While most think of Walgreens as a place to pick up a prescription or a snack, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of the so-called “Squad” is making the case that the chain is one of the vestiges of white supremacy on the basis that they close stores.
There’s been an unfortunate increase in businesses being forced to close due to crime, such as In-N-Out closing a store in Oakland, their first store closure in the history of a company that has been around since the Truman administration. The percent of chains that have such a record round down to zero - and in In-N-Out’s case, only could be derailed by crime in the far-left city of Oakland.
It’s overwhelmingly been in blue cities that these closures are occurring in, and the “defund the police” policies and implosion of morale resulting from those policies, have led to skyrocketing crime. And the crime stats we have are massively understating the problem. San Francisco's shoplifting rate for the entire city doubled from a single Target location accurately reporting every shoplifting case to the police. If one store accurately reporting shoplifting can double a city’s reported crime rate, how high would it be with all the other businesses reporting accurately?
But according to Rep. Pressley, businesses only close due to racism, an increasingly elusive force still blamed for everything the left doesn’t like.
According to Boston.com:
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley condemned Walgreens on the U.S. House floor Tuesday for closing another pharmacy in Roxbury, an act Pressley said will deepen racial, economic, and healthcare inequalities for marginalized groups.
Addressing the U.S. House Speaker, the state’s Democratic representative for District 7 said the pharmacy store chain is “abandoning” low-income communities in the district and leaving communities without access to essentials like medication and baby formula.
“These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent,” Pressley said in her speech. “They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.”
She is right on one thing - the closures are not arbitrary, they’re a consequence of her ideology, and those around her. Massachusetts, where the district she’s a representative of is located, has the highest crime rate in New England, with a violent crime rate nearly triple that of Maine, and double that of New Hampshire. Of note, the three least violent states in New England are Constitutional Carry states.
In the past, Pressley has called for the release of “vulnerable criminals.” Setting aside the hilariously Orwellian nature of the phrase “vulnerable criminals,” these same criminals would likely go on to commit the same kind of crimes that caused Walgreens to close in the first place, as the recidivism rate in the U.S. is nearly 50%.
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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