Slavoj Zizek often observes that (paraphrasing) "when arguing with a Nazi, if you end up debating over the details of 'if Jews really had all of the money, if Jews were really taking society over, if Jews were really doing this and that', you've already lost. No, the real question is why do you need this figure of the bogeyman Jew for your political identity?" [quoting from here] "The most efficient lies are lies with truths, lies which reproduce only factual data. ... Antisemitism, and other racisms, is wrong a priori, formally, absolutely. You know what I'm saying - it's not the question of, okay, 'Hitler was a little bit right, maybe there were too many Jews in culture or whatever, among journalists, but he exagerated.' No he was absolutely wrong, in what sense? Not because how he distorted facts, he was wrong even if he didn't, but he did distort facts. He was wrong because the way he used facts was in order to sustain a general lie about society, obfuscating its antagonisms, and so on so on. You can use correct data to serve a lie." [1]
Today, there are many bogeyman that take this role for the far-right, but one that has grown to prominence is the crime wave. Many outlets - such as Media Matters and the Guardian - have gone back and forth on this debate, going over how the numbers maybe have grown, but just by a bit, and only for gun violence in particular, as if that means something. This debate isn't totally pointless, don't get me wrong - being aware of the data is totally necessary. However, if our political discourse centers on the details of crime in the United States then we are certainly to get nowhere. What if this crime wave is real? It seems likely. Ahhhh, but here comes the leftist critique.
Where do many of these crimes emerge from? Situations of impoverishment and desperation. In fact, if there is a crime wave, it lends support to a leftist social critique. We have been governed by the bungled hands of neoliberals for decades, of course the people are impoverished, and of course crime may therefore go up. So what then should we do? (And I'll come back to Zizek in a second)
Observing this situation, researchers John Clegg and Adaner Usmani in The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration suggest there are really three things a state can do: it can do absolutely nothing (that is, abdicate its responsibility as the monopolist of violence or whatever), it can crack down on the resulting crime with a police state, or it can address the underlying cause of social woes. Their research shows that maintaining a police state is in fact cheaper, and that the requisite social safety net we would need would be very expensive. Still, it would be worth it. This approach, while costly, would not require the electorally costly "defund the police", nor would it stoke attacks on the progressive left as being "pro-crime" or whatever. By addressing social woes (and thus address crime), any attacks on the left for being sympathetic to criminals would expose the Republicans (or moderate Dems) for their pathological malice for the poor.
This then brings us to Zizek's critique. Why is the right-wing so obsessed with crime, when the real villain are far-right politicians who prevent us from properly fixing the social woes of our nation? I do not want to go down a conspiratorial rabbit hole (I'm more prone to believe conservative malice towards the poor is incidental, not a deliberate hatred, but who knows), so I will just assume this is their latent ideology at work. But either way, they are using this array of data to support a lie about society - whether it be a racist lie, a lie that we "need" tough-on-crime policies (because crime is just a "natural" problem, not one that can be fixed), and so on. Following his criticism of Nazi rhetoric, the focus on crime as itself a [natural] problem is formally wrong. The right-wing uses news about crime statistics and crimes in general - all themselves true factual data - 'to sustain a general lie about society, obfuscating its antagonisms'. This is not some relativist bullshit either (as Zizek is also very clear about), I am fully willing to accept the data. The thing is, from a leftist perspective, the existence of such crime supports a view that poverty and impoverishment remain a disease on society.
This same criticism can be extended to many other problems today. The swelling in migrants coming to the United States is not formally, a priori, absolutely the problem. All of the data about the migrants coming in, the violence of drug cartels, all of this can be true. The lie is not the facts, it is the use of these facts to sustain a false narrative. These facts also support the correct assessment - that climate change, the Drug War, and policies of US interventionism have upended peoples across Latin America, displacing them, bearing violence down upon them, and forcing them to seek refuge.
Note: this is NOT to call conservatives who echo these positions Nazis (although there are some who are increasingly showing their true skin), this is borrowing a tool that was applied to Nazis (You can use this technique to erroneously support any position!).