The Legacy of Liberalism: A Tale of Four Crimes: With Data

Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old black man who died three days after five black police officers beat him brutally for suspected reckless driving in the city of Memphis.  Ben Crump, a high-profile attorney, who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and others, was also representing the family of Tyre Nichols.  In his comments, Crump implied that race was a factor.  But how could that be?  Blacks attacked a black.  Crump suggested that when it came to police, it didn’t matter the race of the cops, only the race of the citizen.  That if the suspect was black, he would be treated differently.  But there is no evidence for that.  Just as there is no evidence that race was a factor here.  

It is worth comparing how cops treated George Floyd, in Minneapolis.  Here, there were four officers, two white, one Asian, one black. Floyd resisted arrest before the officers placed him on the ground.  The officers struggled to get him in the back of the car because he was not cooperating.  Once there he complained that he couldn’t breathe.  He then left the vehicle on the other side.  He asked the cops if he could get on the ground because he couldn’t breathe.  He was not thrown to the ground.  He chose to be on the ground. None of the cops used racial slurs, even referred to his race, or abused him in anyway.  They called the ambulance and helped Floyd after the medical team arrived.   

Floyd was not physically abused.  He died because he had overdosed on fentanyl, like so many other Americans. It was not the knee on the back of the neck.  His blood fentanyl level was 11ng/ml, nearly four times the lethal dose.  There was no evidence of asphyxiation from the autopsy.  The cops used standard protocols in subduing Floyd.   

The five black officers approached Tyre Nichols very differently.  Perhaps from their perspective Nichols was resisting arrest but if you actually look at the videos, it appears that he was trying to cooperate.  It’s just that the policemen were not making it clear what they wanted.  They screamed at him and shoved him.  When he took a chance to run away that infuriated the officers.  But he may have had good reasons to flee; it was not so much that he was resisting arrest, but that he feared the cops and what they were going to do to him.  He was correct because look what happened.

Some claim that the police department indoctrinated officers to treat black suspects differently than white suspects, but probably they would treat them the same way.  It is more likely they behaved this way because of their own upbringing before they even made it to the police force.  These men probably grew up in violent situations.  They were probably raised in homes with a single mother and no father, as most blacks are.  Some of them may have been gang members themselves before joining the police force, and still carry those wounds.  

Some of these men, perhaps, should not have been hired or needed more training before allowed on the street.  Or they needed greater supervision.  But it is clear that racism had nothing to do with it.  What also likely played a role is affirmative action at the police force as well as the social welfare state.  These are policies by the federal government, all of which may have gotten them into the police force and helped create the violent environment in which these police officers grew up in.  

This case has not created anywhere near the national outrage that you had with George Floyd even though in this case the police behaved far worse than the officers in the Floyd case. The reason is that the police on the case are the wrong race.  They are not white and that’s where the racism comes in.  It is not in the police departments it is in the media.  But not only is the media biased against whites, but they are also biased against the police.  Whenever there is a story about somebody who is killed by police, they jump to the conclusion that it was police malfeasance, and that the person that they shot was another innocent victim of police brutality.  That does occur, because clearly the police were very brutal in the Tyre Nichols case, but that is the exception not the rule. 

There was another case of biased media coverage of the police.  This was an incident that occurred in Huntington Park California.  The individual who died was Anthony Lowe Houston, a 36-year-old black man.  The Woods story was unique in that he’s a double amputee.  He lost both of his legs from the knee down.  He was in a wheelchair and the police shot him to death.  The news stories, all say the police shot him while he was running away.  The implication was that the police had no reason to shoot him, and that he wasn’t a threat; he was just escaping.  But when you actually look at the circumstances, it’s not that straight forward.  

First, the reason the police were attempting to arrest him was because earlier he stabbed somebody in the chest with a 12-inch butcher knife.  The person he stabbed was Hispanic.  This piece of information was difficult to find because it disturbed the tidy narrative of white racism and instead demonstrated black violence against another “protected” minority.  The man has been identified as Ramiro.  He is a warehouse worker and a father of four and he didn’t know Anthony Lowe.  He reported that Lowe pushed himself out of his wheelchair and came running up on his knees and shoved a knife into his side just below the armpit, puncturing his lungs.  He almost died and was in surgery for four hours and is still recovering from the injury.  We can credit a police officer for saving his life because he applied pressure to the wound and was reassuring him while they were waiting for an ambulance.  

So, there was a police officer that saved a man’s life, and no one wants to talk about it.  They are more concerned about these officers who took somebody else’s life. Again, the life they took was an individual who attempted to murder Ramiro. Anthony Lowe was an attempted murderer.  He would have been an actual murderer except that the police and then doctors saved his life.  But he intended to kill Ramiro. 

His motivation for killing a complete stranger was unknown.  The reason he lost both of his legs involved another altercation with police in Texas.  Lowe was a repeat criminal.  That doesn’t justify the police shooting him, but other things that he did may in fact have justified the shooting.  

First, the police received a call that a man in a wheelchair just stabbed somebody, and so they responded to the call.  They saw the wheelchair and the man.  Furthermore, he runs away, but he’s not just running away.  He is brandishing a 12-inch butcher knife, which he’s already stabbed one person with.  His action and words at the time were threatening to the police.  The police were trying to stop him.  He had a knife and could stab somebody else.  The police ordered him to stop and drop the knife.  He continued to run.  They tried to incapacitate him with tasers twice, but they didn’t work.  He threatened to throw the knife at the police and the police had to make a decision.  Let him run away and potentially stab somebody else or incapacitate him.  

If you are a policeman and some man was threatening to throw a knife at you, and the individual has already stabbed someone, you cannot assume he is going to throw badly and miss you.  He is still threatening them.  He is not dropping the knife.  He appears as if he is ready to throw it at them.  So, they shot him.  But all the coverage is of the mistakes the police made.  None of the coverage is of the mistakes Lowe made that prompted their actions.  He resisted arrest, stabbed someone he never met, and did not drop a deadly weapon when ordered to do so.  He threatened police, then attempted to run away still holding the knife.  Perhaps he would have used it on someone else just as he stabbed Ramiro.  Whose fault is that?  The police for shooting him or Lowe for running away from police while brandishing a deadly weapon?  

Another story also illustrates the hypocrisy of the media and the “race crowd.” This also occurred in California.  It involved a cyclist who was hit by a car and died.  He didn’t die as a result of being hit by a car however.  He died because the man who was driving the car got out of the car after he ran into him and stabbed him to death.  He was a 58-year-old doctor named Michael Mammone, a married father of two.  He worked in the trauma department in an emergency room at Providence Mission Hospital in Laguna Beach.  He was bicycling to work when he was hit by a car and then stabbed to death by the driver.  The man hit by the car was white; the guy who violently murdered him was black, a 39-year-old man named Vanroy Evan Smith. There had been no prior contact between them.  The final twist in this matter is that a bystander reported that while Smith was stabbing Manning to death, the killer was shouting about “white privilege.”  There was a racial element to this crime.

This story was not covered at all in the national news.  It was covered locally, but CBS NBC ABC and CNN did not mention it.  But imagine if the races had been reversed.  What if the doctor riding the bicycle happened to be black and the man driving the car was white and if witnesses reported that as this white man was violently murdering the black cyclist he had just hit, he was shouting racial slurs.  If it was a white racist who violently murdered a black doctor it would have been all over the national news.  President Joe Biden would’ve gone there to console the grieving family, describing the act as an example of racism in America, and blaming it on Donald Trump and Republicans. 

But because the race of the murderer and the victim do not fit the narrative, there is silence.  It’s not a story the media wants to tell.  They are looking for examples that prove the narrative they want, of whites killing blacks or police killing blacks and whenever they find one it becomes a huge national story.  Even if they don’t actually find one, they will make one up as they did with the case of George Zimmerman.  The media magically turned him into a “white Hispanic” and accused him of murdering a young black (Trayvon Martin).  All of this one-sided coverage creates the false impression that it's open season on blacks.

There are many news stories of racist policeman and non-policeman killing black people because those are the stories the media want to tell.  But there are many examples of blacks killing whites or Hispanics or blacks killing blacks that do not make the news.  When the only killing appearing on the news are whites killing blacks, or police killing blacks, it creates the perception that that is all that is going on; but it’s not all that is going on.  This is what the media and the race industry want people to think is going on.  To advance their agenda, they need to create the impression that we have a problem with systemic racism in America.  The reason they want to blame so many problems in the black community on racism is to deflect away from the real reason that you have these problems.  It’s not racism, it’s government.  It is the welfare state.  And broken leftist culture.  In other words, liberalism.

The Democrats and the Left have created this problem but of course the politicians do not want to tell blacks the real source of the problem if they even understand it.  They want blacks to feel that they are victims and the only chance they have for succeeding in this racist society is by voting for those politicians who are going to protect them from the racist threat that the Left and Democrats have manufactured to get black voters to repeat the same voting patterns that have returned them to office and maintained the wealth, power, and prestige of the race industry.  The last thing they want is for blacks to achieve success on their own because if they are successful and self-sufficient, they will no longer need government, no longer require the ministrations of the race industry, and may vote Republican. 

There are other disturbing dimensions that derive from these news stories, emblematic of significant pathologies afflicting many blacks that even a cursory review of the data demonstrates.  

There are high levels of criminality amongst blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2005, the black homicide rate was seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined.  Blacks committed over 50% of murders in the US despite being 12.5% of the population, four times their relative proportion.  In 2006, blacks were arrested at 2-3 times the rate of their representation in the population. Blacks represented 39.3% of all violent crime arrests, including 56.3% of all robbery, 34.5% of aggravated assault arrests, and 29.4% of property crime arrests.

In 2018, blacks were overrepresented among persons arrested for nonfatal violent crimes (33%) and for serious non-fatal violent crimes (36%). In 2019, according to the FBI, blacks committed 51% of all murders, 52% of robberies, 33% of aggravated assault, and 36% of violent crime.  The issue of black criminality is ignored by the media, Democrats, and most Republicans.  It should not be.

There is the matter of interracial crime and hate crimes.  In 2015-2016, there were more than twice as many black on white murders than white on black murders.  But one must also consider that there are five times the number of whites than blacks.  So, relative numbers could be multiplied by five meaning that there are proportionally more than ten times the number of black on white murders than white on black.  

In 2021, 21% of hate crimes were committed by blacks, much higher than their representation in the population of 12.5% of the population.  In 2018, blacks were responsible for 71% of hate crimes in New York City.  The black rate for hate crimes against Asians, Latino, and LGTBQ populations was 40%, 76%, and 303% higher than the white rate despite their far smaller population. Overall, black rates for hate crime assaults were 94% higher than white rates. In 2018, in NYC, 36% of anti-Semitic hate crimes were committed by blacks.

Black academic performance is similarly dismal, with blacks often 4-5 years behind their Asian and white counterparts by the time they graduate high school.  Blacks score far below their white and Asian-American counterparts on the SATs.  Whites were 10x more likely than blacks to score 700 or above on the math portion of the SATs. Only 20% of black SAT takers showed career and college readiness in math and reading compared with 56% of whites.  

Perhaps the single most critical statistic that perhaps explains much of the other unfortunate realities of black life in America is their illegitimacy rates.  

Blacks are largely a fatherless community with a 77% rate of out of wedlockchildbirth.  In 1960, 78% of blacks were raised in two parent families. Black women were more likely to be married than white women as late as 1950.  The black family was far stronger in the first hundred years after slavery than the next fifty years.  The poverty rate for single parent black families is 37%.  That number drops to 8% among married black families.  Male criminality soars when there is no father present.  Seventy percent of all juvenile offenders in state institutions were raised in fatherless homes.  This includes 60% of rapists and 72% of murderers.  Young black males lack a father figure or role model.  Children raised by single mothers are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide, have behavioral and emotional disorders, join gangs, engage in criminal activity, and become incarcerated. 

Many hearken to the magical decade of the sixties with the onset of the “War on Poverty” and “Great Society,” and the slew of federal programs that followed. But if we examine the decades preceding the sixties, we find that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960 in an era with virtually no Civil Rights legislation or anti-poverty programs and when there was actual institutionalized racism in America.  It fell another 17% in the sixties and dropped 1% in the seventies. The progress continued after “Great Society,” but at a far slower rate.  In skilled trades, the incomes of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959.  The rise of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the five years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than the five years after.  In 1900, black unemployment was 15% lower than white unemployment, while in 2017 it was 30% higher.

Violent crime and riots were far less in black ghettos before the sixties than after, at a time when black poverty and white racism was indisputably worse.  Murder rates among black males was going down in the fifties and went significantly higher in the sixties and beyond.  Most black children before 1960 were raised in married, two parent families.  Most today are not. As Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams have written, by removing all middle-class, bourgeoise, civilizational requirements, such as work, discipline, proper standards, and replacing them with non-judgmental aid for non-productive, self-damaging behaviors is and has been a recipe for disaster. 

What is clear, is that federal programs, the War on Poverty, Great Society, the vast racial “industry,” with its armies of race baiters and “diversity” commissars, the broken liberal culture, and patronizing, condescending elitist attitudes have destroyed blacks and the black “community.”  The black family that had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination had fallen prey to an adversary even more insidious: the welfare state that incentivized unwed pregnancy, single parenthood, broken families, and welfare dependency as a way of life.  Liberals, abandoning reason and understanding of human nature, have impoverished them.  They have broken and fractured them and reduced so many blacks to dependency status.  Destroying their traditional culture and family structure, they also moved them away from church, faith, and God, which had always been foundational for blacks.  Liberals, white and black, have led them into criminality and economic and academic failure.  By all standards, liberalism has unleashed wholesale chaos, devastation, failure, and death upon blacks.  They have compromised them and led them into a house of despair. Indeed, as Thomas Sowell has quite aptly put it, it was not the legacy of slavery, as liberals often cite, that has so damaged blacks, but the legacy of liberalism.

The Democrats and the Left have created this problem but of course the politicians do not want to tell blacks the real source of the problem if they even understand it.  They want blacks to feel that they are victims and the only chance they have for succeeding in this racist society is by voting for those politicians who are going to protect them from the racist threat that the Left and Democrats have manufactured to get black voters to repeat the same voting patterns that have returned them to office and maintained their wealth, power, and prestige.  The last thing the race crowd wants is for blacks to achieve success on their own because if they are successful and self-sufficient, they will no longer need government, no longer require the ministrations of the race industry, or the Democrat party, and may vote Republican.  But beyond the double-dealing hypocrisy of the media and the racialists, the real culprit behind these tragic stories of violence in America, and particularly amongst blacks, is liberalism itself: its failed policies, its damaging impact upon blacks (and others), and the unfortunate willingness of many blacks to embrace them – to its lasting detriment.