There’s really nothing a politician desires more than an uncritical propaganda platform. Such platforms allow them to say incoherent and factless things without fear of pushback.
Case in point was Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s recent appearance on the “Real America with Dan Ball” show on the One America News Network.
“Chad, nice to see you,” Ball said in introduction. “You are a law and order cop. Matter of fact, I know that you have um cleaned up the old county I used to live in, Riverside. Thank you for that, sir.”
Ball then teed up Bianco to riff on crime, at which point Bianco explained that law enforcement has been held back and so he’s grateful for President Donald Trump to do something about it.
“And so the president is stepping up and going after these groups that are terrorizing our streets,” he said. “Antifa has been doing this for years. We have known it. We’ve been complaining about it. We have been arresting them and now finally they are being called what they truly are and that’s a domestic terrorist organization and they are being paid for by the Democrat Party, we know that.”
There’s a lot to unpack in all of this. Up at the top, it has to be pointed out that, contrary to Bianco’s tough-on-crime persona, he’s been really bad at actually fighting crime.
A report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that his sheriff’s department “ranks dead last in solving crime” in the state despite having higher per-resident funding than the average county sheriff’s department.
“By Bianco’s own numbers, violent crime rates rose by an alarming 18% in his jurisdiction during his six years in office, much faster than the 2% rise in the rest of Riverside County,” the researchers noted. So much for cleaning things up as Dan Ball thinks.
But these failures are masked with Bianco’s tough talk on antifa, along with his conspiratorial belief that “the Democrat Party” is funding the far-left activist movement. It wrongly gives conservatives the impression that he’s someone worth backing in the upcoming gubernatorial race because he talks like a MAGA influencer.
Results ought to matter far more than talk and the results unfortunately speak for themselves.