Newsletter: White people, be afraid — of other white people

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017. July and the first few days of August have been miserable weather-wise in Los Angeles, but it could be worse — in fact, if you live in Death Valley, it’s much, much worse. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

President Trump paints a lurid picture of life in minority-heavy communities. He famously called our “inner cities” a “disaster” during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, and at rallies attended mainly by white Americans, he has recklessly insinuated that daring to so much as walk through certain neighborhoods is too great a risk for his supporters to take.

But the numbers, according to crime researcher Mike Males, show the opposite to be true. In fact, the president would do his white supporters a favor if he told them to spend more time in places that have higher minority populations:

The white Americans who are safest from such deaths are those who live in racially diverse areas such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, where two-thirds of residents are nonwhite, where millions of immigrants live, and where voters favored Hillary Clinton in 2016. Nonwhites also are safer in these areas overall, though rates vary by location.

White Americans are nearly eight times more likely to die from illicit-drug overdoses than murder, the CDC statistics show, a proportion that undoubtedly reflects the heroin and opiate epidemic. But according to FBI data for 2015, when whites are murdered anywhere in the country, the murderer is five times more likely to be white than nonwhite. (This ratio counts only murder cases in which information about the offender is known by law enforcement.)

Overall, white Americans who live in predominantly white and Trump-voting counties are 50% more likely to die from murder, gun violence and drug overdoses than whites who live in the most diverse and Democratic-voting counties. The more white and Republican a county is, the greater the risk for white Americans.

Whites are so much safer where there are fewer whites and Republicans, in fact, that it raises the question of what exactly underlies this strong correlation between white safety and voting patterns. ...

California can serve as an illustrative example of how safety increases with greater diversity. Five out of six white Americans in California now live in counties where whites are a minority. (Nationwide, this is true of only one in six white Americans.) White residents of California are generally safer from murder, gun killings and illicit-drug overdoses than whites elsewhere. Overall, the state’s crime rate is near a historic low.

California experienced political uproar over demographic change in the 1980s and 1990s, and the state generated the same anti-immigrant, tough-on-crime, racist panic that Trump and some Republican politicians are now fomenting.

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Trump thinks Vladimir Putin is an admirable world leader. That’s Max Boot’s takeaway from the U.S. president’s refusal to push back against Moscow’s expulsion of more than 300 Americans in retaliation for the latest round of sanctions. Also from the dizzying week in Trumpland, editorial writer Michael McGough warns of the precedent set by leaking the president’s phone conversations with world leaders, The Times Editorial Board does not find much comfort in Trump’s signing off on new Russia sanctions and law professor Anthony J. Colangelo has advice for any military officer who might need to disobey an order from the White House to use nuclear weapons.

Remember all those left-wing pundits drooling over socialism in Venezuela? James Kirchick does, and he has harsh words for those who praised the late Hugo Chavez when the going seemed good in the now-failing state: “In the form of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the world has a petri dish in which to judge the sort of policies endorsed by [British journalist Owen] Jones, [Naomi] Klein, British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, homegrown socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and countless other deluded utopians.” L.A. Times

Michelle Carter deserves help, not prison. Amanda Knox does not believe Carter deserved to be convicted of involuntary manslaughter, a charge normally leveled at drunk drivers and, say, carnival ride operators whose recklessness leads to the death of innocents, not teens who encourage their mentally troubled ex-partners to commit suicide. Knox, who was cast as a “femme fatale” in her murder trial in Italy, also says she watched Carter’s trial with a “sickening sense of déjà vu.” L.A. Times

Opioid addiction is ravaging West Virginia, and a Trump panel’s recommendations won’t help. Cassady Rosemblum writes of the unnerving experience of visiting her childhood home in West Virginia, where many of the people she played with as children have since overdosed or grown up to find themselves dependent on opioids. She is not reassured by what the White House commission hopes to do for states like West Virginia: “Drug ’em up, make big Pharma richer, and blame China. It certainly sounds like a Trump commission, but it doesn’t sound like a plan. The people of West Virginia, and our country, deserve better.” L.A. Times

Thanks, Grover Cleveland, for ruining the American cruise industry. Ever wonder why you can board a cruise ship in Long Beach and sail to Ensenada, Mexico, but not San Diego? A law signed in 1886 that required ships sailing between two American ports to be built in the United States was intended to help U.S. workers, but it has had the opposite effect. L.A. Times

Reach me: paul.thornton@latimes.com