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This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Great guest today. I’m joined by the Vera Institute’s president, Insha Rahman, who is talking about criminal justice policy, immigration, policing—those are the kind of issues that Vera works on. Insha, welcome.Insha Rahman: Thanks for having me, Perry. Glad to be here.Bacon: So I want to start with the thing you all are talking about a lot. The phrase from the ’80s and ’90s was “tough on crime,” which is something the Republicans leaned into, but the Democrats leaned into as well. And the three words you all seem to be using a lot are “serious about safety.” I want to break that down. Talk about those three words themselves and why they’re more useful than “tough on crime,” because I assume that’s intentional.Rahman: Yeah, it is intentional. “Tough on crime”—everybody knows what that means. We can all fill in what tough on crime is: more arrests, more punishment, more incarceration. And it has been the only option on offer in this country when it comes to people’s very valid desire to prevent crime, break its cycle, and be safe.We have now been in several decades of tough-on-crime status quo in this country. As you said, both Republicans and Democrats have peddled in it. And the truth is, we are seeing two things. One is that we now have really good evidence, over the past several decades, of what actually works to prevent crime and break its cycle—and it’s not those punitive measures. And we are a country where voters are in 2026. They are not in the 1980s, during the famous Willie Horton ad of 1988, or the 1994 crime bill.What both parties—but especially Democrats—have an opportunity to do is to have a new brand and a new approach to safety. That’s where the “serious about safety” brand—and it is a brand—that tagline comes from. Because Democrats aren’t seen as having a brand. Republicans, when we ask voters in the public opinion research we’ve done, “What do you think of their brand on crime?”—they say, “Oh, they’re tough on crime, they’re law and order.” Democrats? “We don’t know what they stand for.”You can’t reclaim the tagline of the opposition. It simply doesn’t work. You’re not going to out-tough the GOP on this issue. So Democrats have a real opportunity to, first of all, have their own brand—being serious about safety—and to fill it with the meaning and the policies that voters actually favor: strong, accountable policing; addressing the overdose crisis and the mental health crisis; having safe streets and good quality of life, as well as tackling gun violence.Bacon: It’s worth thinking about the words themselves—safety versus crime. Everyone wants to live in a neighborhood without crime. They also want to live in a neighborhood that’s safe. Do those words have different valences or different meanings?Rahman: They do. You’re raising such an important point. One of the things we found in focus groups we did is: When you talk about crime, you tap into that primal fear, that instinct, which is a really potent one if left unchecked. If you flip the frame of the debate to safety and you actually talk about what works to make our communities safe, you actually win over more voters. Voters want politicians to talk about safety, not just crime. Crime’s the thing they don’t want. Safety is the thing they do—which is why that flip is such an important one, and why we’ve been pushing it with politicians across the political spectrum, but especially Democrats, to say: You have an opportunity to create your own brand.Bacon: You said a few minutes ago Republicans have the “tough on crime” and “law and order” brand, and Democrats don’t have one. Some people would say Democrats do have one. It’s “soft on crime” and “Defund the police.” Do you think that’s true?Rahman: Absent any other branding from Democrats, that’s where voters are going to go—Democrats’ brand on this issue has been painted by their opposition. And we have seen, especially since 2020, when “defund” became part of the common lexicon after the very valid protests in the summer of 2020 against police brutality—the murder of George Floyd and so many others—Democrats didn’t come out and say, We need a new approach to public safety. What happened to George Floyd and others should never happen again. And safety and justice are compatible—it’s not a false choice between one or another.And in the absence of making that case, they let Republicans tar them as soft on crime, the “defund” folks. We have literally been tracking the amount of money being spent in election cycles on this. In 2022, it was about $250 million that Republicans spent against Democrats, calling them “defund,” “soft on crime.” In 2024, that went up to $1 billion. They pulled in a bunch of things—open borders, migrant crime. There were new Willie Horton characters in that Republican narrative.Absent any counter and absent any clear narrative of what Democrats stand for, voters will think of them as soft, will think of them as needing to moderate—if they let “defund” and “soft” be the caricature of who they are. It is not actually where most Democrats are. But they need to affirmatively say what it is they stand for. Owning safety, being serious about safety, talking about safety, talking about accountability, talking about justice—that is actually where the vast majority of voters are. It will help them find a new brand.Bacon: I want to go back a little bit, because it’s helpful. The period of 2010 to 2020 was actually not a lot of—the police funding was zeroed out in zero places, as far as I know. What actually happened was a lot of policies to make the system less punitive—bail reform, you worked on, making the police wear body cameras. Some of those policies were better than others, but I viewed the 2010-to-2020 wave of policies as things that made the police more scrutinized, and I viewed those as a good thing. Can you talk about that a little bit? It was not all defunding. In fact, no defunding happened. That’s why I find this whole discourse kind of frustrating. Sorry.Rahman: Yeah, absolutely. Here’s the thing—voters deserve an honest debate about public safety, and what they get instead are political rhetoric and scare tactics. What a crying shame. All of us as voters should demand better from both parties.So in this era, from about 2013 to 2020, we actually saw really significant reforms across the country. Bail reform—and that is not just let them all go free. It is actually taking wealth out of the equation, having public safety determine who stays in jail and who’s released pretrial. More measures of police accountability, especially as we watched Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and so many others be murdered at the hands of police. And you’re right—there was no defunding happening.What there was, though, was a real public conversation about: We are arresting and incarcerating too much, and that’s actually not the way to get safer.The other trend that happened in that time is, if you look at GOP spending on crime scare tactics, it was very low. It just wasn’t what the political debate was about. It was about health care, the economy, racial justice and the politics of race. But it was not about policing or crime and public safety. That emerged as the political cudgel that we now know it to be in election cycles really around 2020.And so that’s the other important point for Democrats, who I’ve often heard say, This is as old as time, this Willie Horton playbook. We’ve been losing on it since 1988. Maybe we had a brief blip in 1994, and that’s what we should return to. That’s actually the wrong way to look at this. Voters aren’t in 1994. They’re in 2026. And they have seen that police left to their own devices—without accountability, with just a blank check of funding—that’s actually not where most American voters are.What they want is police to play a role—to solve serious crime, respond to 911 calls, clear cases—but they don’t want police to be the default or the only response. And you can see in our polling across the country, the policies that are working, especially with Black mayors who are investing in these policies: They’re sending crisis responders to a mental health crisis. They’re sending community violence intervention and interrupters to deal with gun violence. They’re investing in things like summer youth employment and mentoring and after-school programs. All of those have very real public safety and crime-reduction benefits.Bacon: Also in that 2010 to 2020 period, we saw crime go down—it’s been going down a lot. That’s also one of the reasons it wasn’t as salient politically: The actual murder rate was going down, even after the Bloomberg-style mayor—even after stop-and-frisk and the stuff I don’t agree with was ended, the murder rate was still going down, correct?Rahman: Yes, it was. And look, if the crime debate was aligned with actual crime statistics, we would just be in a different world—because today we’re actually facing some of the lowest murder rates in recorded history. Lower than they were 10 years ago, lower than they were 50 years ago. Quite literally, in cities across the country like Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, we’re seeing 50-year lows in gun violence and homicides. And we’re seeing violent crime overall decline and low-level crime decline, as well.And yet that doesn’t actually stop the fearmongering and the rhetoric around crime. So while I think it’s really important to name those statistics—we have to—we also have to recognize crime is one of those things that actually isn’t driven by statistics. The average American, when they’re asked, “Do you think crime is going up or down?”—even in years that it has been going down, they say, “I think it’s going up.”And that’s for a couple of factors. One is the political rhetoric and how much politicians are talking about it on the campaign trail and otherwise. The second is social media and the nightly news—it is a feature on the nightly news that you see the most recent horrific crime event happen.Bacon: Particularly in local news, crime might be—Rahman: Exactly. That just shapes our perception. And I would say a third thing that’s really important, Perry, is: since 2020 and Covid—where we just watched all of our social safety net and our government infrastructure collapse overnight because of this global pandemic—there’s more trash on the streets. More people are homeless. There’s more visible crisis, and people associate that with crime, as well. And so it’s not just about the statistics. We actually have to deal with people’s perceptions—and when you walk outside, all of that is what you’re seeing. All of it is solvable. Police and mass incarceration is not the answer to it, though.Bacon: So 2021, 2022—it looks like the Democrats did not win the election by as much as they wanted, so they immediately said the problem was “defund.” There was an increase in crime in that 2020–2021 period, particularly, that actually did happen. And the reaction was, I think Joe Biden at some point called for—what, 100,000 more police? He famously said, “Fund the police, fund the police,” during the State of the Union address. What did you think about those responses to both the actual increase in crime and the political problem of crime, for lack of a better word?Rahman: Yeah. So two things. One, Democrats were very slow to acknowledge that there was an increase in crime. Get out ahead—acknowledge the thing that people are thinking about and seeing. Republicans seized on it real fast. Didn’t offer any real solutions, but they certainly talked about the issue. So that was a problem—Democrats should be talking about this issue and acknowledging it.And the second is to have real solutions and to not go back to the 1994 strategy. When was the last time Democrats called for 100,000 more police officers? In the 1994 crime bill. That might have been popular then. That was almost 30 years ago—Perry Bacon: This is one of my other notes. It was strange they came up with the exact same number, even though the population has grown—suggesting the idea was not creatively considered but just reflexive. Sorry to interrupt.Rahman: Yeah. Exactly. You can see the political consultants saying to the Biden administration, “Hey, we did this back in 1994. Just do it again and say it again.” And that’s the problem with crime and public safety strategies that aren’t grounded in evidence and the reality of what works. Because if the Democrats were smart back in 2020, 2021—and we saw a 29 percent increase in homicides between 2020 and 2021, that’s how significant it was—Bacon: We think it has something to do with the pandemic—related, we think, or it has to be—OK, yeah, sorry.Rahman: Yeah. Exactly.Bacon: I’m not a criminologist, but—Rahman: And look, there was no one cause, but we can name several. The fact that the social safety net fell out from under us. There were more people at home. There were more people who lost their loved ones—and having your parents, your grandparents, family around you, those are protective factors. Remember, the unemployment rate shot up at the beginning of Covid—that is another protective factor. So you can explain that Covid spike.Bacon: How do you view the Ferguson effect thing—the idea that the protests themselves—you have protests about policing, the police pullback? I don’t love that idea, but I just wanted you to discuss it because I think it’s worth addressing—it’s out there.Rahman: Yep. Here’s the thing—it’s a political device to, again, put Democrats on the defense. And the truth is, if police don’t feel held to a standard of strong, accountable policing, they won’t actually respond to 911 calls. They won’t actually solve crimes. And we saw a real sort of almost like a—Bacon: Strike, of sorts.Rahman: Yeah. And so that’s real, but it wasn’t because people were protesting police brutality. It was because we didn’t hold the police accountable to do what they’re supposed to do. And Democrats are really afraid of taking on the police and police unions, even though all of our research shows that voters are there for it. They see police unions the way they see other unions—as an interest group. And Democrats would actually be smart to be almost populist in their approach to policing and public safety, much as they’re starting to do on health care and the economy.So again, what should Democrats have done back in 2020, 2021? They should have owned the issue and said, This is a problem—we are seeing increased violence and gun violence and homicides and increased disorder on our streets. And I have a comprehensive approach, a serious-about-safety approach: strong, accountable policing; investing in mental health; investing in gun violence [reduction]; investing in programs for our young people.And here’s the thing—the Biden administration did do that. There were two things that happened in 2021 into 2022. One was the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which had, I believe, four Republicans on it, one of them John Cornyn. That was really coming after Uvalde and the horrific murder of several schoolchildren there. They actually passed real restrictions on gun violence, and importantly put millions and millions of dollars into community violence intervention—actually rooting out gun violence and targeting the folks who are most likely to be victims of gun violence or perpetrators, and saying, We will offer you mentoring, support, housing, counseling—the things you need to break this cycle.And we are now seeing the impact of that from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, as well as ARPA funding—the Covid recovery dollars. A lot of cities used that for crisis response, to have trained mental health experts respond to a 911 call for mental health crisis as opposed to the police. And we’ve seen a real impact of that, as well. We need to keep funding those things. And the Biden administration should have been talking about them in this comprehensive approach to public safety instead of talking about 100,000 more police. They would have inoculated on this issue a lot better if they had.Bacon: I guess they would have probably argued that those things worked and also that some of those cities hired more police officers. I might be ideologically opposed to more police officers, but I think they might argue that—Rahman: No, Perry—can I say this? Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a decline in the number of police. Police departments are about 10 percent smaller across the board than they have been in the previous decade, and yet we’re still watching crime go down down down down down. So we should actually own that—to say: We do need police. Police have a really important role to play, and we need to invest in a lot more than just police to deliver public safety. That’s the right way to talk about this, and it’s actually where the majority of voters are.Bacon: But you’re saying it’s not clear that having more police decreases crime—that’s not a clear correlation. It’s more complicated than that—is that what you’re getting at?Rahman: It’s much more complicated than that. There are some studies that show a correlation—that for every 17 police officers, you maybe avoid one homicide. But think about the cost of that, and what other strategies can help to avoid homicides as well. We’ve seen community violence intervention, crisis response—a number of these other things that we are talking about also lead to a decline in homicides, assault, violent crime, and low-level crime, as well.Bacon: In part what we’re talking about is two different approaches to crime reduction. Many of the people who said ban defund were also calling for more community intervention and the things you’re talking about. And many of the people who supported stop-and-frisk before want more police officers. There’s one approach that’s more community-oriented and one that’s more draconian, and there’s a real divide here, right?Rahman: Yep. There is a divide, and I think where Democrats would do well is to look to who is doing this well in the party. And that’s the mayors. We are seeing Black mayors across the country run and win on these platforms and enact these policies that are really working.Brandon Scott in Baltimore has seen remarkable reductions in crime. Everybody’s looking at him and asking, What are you doing? And he says, Simple. We invest in our neighborhoods. We invest in our young people. We actually invest in strong, accountable policing. And here are the results.Likewise, Chicago—which has long been demonized for crime being out of control—is seeing remarkable gains in public safety. Mayor Brandon Johnson came in and said, There are 35 neighborhoods that we have not invested in, where crime is at its highest. We are going to flood those neighborhoods with services, money, investment, as well as smart, strategic policing. And again, we’re seeing a huge decline.I will say too, it’s not just mayors in big cities like that. It’s not just progressive mayors. I think we’d both call Brandon Scott and Brandon Johnson progressive. But it’s mayors like Gina Ortiz Jones in San Antonio, who is doing this same kind of thing. It’s mayors in places like Cleveland—Justin Bibb—who are doing this. We’re seeing this across the board.And why are mayors doing this so well? It’s because ultimately they are seen as so responsible for public safety. It’s what they get voted in on and what they get voted out on. Even in a place like New York City—which is where I’m based—last year in the mayoral election, crime was the top issue. It was exactly where voters were and were concerned about. And Zohran Mamdani, who certainly ran a campaign on affordability, managed to tuck safety right into it, to say: Safety is key to a life you can afford.And his signature idea around public safety was an Office of Community Safety, which he’s just set up now. The idea was: We’re going to do all of these things—the mental health crisis response, community violence intervention, investing in place-making, meaning making neighborhoods nicer places to be, picking up the trash, more green spaces, places for kids to play. That was his signature public safety idea, and people were like, Yeah, I’m here for it.So that’s again a tell for Democrats—you’ve got lots of examples, from the more moderate part of the party to the left, to see who is doing this well. But it really is the mayors.Bacon: One thing you all are doing, in my sense, is connecting immigration and what we think of as traditional local crime. Talk about that a little bit—how those issues are related to each other, how thinking about safety in a law enforcement context may also involve ICE and the local police. Talk about how those things are related to eachother.Rahman: Yeah. Back in 2023, when Governor Abbott and DeSantis started busing people coming across the border up to blue cities, you saw this real conversation about, quote-unquote, “migrant crime”—are we less safe because of open borders? And it was frankly a cynically brilliant play by Republicans to suddenly take another issue—the border and immigration—and make it a crime issue. Make it really touch that fear nerve—Bacon: Fear. And the fear is less that you’re going to be murdered by immigrants, although some of that too, but more that they’re going to disrupt your communities.Rahman: They’re going to take your jobs, they’re going to take your housing, they’re going to commit crime. The xenophobia was just stacked up.Bacon: Because the Laken Riley situation is about the crime idea.Rahman: Yeah. Exactly. And so in the 2024 election cycle, we saw the GOP spend over a billion dollars in crime attacks. Most of them were migrant crime, open borders—but they were playing on the same Willie Horton playbook. It wasn’t really about immigration policy.And where we’ve seen Democrats fail in countering that conflation of immigration and crime is when they go right to immigration policy and try to out-tough Republicans—by saying, I’m going to shut the border even more. And people are seeing this administration and this extreme immigration agenda and what ICE is doing, and they’re actually linking it to law enforcement, as well, and crime and public safety.And so last year, when President Trump sent the National Guard and ICE and other federal agents into our cities, again, it was Democratic mayors who did such a good job of saying, I know what makes my community safe. I know what makes our neighborhoods safe. And it is not this advancing of an authoritarian agenda under the guise of crime control. Don’t fall for it. This is political theater.And we won that narrative debate. Everybody looks at that and says, That was not a success. Nobody believes the National Guard being in our cities is actually making D.C. or Chicago or Portland or any of those cities safer. And then, of course, it all came to a head in Minneapolis earlier this year, in January, when ICE officers killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good, and people were like, Absolutely not in our name.And now you’re actually seeing on the campaign trail this year how immigration-as-crime is a flashpoint in Democratic primaries. Let me give you one clear example—again in Minnesota. There’s a big U.S. Senate race. It’s an open seat. Tina Smith is retiring, and there are two Democratic candidates. One is Peggy Flanagan—she’s a progressive. The other is Angie Craig—she’s a moderate.And Angie Craig voted for the Laken Riley Act and is getting hammered on the campaign trail. She actually released an op-ed saying, I regret my vote there—trying to walk back her tough-on-crime bona fides and her support for ICE, because suddenly that issue has become a liability.And so again, I would look to how Peggy Flanagan is owning this issue, because she’s not only saying, This is not what makes us safe—she has a really strong, serious-about-safety platform about what does work to make us safe. That is where Democrats should be right now.Bacon: So I think next year we’re going to have a lot of people running for president—the Democrats. We’re going to have a really robust discussion. So I want to talk about two things I’ve seen that I’m not overly excited about, but I’ll be curious what you think.I guess one of the candidates likely is going to be Josh Shapiro, and he’s been talking a lot about running on increasing the number of police—that thing we talked about earlier.Rahman: Yep.Bacon: And then I guess the Center for American Progress—their president has been talking a little bit about how Democrats have lost the crime issue, so they put out a plan. And their plan was, We’re going to hire more detectives—so not police officers, but the same thing. And I read the document, and it was very much: Yes, crime has gone down, but we’ve lost the message on the issue—which you’ve said too. But it’s definitely more oriented around more toughness, even if the word itself isn’t used. So what would your—what is the alternative approach to more police, more detectives, more toughness?Rahman: Yeah. So both Josh Shapiro and CAP are right to diagnose that Democrats have a vulnerability—a liability—on crime and public safety. That’s absolutely right. But their prescription, in my humble opinion, is wrong.The right prescription should be to own: We need a comprehensive approach to preventing crime and breaking its cycle. We need to demonstrate we’re serious about safety, and here’s what that looks like. It looks like an unprecedented investment in a civilian public safety workforce—from community violence intervention workers to crisis responders to counselors in schools—and really addressing the root of violence, which starts very young, and there are ways to get at it.And then importantly, there is a role for police, but it’s not simply more police or more police funding. It is to have more trained officers respond faster to 911 calls, to also know when to pass off those calls to another first responder when the police aren’t the right responder, and to make sure that police actually solve serious crimes and not simply enforce low-level crimes.I’m sitting here in New York City, where a lot of the debate right now is on crime and public safety, where crime has hit incredible lows—but we are seeing in the courts a lot of arrests for things like taking up two seats on the subway, or hopping the turnstile, or stuff that I really thought we were done with. And this is where Zohran Mamdani, as a progressive in the Democratic Party, has a real test in front of him. Will he stand up to this police commissioner and say, No, not on our watch? Because it’s actually not what New Yorkers or Americans want. But they do want to know that incident of gun violence, that serious assault, that serious robbery, is investigated and solved. Those are the smallest numbers of crimes, but they’re the ones that actually impact people the most. The low-level stuff can be addressed by all of the other interventions we talked about.So, that’s not pithy—I understand that it’s pithier to say more police. But actually trust American voters to be smart and to say, We can hold a multidimensional approach. And it can be pithy, which is to say: strong, accountable policing; send the right first responder; and invest like we’ve never invested before in our neighborhoods, our young people, and our families. That is the best crime-prevention strategy Democrats can adopt.Bacon: So I guess I’m struck—this will be the last question—I guess my hope would be, in an era of low crime rates, we could maybe talk about AI or income inequality or other issues. I’m not saying crime is not important—I’m just saying it’s not 1996 or 1985 anymore in terms of America, so why are we talking about crime so much? But your argument would be: People care about crime, whatever the data is, and so there’s going to be an argument about it, and we need to have one vision that’s better than the other—but we can’t put it off to the side.Rahman: Yeah, exactly. And here’s the thing—yes, crime rates are low, but Republicans, especially as Trump is losing credibility on every other issue—he is below water on the economy, even on immigration, certainly on tariffs and the rest—where are they going to turn? Crime. And they’re going to stay on that in the 2026 cycle. They’re already doing it. If anybody’s following the North Carolina Senate race, it is all about crime, all the time. That’s going to be the case in Texas, in Michigan.So Democrats can’t afford to ignore this. For one, they need to lose less badly on this issue. It’s a matter of sheer inoculation and survival, especially in races that are going to be won and lost on the margins. The Wisconsin Senate race in 2022—where defund killed the Democratic candidate by one percentage point. Likewise, Democrats lost the House in 2022 because they didn’t inoculate on crime in New York. They can’t afford to keep losing on it.And importantly, they have an opportunity to go on offense and make this a winning issue—if they talk about owning safety and justice. There’s no false choice between one or the other. We’ve been beating this drum, and there are actually a lot of members of Congress who are interested in this, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus, who understand public safety is an issue that matters twice as much to Black voters as to any other voter in this country—because those are the neighborhoods and communities that have been most disinvested in when it comes to public safety. And I’m watching many members of Congress who are Black, who are seeing this issue in their own neighborhoods, really take it up and own a serious-about-safety approach.Bacon: You’ve mentioned Black CBC members, Black mayors a couple of times, and I guess I hadn’t thought of it until you said it this way. But in these communities, crime and public safety is a real issue. With due respect, the voters of Wisconsin may be talking about crime in terms of what they see on TV—Chicago and Baltimore are different from rural Wisconsin. And so in some ways, you have to deal with voters who are actually thinking about crime and also worried about police brutality, because those things happen in Chicago and Baltimore. And you also have to think about voters for whom crime is, in some ways, more theoretical—Rahman: It’s a boogeyman.Bacon: —assuming they think about it.Rahman: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And Democrats need a strategy for both. You have voters in—and you mentioned Wisconsin. Milwaukee? We just did a survey there—and people are like, I actually think it is a big issue. They’ve had real declines, but there’s more good work to be done.And then there is the boogeyman, the scare tactics. You’ve got to have a strategy for both. And the serious-about-safety approach helps to do that, because it is about the messaging and inoculating, but it’s also about concrete policies.And again, voters are smarter than I think sometimes politicians give them credit for. They see the emptiness of calling for 100,000 more cops. They’re like, We’ve done that before, and that doesn’t really help pick up the trash or make 911 calls get responded to faster. And I really appreciate it when I know my kid has mental health counseling at school, or an after-school program, or summer youth employment—because that’s what I think will keep this person out of trouble. People just get it, viscerally, and Democrats should be talking about it that viscerally.Bacon: All right. Insha, where can people find some of your work and Vera’s work outside of this conversation? I’ve enjoyed this—I think you’ve brought a new perspective, so I’m hoping people can catch more of it. Are you all on social media? Do you have some reports somewhere? Where can people find your work?Rahman: Yeah. Follow us online—Vera Institute—and on our C4 side, where we’re doing more of this political stuff, @VeraAction. And go to our website. You’re welcome to follow me on LinkedIn, @InshaRahman.And this is an issue where every single one of us can play a role, because at the very local level, we all have mayoral races, city council races, D.A. races where crime and public safety really matters. And also, call your member of Congress and say, “Don’t vote for bad bills that are really just putting Democrats on the defensive.” There are a bunch of them going through Congress right now. Own a serious-about-safety approach. Don’t take the bait.Bacon: You mean like the Laken Riley bill—the things that are—the Republicans push something to make you seem soft, and then you vote for it, and then you have to apologize for it later on.Rahman: Yeah. It’s not a winning strategy. Don’t do it.Bacon: Yeah. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in. See you soon.Rahman: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.Bacon: Thank you. Bye-bye.

It would be hard to know from his campaign alone what office exactly Bo French is running for. He’s raged about the supposed “Islamification” of Texas and called for deporting 100 million people, including Native Americans. He’s pledged to take on both DEI and sharia law, which he accused his opponent in the Republican primary of supporting. He’s praised Rhodesia, the former white minority–ruled African state that is now Zimbabwe. He’s said the crusades didn’t go far enough. Given these preoccupations, you might surmise that French is angling to become a sheriff, or maybe even a state legislator in a deep-red seat. Instead, he wants a six-year term as an elected oil and gas regulator on the Texas Railroad Commission. Despite its name, the TRC no longer has much of anything to do with railroads. Rather, the three-person body is tasked with overseeing pipeline safety, gas flaring, surface mining operations, and other matters near and dear to Texas’s enormous energy sector. Given the sector’s centrality, the position French wants is one of the state’s most important offices.French is hardly a natural fit for the job, but today’s GOP prioritizes ideological loyalists—however bombastic—over qualified candidates. Backed by a pair of billionaire oilmen with a penchant for Christian nationalism, French holds views that are more extreme than even those of many MAGA diehards. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick both endorsed French’s opponent in last week’s primary, incumbent Jim Wright, who had collected campaign contributions from major oil and gas executives, including Oxy CEO Vicky Hollub and Energy Transfer head Kelcy Warren. Like Ken Paxton’s win in the Senate race the same day, French’s primary victory is a reflection of just how far right the Republican Party has swung. That he’s a neophyte gunning for a seat on the TRC—a body with real and somewhat technical responsibilities—is especially telling. As Republicans continue crafting an ever-more extreme base, including through gerrymandering, they could start offending some of the establishment business interests who have fueled their rise.French won his primary runoff last week against Wright despite objections from leading Republicans and major energy interests. He’ll now face off against Democratic state Representative Jon Rosenthal, who must contend with the reality that Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. Texas Railroad Commission races don’t tend to attract much coverage outside Texas, but French’s far-right insurgent candidacy has started to garner attention outside of the Lone Star State. If the outlandishness of French’s views is obvious, his career and work experience remain something of a mystery. Most recently, French has been the embattled chairman of the Tarrant County GOP. Fellow Republicans, including Patrick, called for his resignation last summer over a poll he posted on social media asking whether Jews or Muslims “pose a bigger threat to America.” French refused to resign, but he stepped down anyway last November to run for the TRC.French’s self-reported qualifications for becoming a commissioner lean heavily on his pedigree. He is the son of a well-off West Texas oil family, and his family still runs the Midland-based French Oil Company; his own involvement is unclear. He attended boarding school, graduated from Texas Christian University, and worked on his father’s ranch before joining a hedge fund in North Texas. French’s LinkedIn states that he spent eight years at Carlson Capital before co-founding and serving as chief operating officer of Verity Capital Partners and Trungent Capital. French’s next years are better documented, and saw him rub shoulders with a Republican celebrity. He worked with the famed late Navy SEAL and American Sniper Chris Kyle to found Craft International LLC, a “tactical training” company that instructed SWAT teams and military personnel to work in “austere environments and situations.” Craft’s operations—including government contracting—may be the basis of French’s campaign-ad claims to have “owned businesses in the Middle East, protecting the world’s largest oil and gas and service companies from radical Islamists,” and to have “protected oil tankers from the threat posed by Somali pirates.” French did not respond to a request to provide details about his responsibilities at Craft and the company’s broader operations.Helping one of the conservative movement’s most beloved Iraq War veterans found a business might have been a fast track to right-wing stardom. French, however, rarely mentions that experience on the campaign trail. That’s likely because, after Kyle was shot and killed on a gun range in early 2013, French got involved in a tense ownership dispute with Kyle’s widow. Taya Kyle alleged that French and fellow Craft co-founder Steven Young were conspiring to “steal” the company, and had been “manipulating Craft’s stock, mishandling funds, diverting assets and mismanaging and usurping Craft’s contracts.” She also claimed that Craft had been illegally using Chris Kyle’s image to sell trainings and merchandise, which reportedly accounted for half of the company’s revenue in 2013. French and Young countered that Kyle’s charges were baseless, disputing her claim to have owned the majority of the company. Craft International filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the summer of 2014, and reportedly owed $2.6 million to investors. Kyle’s case was eventually dropped, and the two parties reached a settlement agreement in November 2014. In 2016, lawyers for Tara Kyle sent a cease-and-desist letter to stop French from using her late husband’s name and likeness in campaign materials for one of his two failed bids for a seat in the Texas state legislature.French’s more recent employment is a bit hard to parse. According to LinkedIn, French is currently on the board of a for-profit company called Live to Give. The company’s website states that it donates 50 percent of “net profits” from the sale of Live to Give–branded coffee and electrolyte-enhanced water “to benefit veterans and first responders.” French is also listed as a current managing partner at both French Capital Partners and NOCOM LLC. There are scant details available online about these or the other investment vehicles where French has worked. He did not respond to a request for comment about the nature of these companies and his responsibilities therein.Although French comes from an oil family, his résumé doesn’t appear to demonstrate deep experience in the industry the Texas Railroad Commission is tasked with overseeing. During the primary, his race, as The Texan Tribune reported, accordingly became the site of a sort of proxy battle among Republicans. Wright earned the support of Texas’s major oil and gas interests—including ExxonMobil’s political arm—and took in donations from casino magnate Miriam Adelson and Harlan Crow, the real estate mogul who’s treated right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to several lavish getaways. French’s campaign has been backed by Republican megadonors and oilmen Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, West Texan supporters of Christian nationalism whose funds have been instrumental in pushing Texas’s legislature even further right. Dunn’s company, CrownQuest, sued the TRC to challenge the legality of its overhaul of long-outdated oilfield waste rules. While French has spoken at length on the campaign trail of subjects that have nothing to do with the TRC’s mandate, he’s also promised to further deregulate the oil and gas industry and roll back changes that Wright supported.French did not respond to a request to detail his own experiences with Texas’s oil and gas industry. His donors Wilks and Dunn, for their parts, don’t seem concerned that the person who might soon be tasked with regulating that industry doesn’t appear to have spent much of his career thinking about it. For the fossil fuel interests that backed Wright, the question now is whether they’ll support an inexperienced extremist for the sake of keeping a Democrat from regulating them.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. In the 2022 and 2024 elections, Republicans successfully used the issues of crime and immigration to cast Democrats as insufficiently concerned about the safety of average Americans, according to Insha Rahman, president of the Vera Institute of Justice, a left-leaning organization that focuses on criminal justice issues. But she says it’s a mistake for Democrats to lean into “tough on crime” rhetoric and policies such as hiring tens of thousands more police officers, as some in the party are now calling for. Instead, in the latest edition of Right Now, Rahman advocates a “serious about safety” approach. That means Democrats should use the term safety instead of crime. And they should embrace a comprehensive approach that includes strong but accountable police officers, expanded recovery and treatment programs for people with mental illnesses, and community-wide strategies to reduce gun violence. She argues that voters don’t want a repeat of the 1990s playbook of drastically increasing sentences for crimes and hiring more officers. Rahman cities Baltimore and Chicago as places already using “serious about safety” tactics.

The post Toxic Ground: How Oil Field Pollution Is Threatening Oklahoma appeared first on ProPublica.

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