The Left's Big Lie on Race

From our national treasure, Heather Mac Donald, in City Journal. The lede alone is brilliant:

Since last summer, a lie has overtaken significant parts of the country, resulting in growing mass hysteria. That lie holds that the police pose a mortal threat to black Americans—indeed that the police are the greatest threat facing black Americans today. Several subsidiary untruths buttress that central myth: that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks; that the black underclass doesn’t exist; and that crime rates are comparable between blacks and whites—leaving disproportionate police action in minority neighborhoods unexplained without reference to racism. The poisonous effect of those lies has now manifested itself in the cold-blooded assassination of two NYPD officers. The highest reaches of American society promulgated these untruths and participated in the mass hysteria…

What we are witnessing in New York City right now — Merry Christmas, everybody! — is nothing short of a national nightmare, deliberately provoked and egged on at the highest levels of city and federal government. Bill de Blasio is a communist sympathizer and man of the hard Left who essentially was elected mayor by … wait for it… the 282, 344 votes he got in the Democratic primary, which gave him the party nomination.  He went on to win the election with just 796,000 votes in a city of eight million people, of which half are registered to vote — a record low turnout.

But among all the posturers, none was so preening as New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio. In advance of a trip to Washington for a White House summit on policing, he told the press that a “scourge” of killings by police is “based not just on decades, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio embroidered on that theme several days later, after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict an officer for homicide in Garner’s death. (The 350-pound asthmatic Garner had resisted arrest for the crime of selling loose cigarettes; officers brought him to the ground, provoking a fatal heart attack.) “People are saying: ‘Black lives matter,’” de Blasio announced after the grand jury concluded. “It should be self-evident, but our history requires us to say ‘black lives matter.’ It was not years of racism that brought us to this day, or decades of racism, but centuries of racism.” De Blasio added that he worries “every night” about the “dangers [his biracial son Dante] may face” from “officers who are paid to protect him.”

The mayor’s irresponsible rhetoric was a violation of his role as the city’s leader and as its main exponent of the law…

But what does he care?

The only good that can come out of this wrenching attack on civilization would be the delegitimation of the lie-based protest movement. Whether that will happen is uncertain. The New York Times has denounced as “inflammatory” the statement from the head of the officer’s union that there is “blood on the hands that starts on the steps of City Hall”—this from a paper that promotes the idea that police officers routinely kill blacks. The elites’ investment in black victimology is probably too great to hope for an injection of truth into the dangerously counterfactual discourse about race, crime, and policing.

De Blasio and his venomous ilk are destroyers, out to disrupt the fabric of a society they despise because they can. The other day Drudge had a headline to the effect that the NYPD feared a return to the 1970s of The French Connection — filthy streets, rampant crime; the unlivable city that Rudy Giuliani cleaned up after defeating David Dinkins for the mayoralty in 1993.

But that’s not the worst fear. We might not be returning to the 1970s but to the 1930s. This is what “hope and change” has come to. This is what America voted for.