The Anniversary the Media Would Prefer You Forget

How did I miss the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death? Were the media caught sleeping? Three years ago, Floyd was given funerals in three states, carried in a gold casket and driven to his final resting place in a horse-drawn carriage. It was like the funeral for a pharaoh.

      From Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, to the end of the year, The New York Times alone ran more than 4,000 articles about him. But exactly three years later, Floyd’s name made it into only three Times items -- fleetingly and barely.

      Are the media (and Democrats, and Hollywood, and corporate America, and the universities and grade schools, and hospitals and military and President Biden) hoping we’ll forget about their weird campaign to make black Americans even angrier?

      Since May 25, 2020, the single-minded message delivered to black people, without interruption or contradiction, has been that they live in a country steeped in white supremacy, anything bad that happens to them is proof of racism, and oh by the way, the police are trying to kill them.

      The You Are a Victim! message is unlikely to produce stellar behavior in anyone. Directed at a group that already had a pretty high rate of criminal offending, it nearly destroyed our country.

      By the end of 2020, the national homicide rate had shot up an unprecedented 30% and has continued to climb since then.

      As Heather Mac Donald writes in her new book, “When Race Trumps Merit”:

      “New homicide records were set in 2021 in Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Rochester, Louisville, Toledo, Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Portland, and elsewhere. The violence continued into 2022. January 2022 was Baltimore’s deadliest month in nearly 50 years, with 36 people killed, compared to 35 in 1973, when the city’s population was much larger.”

      With the black community itself bearing the brunt of the violence, by now, the ruling class’s fawning embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten tens of thousands of black people killed. 

      If I’d done that, I’d want everyone to forget about the “racial reckoning,” too.

      Although the hourly "racism updates" have ended, BLM's lies have calcified into received wisdom. It is still a matter of doctrine that black people are victims of systemically racist police.

      In fact, as Mac Donald has been documenting for years, police are 400 times as likely to be killed by a black person as unarmed blacks are to be killed by cops.

      Using the latest figures, in 2021, a grand total of eight unarmed blacks were killed by cops. That same year, an estimated 29 police officers were killed by black suspects. Of course, there are a lot more black people (47 million) than police officers (700,000). Thus, the apples-to-apples comparison works out to: For every 100,000 blacks, 1/100th of one unarmed black is killed by a cop; for every 100,000 cops, four are killed by black men.

      Maybe it’s the moms of black cops who ought to be giving their sons “The Talk.” Son, do everything you can to avoid being assigned to a black neighborhood. Be alert at all times, even when sitting in your squad car. If at all possible, do not arrest a black suspect. If you absolutely have to, make sure you have backup.

      One person too full of her own self-righteousness to notice that the rest of her party had decided to keep mum about the “racial reckoning” was Rep. Ilhan Omar. She marked the occasion by regurgitating the exact same boilerplate about racist cops and “black bodies.”

      “Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies,” she told The Guardian, “it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher.”

      (What I admire most about third-world immigrants is their realization that their ancestors were people utterly incapable of building a functioning society, and therefore, if they happened to find themselves in a successful country, like the U.S., they should shut up, listen and learn.)

      “State-sanctioned violence” against “black bodies”? The fact is all police shootings of blacks combined (justified, unjustified, armed and unarmed) is a smaller percentage of the black homicide rate (2%) than police shootings are of the white and Hispanic homicide rates (9%).

      But the 98% of black people who are killed by other black people are of zero interest to the media or the Democratic Party. It’s that crucial .01% of blacks killed by cops that get the headlines.

      Neighbor: YOUR 9-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER WAS JUST GUNNED DOWN BY GANG MEMBERS IN A SACRAMENTO PARK!

      Black mother: Please God, tell me the shooters weren’t white!

      After listing pages and pages of black children killed in black neighborhoods by black criminals, Mac Donald writes: “Since the black children’s assailants are overwhelmingly black themselves, the country changes the subject, lest it be accused of a taboo attention to black crime.”

      So black bodies continue to pile up, and the only people who give a damn are conservatives -- and the police.

      Happy anniversary.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER