Numbers Don’t Lie, Except When Democrats Report Them

Written by Robert Knight

President Biden said during July’s heat wave that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”

Mr. Biden is “wrong by a factor of 25,” wrote Bjorn Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, in The Wall Street Journal. “While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold.”

Mr. Lomborg noted that heat-related deaths have declined for decades in the United States and around the world because prosperity has allowed more people to afford air conditioning and other technology. This wealth was made possible by reliable energy courtesy of fossil fuels.

Here are some other numbers to ponder in the dog days of August.

How about 300,000? That’s the number of people in our country who have been killed by fentanyl from 2022 until now. That’s roughly the period in which Vice President Kamala Harris has been “border czar.”

Last Tuesday, she told a Georgia rally audience that she’s been tougher on immigration than former President Donald Trump — even though 6 million aliens have entered the United States illegally on her watch.

If she gets any tougher, the Border Patrol will hand out coupons for free meals at Ruth’s Chris Steak House — but only for people entering illegally. If you follow the rules, you get turned away but are given a coupon for 50 cents off a chili dog at 7-Eleven. Just kidding. You don’t even get that.

Ms. Harris’ claim to be an immigration hawk is right up there with President Biden’s insisting he inherited 9% inflation from Mr. Trump.

When Mr. Trump left office in 2021, inflation was 1.4%. It spiked wildly right after Mr. Biden attacked America’s energy industry with executive orders on his first day in the Oval Office. As gasoline and diesel fuel prices surged, so did the cost of everything else.

Then came trillions in new federal deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s disbursement of cash to keep up with it all. Remember that the current 3% alleged inflation rate is on top of what came before. Prices for many items have nearly doubled, and products have been downsized. That shrinking can of soup is not a figment of your imagination. Soon, a lunch bag of potato chips will cost $4 and contain enough only for a toddler.

Even McDonald’s has announced a slowdown in traffic as people balk at paying casual restaurant prices for fast food.

The inflation has hurt other chains, too, such as Chick-fil-A, which has had to raise its prices in order to maintain its reputation for high quality and decent portions.

In addition to the media’s whitewashing of inflation under Mr. Biden, a lot of other flaky numbers have been in the news lately.

In Venezuela, communist dictator Nicolas Maduro claims he won 51% to 42% over his opponent in last week’s presidential election.

But an opposition party audit of more than 70% of the tallies shows that Edmundo Gonzalez received 6.2 million votes to Mr. Maduro’s 2.7 million. Many international observers, including the U.S. State Department, say that Mr. Gonzalez was the clear winner.

In good communist fashion, the Maduro regime quickly claimed victory and is crushing mass protests.

Some of this sounds familiar. As with a certain 2020 national election in North America, vote counting in Venezuela mysteriously stopped in the middle of the night. Depending on where they were collected, ballots got disparate treatment.

Not to worry, Mr. Maduro has offered to let his hand-picked U.S. Supreme Court review the votes. That’s like asking Al Capone to polish the silverware.

Maybe they should bring in the North Korean Vote Fraud and Gulag Assignment Squad. On second thought, there are lots of Cuban security experts already working to fundamentally transform Venezuela into a communist police state. Catastrophic damage to the once-rich nation’s economy and social fabric began with socialist Hugo Chavez’s election in 1999. It accelerated under Mr. Maduro since he took power after Chavez died in 2013.

More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled their homeland, and 1 million others are expected to leave If Mr. Maduro gets away with stealing the election. Many are likely to head for the United States’ open southern border.

And speaking of the United States, the Biden-Harris administration is still using facial recognition technology to round up people who were at the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. As of January, federal prosecutors had charged more than 1,265 defendants across nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia and secured jail sentences for more than 460 people. Prosecutors have promised more arrests.

By contrast, the thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters who tore up cities in 2020, laid siege to federal buildings, destroyed $2 billion worth of property, killed more than 25 people and injured hundreds of police officers are not losing any sleep. Nor are most of the pro-Hamas demonstrators who stormed a U.S. House office building in October and bullied and barred Jews from elite campuses this past spring.

There are several reasons for this. But the most important one is that these are Democrats, not Republicans, Christians or conservatives.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.