Kneeling for a Self-Deceiving Lie

Forget Donald Trump for a moment (assuming that’s possible) and go back to what initiated this whole escalating orgy of racial accusation that has overtaken football and other sports and you find one of the more despicable and self-destructive lies of our time — that the police are targeting minority communities.

Heather Mac Donald’s excellent “The War on Cops” is chock full of statistics demonstrating why this is not only a lie, but the complete opposite of reality. Unfortunately, Mac Donald is white and therefore, I’m told, disqualified, so I will quote a short version from the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley, who happens to be black:

In New York City, home to the nation’s largest police force, officer-involved shootings have fallen by more than 90% since the early 1970s, and national trends have been similarly dramatic.

A Justice Department report published in 2001 noted that between 1976 and 1998, the teen and adult population grew by 47 million people, and the number of police officers increased by more than 200,000, yet the number of people killed by police “did not generally rise” over this period. Moreover, a “growing percentage of felons killed by police are white, and a declining percentage are black.” A separate Justice study released in 2011 also reported a decline in killings by police, between 1980 and 2008. And according to figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate at which police kill blacks has fallen by 70% since the late 1960s. [bold mine]

So why are all these multi-millionaires insulting the country that made them wildly rich and creating a national (even international) crisis about police brutality when, with rare exceptions, it’s no longer there? Do they actually believe their own lie?

Probably, to some extent, they do.  After all, they’re surrounded by it.  The media — aka Democrats with press passes — constantly rattle on about the evils of the police in order to stir the racial pot.  It even got worse after Barack Obama was elected.  (Not surprising, really, when you think about it.)

The Democratic Party depends on racism — more precisely the perception of racism — for its survival.  Without a seeming non-stop race crisis in our country, that party would no longer exist, at least as presently constituted. It would hemorrhage voters, with large numbers of African-Americans soon tiring of the Democrats’ fusty socialist economic schemes that have failed black people especially.

Our inner cities, almost exclusively under the control of Democrats for decades, have been wrecked, families shattered, in part, by the policies of that party. We all know that.  The football players deep down known that and so do the cynical team owners.  They’re all participating in a pathetic charade, pretending (or convincing themselves) the police are the problem in black communities.  The police aren’t the ones shooting each other in Chicago and Baltimore.  They’re the ones trying to stop that from happening.  This is so obvious that it’s not even the elephant in the room.  It’s the brontosaurus in the room.

We now live in such a victim culture that even mega-rich athletes and movie actors claim victimhood. Maybe we should rewrite Sly Stone’s “Everybody Is a Star”  as “Everybody Is a Victim.”

The problem with this of course is that little gets solved by playing the victim. It’s just a dumb show, a bunch of guys refusing to stand for the National Anthem.  Meaningless, except to their egos. This kind of behavior is, in reality, the enemy of action, taking things backwards and giving people an excuse not to do something substantive.  Does anyone seriously expect the current “protest” by the football players to have any result (other than turning fans off football)?  What could it be?  Improvement for poor black communities?

Oh, come on.  If you want to improve poor black communities, round up some money and start a business there.  Be entrepreneurial.  Make something. Build something…. Oh, wait.  Then you might have to deal with Donald Trump.  (I knew I couldn’t keep him out of this.)

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His latest book is I Know Best:  How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If  It Hasn’t Already.