Vox writer who invented nonexistent bridge quells rumors about 'fake' Swedish rape epidemic

Brett T. | 8:33 PM on February 20, 2017

President Donald Trump is capable of saying some stupid things, but as we’ve said before, the media would be doing themselves a big favor if they could realign their priorities now that the election is over; the unofficial contest to see which reporter can dig up the dirt that forces Trump to drop out of the race is over. The Pulitzer committee will award some nice consolation prizes eventually, but dial it back a notch, maybe?

We saw how long it took for the press to go wild with Trump’s claim during Saturday’s rally that there had been a terrorist attack in Sweden the night before. Even the Swedish Embassy got in on the act, but it wasn’t enough to ridicule Trump — the explainers at Vox had to go a step father and prove that Sweden has no problem with immigrant-related crimes.

The Daily Caller’s Justin Caruso, however, argues otherwise.

https://twitter.com/justincaruso2/status/833461260347961347

Vox’s Reporting On Sweden’s Migrant Crime Problem Was So Bad That Even Liberals Corrected Them https://t.co/zg0mxG5LgT pic.twitter.com/PKzY8D5uVA

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 20, 2017

Caruso reports that “since 2005, Sweden has refused to publish crime data on immigrants,” leaving Vox’s Zack Beauchamp to rely on outdated research.

Same writer who thought there was a bridge connecting Gaza to the West Bank. So no surprise. https://t.co/OaPqPBSgdw

— ed (@edkrayewski) February 21, 2017

With data being sketchy, the Vox take was to instead look at the”long history of sexual panics in the West about non-white immigrants.”

Caruso notes that even liberals couldn’t swallow the Vox Kool-Aid this time around, with Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum admitting the piece set off his B.S. detector: “He linked to an old report that tallies crime rates for the years 1997-2001 — which is all but useless in 2017 — and then glided quickly past his eventual acknowledgment that the foreign-born have ‘a higher rate of criminal charges than the native-born.'”