck the wording of that title. That makes it sound like it’s justified.
Yeah I guess I could see that. I would say red states are using their blue cities as testing grounds for authoritarian takeovers.
It also normalizes the behavior. Places that seem “normal” go, “what’s the big deal? not much has changed.” Other places get used to the nazis and try to survive in their new shittier universe. Keep boiling the frog until everyone’s fucked. Headlines like that also help normalize. Real easy to find the media that is kowtowing based on the language they choose. This type of media should be banned by all.
It’s WaPo so not really surprising. It’s owned by Bezos now. It seems like the stories are often buried by the misleading headlines, so I’m not sure how much say the journalists are being given in the final headline, especially these days.
Sometimes the headline that appears in a news feed or even the publication’s main page will be completely different than what’s in the actual article once it’s opened.
To be clear though, the watered down language and headlines were definitely a problem that pre-existed Trump. Just saying I’m not sure how much control the journalists actually have now that oligarchs bought up all the news papers.
I still think it’s important to point this stuff out bc if we ever get back to a pre-Trump 2.0 baseline for free speech, we cannot go back to the completely “neutral” headlines and language when convenient while also pushing a big bad narrative against others that don’t deserve it bc it’s convenient for sponsors.
And that’s what the title should be. “Cracking down” implies there is something that needs cracking down on.