BATYA UNGAR-SARGON: The Left ignored the crime the Pelosis suffered. Now they’re finally waking up

In the wake of the sickening, violent attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, we were treated to a rare sight: Democrats demanding justice on behalf of the victim of a violent crime.

Pelosi’s attacker, David DePape, horribly told police that he intended to tie up Mrs. Pelosi and break her kneecaps.

But when he broke into her house to find the speaker, he attacked her 82-year-old husband and fractured Paul’s skull with a hammer.

There is not a sane American who did not revolt and was deeply saddened by this horrific attack.

On Tuesday, DePape was charged with attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, home burglary, false imprisonment, and threat of life or serious bodily harm to a government official.

He was provisionally detained because of the “extreme risk to public safety that he poses”.

It is exactly the way a violent, mentally ill, homeless person who has assaulted a vulnerable, elderly person should be treated.

And yet progressives all too often spend their time lobbying for perpetrators of crime, their victims be damned.

Think Keaira Bennefield, a mother of three, who shared police footage of her estranged husband brutally beating her.

“I was screaming for help all the time,” she told investigators. “I thought I was going to die.”

But her husband was charged with only one felony and was released without bail, after which he killed Keaira in front of her three children.

Or think of Tommy Bailey, a father of three who was stabbed to death on a New York subway by a homeless man, Alvin Charles, who was released without bail after stabbing another man on another subway.

Or think of Saiko Koma, who was murdered by a man with three arrests for armed robbery on his criminal record, who was on parole when he killed her.

Or think of Rong Xin Liao, an 84-year-old grandfather who, like Paul Pelosi, had his head smashed in when 24-year-old Eric Ramos-Hernandez punched him in the face.

Unlike David DePape, Ramos-Hernandez was released from prison and “returned” to his own home for “mental health treatment.”

Too bad Rong Xin Liao and Saiko Koma and Keaira Bennefield weren’t lucky enough to be rich, white, and married to political royalty, or else they might have seen justice too.

They may have met representatives who cared about them, the victims of heinous acts of violence, more than their attackers and killers.

Instead, because they weren’t white and rich and royal, they were treated to the usual fare of a party that endlessly lobbies for bail reform laws and homeless camps in working-class neighborhoods and compassion for violent, mentally ill drug addicts.

Why aren’t they more sympathetic to their own voters?

81 percent of black Americans and 82 percent of black Democrats told the Pew Research Center that crime is a “very important” factor in who they will vote in these midterm elections.

They are rightly concerned: Violent crime is on the rise across the country and is disproportionately impacting black Americans.

From New York to Mississippi to Louisiana, black Americans make up the majority of murder victims, despite being a small minority of the total population.

You would think that the party that has relied on black voters for every political victory in recent memory would prioritize their most loyal voting bloc.

You would be wrong.

Unfortunately for the victims of violent crime, that same Pew study, which found that only 33 percent of white Democrats are very concerned about it, too.

Call it the wakefulness gap.

White Democrats are increasingly part of an overeducated coastal elite living in small neighborhoods far from crime-ridden, dual-earner professional households driving up property values ​​in increasingly economically and racially segregated areas of America’s most expensive cities.

Meanwhile, they condemn their working-class neighbors to live in enclaves increasingly ruled by violent crime – while polishing their elite credentials by supporting movements like Defund the Police that make their neighbors even less safe.

It’s just annoyance and annoyance that so much of this progressive stance is being done in the name of racial justice.

And when faced with a choice between working-class minorities and upper-class white progressives, it’s clear which of their constituencies Democratic politicians have chosen to accommodate.

As working-class liberals grapple with crime and paying the bills, their party is increasingly speaking to elites whose main concerns are abortion and climate change.

That’s what another Gallup poll found: Republican voters are most motivated by the economy, immigration and crime — all of which make lower-income Americans living in more dangerous neighborhoods with less-paying jobs and threatened by migrant workers.

Meanwhile, Democratic voters are most concerned about abortion, climate change and gun policies; they want to decriminalize illegal possession of a gun, but God forbid anyone has a shotgun in the house!

Ultimately, this may look like a political divide, but it’s not: it’s about class.

One party increasingly speaks to the working class, while the other speaks only to its privileged elites who make their careers by checking each other’s language and calling each other racist if they are not in favor of abolishing prisons and police.

Instead of heeding the concerns of desperate Americans across the country, Democrats and their media allies have devoted enormous amounts of energy to downplaying crime.

A year ago, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed concern about the crime-induced hysteria.

“We’re seeing these headlines about percentage increases,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a virtual town hall in July. “Now I want to say that any amount of damage is unacceptable and too much, but I also want to make sure it doesn’t cause hysteria and that we look at these numbers in context.”

The congressman provided the template that Democrats and the media would turn to again and again since: ignore your voters and label their concerns as hysteria created by conservative media.

For example, New York City Mayor Eric Adams denounced the false “perception” of increasing crime on the subway.

“We average less than six crimes a day on a subway system with 3.5 million riders,” Adams told CNN’s Chris Wallace. “But if you write your story based on a story, you’re going to look at the worst of those six crimes and put them on the front pages of your newspaper every day.”

“Can’t overstate the extent to which horrific surveillance footage of black people committing violent crimes has become the quasi-permanent wallpaper on Fox today,” tweeted MSNBC host Chris Hayes in October.

You may wonder why Hayes only sees the perpetrators, but never the victims of violent crime, who are also predominantly black.

Democrats have a chance to do a little soul-searching after the horrific attack on Paul Pelosi, now that they’ve used the muscle you use to feel for the victims of heinous acts of violence — long atrophied on the left.

It is hoped that they will learn to extend its use to working-class poor and black Americans whose voices they covet.

They too deserve some sympathy.