Feminists Say Mollie Tibbetts Was a Victim of Catcalling
An Illegal Immigrant Took The Life Of Mollie Tibbetts and naturally the right has highlighted this as a reason to "build the wall." Interestingly the left has shown this as an issue of catcalling and violent men over immigration issues. Today I'm going to take a look at the issue and discuss whether it is true that Illegal Immigrants do commit more or worse crimes.
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So for those that haven't been following the story, Molly Tibbetts, a college student, went missing and they recently found her body in a cornfield.
She was murdered.
It's a terrible tragedy.
Apparently the guy who murdered her is an illegal immigrant.
Now what I found particularly fascinating with this story is that the left and the right are sort of framing it in different ways.
My friends on Facebook who are on the left are saying this is a story of a woman rejecting catcalling and thus the man became aggressive and he killed her.
Many people on the right are saying this is the case, this is another case, of an illegal immigrant murdering a woman, and even Trump, at his rally just the other day, called out this story, saying that this man should never have been here.
So today, let's talk about this issue of illegal immigration, whether or not they commit more crime, and we'll start by reading the story about Mollie Tibbetts, so we can get an understanding of just what's happening, and then I'm going to show you some examples of what the left is saying, and what the right is saying, and some of the history around illegal immigration, crime, and this larger issue.
So the first story we have is from BuzzFeed News.
It's titled, an undocumented immigrant was charged with killing missing Iowa student Molly Tibbetts.
Christian Bajena-Rivera, a 24-year-old in the U.S.
illegally led law enforcement investigators to the missing student's body on Tuesday.
Now one thing I want to point out before moving out the story is the debate over what to call people who are in the country illegally.
It seems like people on the left are unwilling to say illegal immigrant.
People associated with the far left just say immigrant.
They won't put the word illegal in front of that or undocumented.
The more moderate left will call them undocumented immigrants and the right will call them illegal immigrants.
There's no real way to say, you know, what this person is.
The Associated Press has said, has said, unauthorized immigrant.
So, really, it's almost like a signal to people, depending on how you describe the individual.
If you call them an illegal immigrant, people will assume you're on the right, because the left doesn't agree with the terminology.
But, you know what?
The person was here illegally.
I'm gonna go with illegal immigrant.
I mean, that's the best I can do.
I suppose I could go with the AP standard, but the whole issue is confusing nonetheless.
However, let's carry on with the story and check out the important points.
Mollie Tibbetts, whose disappearance for more than a month set off a massive search, was found dead Tuesday in a cornfield after an undocumented immigrant charged with killing her led authorities to her body.
Christian Bahena-Rivera, 24, has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder in connection with the death of 20-year-old Tibbetts, law enforcement officials said.
Rick Rahn of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation said investigators recently obtained security footage of Tibbetts jogging on July 18 from a local person.
That footage, he added, was critical to solving a disappearance.
Through that, we were able to identify a vehicle that we believe belonged to Mr. Rivera.
From that, we were able to track his patterns and the routes that he took.
We were also able to find Molly running on this video, and we were able to determine that he was one of the last ones to have seen Molly running.
According to the criminal affidavit, Rivera abandoned his car and began to follow Tibbetts on foot.
Defendant Rivera stated he parked the vehicle, got out, and was running behind her.
And alongside of her, Rivera stated she grabbed her phone and said, I'm gonna call the police.
After that, Rivera said he then panicked, got mad, and that he then blocked his memory, which is what he does when he gets very upset and doesn't remember anything after that until he came to at an intersection.
He told police that when he came to, he was in his car and Tibbetts' body was in his trunk, adding that the side of her head was bloody.
After realizing that her body was in his trunk, the affidavit states Rivera carried Tibbetts into a nearby cornfield and covered her body with corn leaves.
When interviewed by police a month later, he was able to use his phone to determine where he left the body, and on Tuesday morning, he led police to Tibbetts' remains.
Rivera is currently being held in lieu of a $1 million bond.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement lodged a detainer with the Powsheik County Sheriff's Office on Christian Bahena Rivera, 24, an illegal alien from Mexico.
After he was arrested on murder charges, spokesman Sean Neudauer said.
Detainers are requests that allow a law enforcement authority to maintain custody of an undocumented immigrant for up to 48 hours so ICE can potentially deport them.
According to his Facebook page, Rivera had lived in Iowa since at least 2013 and was originally from Mexico.
Among selfies and posts about soccer, he shared an image of AK-47s, but it wasn't a photo he'd taken and the guns weren't his.
The image appears in various videos and pages related to narcorritos, the music genre celebrating the exploits of Mexican drug runners.
So, upon hearing about this story, I thought it was going to be fairly obvious that people on the left are either not going to talk about it, or they will, and they'll make it about something else, and people on the right are absolutely going to talk about this and say this is another instance of illegal immigrant crime.
So, the data on whether or not illegal immigrants commit more crime than citizens is actually a bit murky, and I've got a couple sources that I'll pull up and show you.
But the first thing I want to do is highlight one of the top posts from a feminist subreddit.
So this is 2xChromosomes.
This is a subreddit that is default, meaning that most people will see this appear in their feeds, though I don't know if Reddit does the defaults as much anymore, because I typically just look at all of Reddit.
But this post from Reddit makes the issue about catcalling, and I genuinely find this a bit disingenuous, but let's look at the post and carry on with the story.
From Reddit, Molly Tibbetts was murdered because she threatened to call the cops on a man who was catcalling her, and this is how they have framed the story.
I'm so angry, saddened, and frustrated right now.
Molly was just a normal girl living her life, and this a-hole that I refuse to name ended it because she didn't react how he wanted to.
I feel like people wave off catcalling a lot of the time as relatively harmless, but it's actually really unnerving to be on the receiving end, and in some cases, like Molly's, it can be downright terrifying.
Her name was Molly.
She was a girl living her life and she didn't owe you a damn thing, you bastard.
Not her time or her acknowledgement or even an effing smile.
Edit.
Another thing I forgot to add that pissed me off was that this guy lived free for a month while Molly's body was lying in a cornfield where he dumped her.
They then added a link to the arrest warrant press release as people are questioning the validity of this post.
It contains parts of the killer's confession.
He was in his car and followed her while she was jogging.
When she ignored him, he then got out and followed slash ran with her.
And when she told him to leave her alone and threatened to call the police, he panicked.
And he claims he blacked out during the murder and that he came to later when he was driving and said he saw one of her earbuds on his lap.
Then he drove to a cornfield and dumped her body mother-effer.
So, this post makes it about catcalling, and I think that is disingenuous.
From the story from BuzzFeed, but also ABC News, it sounds like this guy was stalking her.
It would seem to me that his intention the whole time was probably to abduct this woman.
This is different from catcalling, okay?
Catcalling is not okay in my opinion, but there's also nuance.
You know, there was a video Something to the effect of what was called 10 hours of walking through New York City as a woman.
And many of the examples lauded as evidence of catcalling were people simply saying, have a nice day and nice.
Some of the things absolutely were catcalling.
Some of the people in the video actually walked alongside the woman, which has to be uncomfortable and unnerving.
I agree in that regard to the post.
But when you see videos like that, and they claim that someone saying, how you doing, is street harassment, you know, catcalling is defined as street harassment, it makes people skeptical.
When we have a story about a man who, according to law enforcement, was stalking a woman in his pickup truck, and then abducted the woman, claimed he blacked out, but he murdered her, that's not about a man who was catcalling her.
You know, I don't think it's fair to say that he did this because he was mad at her, because she rejected him.
He did this because he was a criminal and he was a murderer.
He was a sick individual who attacked this woman.
I also think, and this is just my opinion, that this man didn't panic or, I should say, he didn't reject, he wasn't mad that he got rejected.
I think, again, this is just my opinion, as an illegal immigrant, when she threatened to call the cops, he probably got worried about being deported and then freaked out.
And killed her.
You know, as to what actually happened, we know we have his confession, and unfortunately we're never going to hear the real story from Molly, and that's one of the worst— that's one of the hardest things to deal with.
You know, this guy can make claims about what happened.
He can claim he blacked out and such, and he says this is what happened, but we don't know if any of that's true.
For all we know, this man just got out and attacked this poor woman, and his story is BS in an attempt to, I don't know, offset some of the anger that might be directed his way.
So I have the arrest warrant here and it includes apparently his confession, but I think that was for the
most part covered in the story by BuzzFeed.
But we can see that they have put on an arrest warrant for this man.
And it says, therefore you are hereby commanded forthwith to arrest the said defendant, Christian Bajina Rivera,
of the absence of the judges of said court or inability to act before the
nearest and most accessible magistrate or the clerk or the clerk yeah yeah we
get it so I want to point out this right here so Trump obviously has played up
the illegal immigrants causing crime and we hear this a lot Many people associated with the right will say, look, illegal immigrants commit a lot of crimes.
And before I move on, I want to tell you all a story.
I lived in rural Miami.
I lived in the outskirts of Miami in an area called the Redlands.
This is when I was working for Fusion.
I lived on a somewhat farm-type property.
I mean, the Redlands aren't, you know, our neighbors were right next to us.
We could walk over there in a couple minutes.
But it was a five-acre property.
And The police were probably a half an hour away if we had to call them.
There were stories circulating.
I don't know how true they were, but the neighbors were really freaked out because we kept hearing about home invasions.
A few blocks away from where I lived, which is actually, you know, the blocks are long out there, so it was maybe like a half mile, there was a man—this is a story I was told, just, you know, this is not something I confirmed through the news.
This is just what was going around the neighborhood, but it kind of brings up my point.
There was a man who was in his shower, and he heard rustling downstairs.
He went downstairs to check on it, and in his towel, there were two men who were apparently invading his home and robbing him, and when he saw them, they put two in his chest.
They killed this man.
That was the story that was circulating in my neighborhood.
Someone in a car pulled up to me while I was just skating in the street, you know, just kind of cruising around, and said, hey, this happened, we're just letting people know, you know, be careful.
I guess at some point these men were caught.
There was like camera footage or something to that effect.
I don't really know what happened, but allegedly they confessed.
And what ended up happening was, or as the rumor circulated, it turns out these men, you know, this is Miami, this is the suburbs of Miami, were illegal immigrants.
And so I talked to some friends about this idea that illegal immigrants are a huge problem and crime is a huge problem and the need for guns.
And this was something that was kind of a new experience for me because I grew up in a city where you kind of don't need guns and guns are a problem.
On the south side of Chicago, you don't really need a gun because there's witnesses everywhere and the cops are really close.
Seriously, within a half mile there's going to be a police department.
So if something really does happen, yeah, it might take a few minutes, but hey, it's a few minutes.
Not only that, most of the people with guns were gangs and were causing problems.
So it made sense that a lot of people in the city didn't want guns and wanted gun control.
But I encountered something that, uh... You know, I'm a fairly open-minded person, but I expected something like this to happen.
When I moved out to the middle of nowhere, I decided to get just a crank compressor rifle.
It's a pellet gun, essentially.
Nothing... It could be lethal, but seriously, no.
And it was... You walk into a sports store, and it's super cheap, and it's just... You know, it shoots pellets.
Nothing really that dangerous, but it could be.
Well, one night, my friends and I were just in... It was around midnight, and we're cooking pizzas, and we're having a good time.
When we see a flashlight in my yard.
Now this is a five acre property, so that's huge.
And we see someone walking around.
And this is after we had heard the story about home invasions.
So I took the air compression rifle, I cracked the barrel, unloaded, and fired in the air and yelled, hey, in my backyard.
And then the light took off, the person took off running.
And this to me was, you know, I talked to a friend about this, about the idea of crime, illegal immigrants, and gun rights, and what I said was, look, what am I supposed to do?
The neighbors are freaking out because apparently there's, you know, illegal immigrants who may have invaded someone's home and killed them.
I don't know if that story's true, but obviously people are freaked out.
If I call the police, they're not gonna be here for a half an hour or longer.
So what?
Do I wait for this person to come to my house and potentially threaten me?
Well, I don't own a gun, and I didn't own a gun out there, though it wasn't that difficult to get one, but I did scare the person off.
And so, while I do tend to lean towards there's probably a lot of things we can do in terms of gun control, the point of the story isn't that, you know, I'm anti-immigrant or anything like that, or I'm pro-gun.
It was simply to try and share a perspective that there are people who live in these areas, who hear these stories, and that's why they're going to vote for someone like Donald Trump.
It doesn't mean they're right.
But when you live in this world where a man was killed, or at least that's a story circling the neighborhood again, but to them it was their neighbor.
It's a story they heard and they were scared.
And there were legal immigrants who had become citizens who had to hear these stories too.
And you know the police can't come to you.
These people end up supporting gun rights, and they end up being very, very critical of illegal immigrants because of these stories.
You then end up with a shift, or I should say a split, in the ideas coming from the left and the right.
The left saying, That it's not true.
Illegal immigrants commit less crime.
And the reason they believe this, and the argument that's presented to me, is that because they're scared of being deported, they lay low.
And they avoid even petty crimes.
They avoid speeding, things like that.
However, from the right, and as it pertains to stories like this with Molly Tibbetts, the story is actually more that, you know, this man is worried about being reported for a petty crime, so he decides to just shut it down.
The argument I've heard in this instance is that And I kind of lean more towards this opinion, is that the man freaked out because if she called the police, he would be deported.
So he panicked.
And he ended up killing this woman for whatever reason.
But I pulled up this source from factcheck.org.
I find that factcheck.org is a relatively decent source in terms of factchecking.
I don't know how good they are.
There are a lot of factchecking sites that actually do a relatively bad job.
But I want to take a look at some of what they say because they kind of break this down in a rather interesting way.
So this article says, Is illegal immigration linked to more or less crime?
And it starts by saying, President Donald Trump said it's not true that immigrants in the U.S.
illegally are safer than the people that live in the country.
Providing several crime statistics he claimed represented the toll of illegal immigration, Senator Bernie Sanders made the opposite claim, saying, I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.
Who is right?
Well, they claim, there are not readily available nationwide statistics on all crimes committed
by immigrants in the country illegally.
Researchers have provided estimates through statistical modeling or by extrapolating from
smaller samples.
One such study backs the president's claim, but several others support Sander's statement.
So they talk about this press conference held by, where Donald Trump made a claim about
angel families and things like that.
I don't want to read through the entire article, and it shows Trump's case as well as lower crime rates, but I do want to mention one bit here where it talks about conflicting research.
It says, there is however one study that backs the president's claim.
John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, looked at data on prisoners in Arizona State Prison between the beginning of 1985 and June 2017 and concluded that undocumented immigrants are at least 146% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.
They also tend to commit more serious crimes and have significantly higher rates for such crimes as murder, manslaughter, sexual assault, and armed robbery, Lott concluded, and are more likely to be gang members.
Conversely, Lott found that legal immigrants were extremely law-abiding, committing crimes at a lower rate than native-born residents.
So it goes on to say that Although Lott says his study is unique because for the first time he was able to differentiate between immigrants in the country legally and illegally, that claim was contested by Nao Rasteh of the Cato Institute.
I'm sorry if I can't pronounce that name right.
Nao Rasteh argues Lott's study contained a fatal flaw in its assumption that it was able to identify illegal immigrants from the data.
The Washington Post fact-checker did a deep dive on the arguments and counter-arguments about the validity of the study.
So, I want to point out a couple things.
First, yes, there's conflicting research.
And when Trump made his statement about, you know, they're not sending their best, if he's looking at talking points and research like this, then you know that he actually believed this to be true, and there's a lot of people who do.
But it's being debated, and it's conflicting research.
It does sound like there are more studies refuting this than supporting it.
But I believe it's fair to say that it is conflicted as for the time being.
But you know what's more important?
We don't need this data.
We don't need this argument.
One thing is true.
This man who killed Molly Tibbetts should not have been in this country.
And that's it.
Now, when I say that, when I say that, I'm not saying we should ignore other factors in murder and crime.
And it may not be the driving force as to why he harmed, why he murdered this, this poor young woman.
It's simply to say that in this one instance, if we were able to enforce immigration law and send this man back to Mexico, Molly Tibbetts would be alive and well today.
When I say that, again, I'm not saying exclude other factors as it relates to crime.
Let's go by the argument that...
The average citizen is more likely to commit a serious crime than an illegal immigrant.
We should look at what causes those crimes too and stop that as well.
Simply because I'm saying this crime could have been prevented in many ways, one of which would be enforcing our immigration laws, doesn't mean I'm saying other crimes shouldn't be prevented as well.
It just means that There's a lot of anecdotal stories.
There's a lot of stories like this.
We had the story last year about Kate Stein, I may be pronouncing her name wrong, who was also killed by an illegal immigrant.
And when we hear these stories, a lot of people might assume that these illegal immigrants commit more crimes, but that's not a point that needs to be raised.
The point that needs to be raised is the crime could be prevented by immigration's enforcement.
And that's That's really it.
It also means that, yes, let's look at all murder and all crimes and figure out what causes them and deal with those issues too.
You don't have to be pro or anti-immigration to say that this person was breaking the law and then harmed this woman and it could have been prevented.
And you can also easily say there's a bunch of other things that could have been done even outside of immigration's enforcement that could have prevented this.
But I think when people bring up this story, The most important thing to focus on is that, unfortunately, the crime could have been prevented.
And it bumps me out to see that it's so heavily politicized because, certainly, this isn't the only story of a woman who went out jogging and was physically attacked or even murdered.
But it's getting a ton of attention for a few reasons, and I don't want to exacerbate the political climate by talking about what those reasons are, except for the fact that we are focused on immigration right now.
There's a huge issue.
You know, I have friends on Facebook who are claiming this is about feminism.
This is about catcalling.
It's about men.
And my other friends on Facebook are saying this is about illegal immigration and build the wall.
And I think Look, it's an anecdote, and there's many anecdotes, but the
data is conflicting.
And I think it is fair to say that if immigration was enforced, this person could have been
stopped.
But there's a lot of things that could have stopped him as well.
And it's hard to know.
You can't change the past.
But people are definitely going to weaponize this.
So ultimately, my opinion.
I think we should just do whatever we can to enforce laws and prevent crime.
It becomes nuanced and challenging because some things shouldn't be illegal, right?
For instance, there are some victimless crimes like marijuana, marijuana consumption and recreational use rapidly becoming legal, and the only way people are able to know that they want it legal is because they broke the law and smoked it in the first place.
So, it's complicated.
Not all laws are the same, not all law enforcement is the same, and it's hard to know exactly what the right thing to do is, but I believe it is fair to say that this person... Well, look, it's true.
They weren't supposed to be here.
They were in violation of the law, and if that law was enforced, this woman would still be alive.
Again, that's not to diminish any other instances or any other laws or to act like we couldn't prevent murder in other ways, and it's not to act like...
You know, and I'm not saying that illegal immigrants commit all of the crime or anything like that.
In this one story, if we're sticking to the anecdote, it could have been solved.
You know, so I want to end with one more point.
Today, on the front page of Fox News, we have Farmhand from Hell, the front and center main story.
Illegal immigrant charged with killing Mollie Tibbetts may have evaded federal E-Verify system.
And that's the main big story that's really dominating right-wing news sources.
And when we look to the left, what do we find?
Well, MSNBC's front page story, Michael Cohen.
And I know I'm getting a lot of criticism because I'm doing a story which is, you know, on the front page of Fox News.
I am going to do a video about Michael Cohen, so don't fret.
It's just gonna be on my other channel because that's gonna be much longer and, I don't know, more fun and maybe more angry from me.
But, I think I sort of, uh, I think I hit the nail on the head with what I wanted to say about this story.
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