by Heather Mac Donald March 15, 2016 4:00 AM
Commentators on MSNBC and CNN have been shedding crocodile tears over
Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric” and lamenting his failure to unify
the country. This sudden concern for national unity is rather hard to
take from the same worthies who have incessantly glorified the Black
Lives Matter movement over the last year and a half.
Let’s dip into the rhetoric of a garden-variety Black Lives Matter march
that I observed last October on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It
featured “F**k the Police,” “Murderer Cops,” and “Racism Is the Disease,
Revolution Is the Cure” T-shirts, “Stop Police Terror” signs, and “Hey
Hey, Ho Ho, Racist Cops Have Got to Go” chants.
What about the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter leaders? Last October,
DeRay Mckesson, one of the self-appointed spokesmen for Black Lives
Matter, led a seminar at the Yale Divinity School, while his BLM ally,
Johnetta Elzie (ShordeeDooWhop), tweeted about the proceedings. Mckesson
(now running for mayor of Baltimore) had assigned an essay, “In Defense
of Looting,” which justified the August 2014 Ferguson riots as “getting
straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white
supremacy.” Elzie’s tweeted reporting on the class included “If you put
me in a cage you’re damn right I’m going to break some glass” and
“Looting for me isn’t violent, it’s an expression of anger.” (Let’s hope
Baltimore residents do their homework before voting.)
How about presidential rhetoric? President Obama routinely claims that
the police and the criminal-justice system treat blacks differently than
whites — an allegation without any empirical support. Last October, he
defended the Black Lives Matter movement on the ground that “there is a
specific problem that is happening in the African-American community
that is not happening in other communities.” And might that “specific
problem” be drive-by shootings, which happen virtually exclusively in
black communities, mowing down innocent children and drawing
disproportionate police presence? Of course not. Obama was referring to
the alleged problem of racist cops’ mowing down black men. In fact, a
police officer is two and a half times more likely to be killed by a
black man than a black man is to be killed by a police officer. Blacks
make up a lower percentage of victims of police shootings — 26 percent —
than their astronomical violent-crime rates would predict. And the
percentage of white and Hispanic homicide deaths from police shootings
(12 percent) is much higher than the percentage of black homicide deaths
from cop gunfire (4 percent).
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432800/donald-trump-rhetoric-black-lives-matter-just-bad
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/432800/donald-trump-rhetoric-black-lives-matter-just-bad
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