Political Memes

That's not the same as what you were saying before, and a pretty drastic moving of the goalposts in a way that's a total non sequitur, if you're trying to say Trump is NOT a drastic and catastrophic step in the wrong direction. But other people have already pointed that out.

I wanted to focus on the 100,000 cops a little bit, because I don't think we've touched on that issue before. It will surprise no one that you're picking out one individual element (maybe borne out of compromise, or maybe from very real conservative parts of Biden's thinking, of a piece with e.g. his support for Israel), and then pretending that that's the whole thing.

Here's the ACLU's statement about Biden's crime plan. Honestly, I'll just let it speak for itself:

The president’s plan proposes investments in two competing approaches to this goal.

The first is to hire more police officers and call for more criminalization and incarceration. For decades, this approach has failed to make us safer and it is alarmingly reminiscent of 1990s style policies that fueled mass incarceration. The second approach, however, is to significantly invest in community-based programs and services that have proven to prevent violent crime and can make America safer for everyone. This is the approach that we need to embrace in 2022 to create thriving communities.

Focusing in on the second approach, they say:

President Biden announced several measures that would put us on the right path. The plan includes investments in education, housing, and job training, and proposes lifting barriers to reentry for formerly incarcerated people. These measures would effectively promote stability and prevent violence. He also seeks to put safety in the hands of those best suited to address the acute problems created when societal failures leave people and communities behind: social workers, crisis intervention workers, and violence interrupters. By investing in alternatives to policing, including alternative responses to behavioral health calls, the president demonstrates that he understands the need to adopt preventive approaches to keep people and neighborhoods safe.

“However, in this moment of fear and concern, the president must not repeat yesterday’s mistakes today. He calls for hiring 100,000 additional state and local police officers – the same increase in officers as the 1994 crime bill.

... and so on. That's basically the gist.

I also never knew this before yesterday, but that's actually grossly misleading as far as the impacts of Biden's 1994 crime bill. He's definitely on the pro-police side, but saying as the ACLU does that:

While we are pleased with the president’s commitment to investing in communities, we strongly urge him not to repeat the grave errors of the 1990s — policies that exacerbated racial disparities, contributed to widespread police abuses, and created our current crisis of mass incarceration.

The Biden crime bill from 1994 came at the end of the crisis of mass incarceration, a couple years before previously skyrocketing incarceration rates leveled off. Here's a pretty comprehensive overview -- which includes some pointed and new-to-me criticism of other instances of bad crime legislation Biden was involved in back in the 80s and 90s -- which makes a pretty strong case that Biden's crime bill had nothing to do with the general semi-police-state that steadily took hold in the US during the years from 1980 to 2000. They show, for example, this graph:

... which doesn't exactly make it look like 1994 created our current crisis of mass incarceration.