If you happen to be a baseball fan who has been watching the playoff games recently you may have noticed some intentionally jarring political advertisements popping up between innings. They depict some of the grisly crimes that have been captured on security cameras around the country recently as the ongoing crime crisis continues to spiral out of control. The advertisements ask voters to consider why this is happening and to take this critical issue into account when they vote next month.

One person who definitely noticed the advertisements was Will Bunch, the liberal author and columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Having his baseball game interrupted by such “vile right-wing political ads” was clearly more than Mr. Bunch could tolerate, so he took to the pages of his newspaper this weekend to vent his fury at the “shadowy figures” behind the advertising campaign. Apparently, seeing images of terrible things that are actually happening on America’s streets today is an unwarranted disruption to the lives of ordinary Americans or something.

If you live in Philadelphia or thereabouts, the October baseball playoffs have brought almost unbridled joy from a Phillies hot streak, punctuated by an epic bat flip and an inside-the-park home run — and marred only by jarring interruptions from the most shockingly crude and, arguably, racist political ads since Willie Horton hit the small screen in 1988.

Every few innings, the dark, grainy TV spots — with a flood of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the U.S. border — broke up the stream of otherwise cheerful spots for iPhones or car insurance. One says “illegal immigration is draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family” — blaming President Biden, and telling Democrats to “stop hurting our children,” against an ominous, empty playground swing. The crime spot blames liberals for a wave of “violence, bloodshed and death” as men with machine guns roam an urban wasteland.

Bunch puts on his detective hat and figures out who is responsible for these advertisements that “marred” the “unbridled joy” of a Phillies game. Do you really need me to tell you who he determined was the culprit? It was the Bad Orange Man, of course! Well… it wasn’t Donald Trump specifically, but the group developing the advertisement, Citizens for Sanity, is the brainchild of what Bunch calls “the very worst, xenophobic remnants of Team Trump.”

What Bunch fails to note is the fact that all of the crime clips being shown are actual events that were in the news. He tries to make hay out of the fact that one illegal immigrant featured in one ad (who raped a toddler at a fast food restaurant after being released early from prison) did so in 2020 before Joe Biden was in office. That’s a rather weak defense since he is inadvertently highlighting the problems caused by mass illegal immigration that predate the Biden presidency but have only gotten much worse over the past two years.

What’s even more stunning is the way that Bunch doesn’t really seem to find the content of the ads to be the worst thing about them. He’s clearly upset that they could be aired during a baseball game. “No one cares that this is afternoon baseball and little girls and boys are watching.” Oh, really? Political ads reminding people of the ongoing crime crisis should be saved for after prime-time hours? Think of the children!

This isn’t the only example of liberals freaking out over advertisements bringing a sharp focus to the crime crisis. An ad run by Dan Proft and People Who Play By The Rules PAC was pulled by the local NBC outlet after the Governor and the Mayor of Chicago complained.

Here is the advertisement, featuring the screams of a woman in Lakeview, Illinois, as she was brutally assaulted and robbed outside of her home earlier this year.

As you can see, no narrator’s voice was included. It was just a clip from a security camera video depicting a horrible thing that actually happened in the Lakeview district of Chicago and was caught on a neighbor’s camera. At the end, the advertisement asks “How much worse does it have to get?”

And yet the Governor of Illinois and Lori Lightfoot managed to get the local NBC affiliate to pull the ad. And all that ad did was show people things that are actually happening in their own neighborhoods. But, of course, we can’t have that sort of thing showing up on television this close to an election, can we? It might hurt the Democrats’ chances.