June 9, 2020

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

“Damn Lies” about George Floyd, “Police Violence,” and Racism

Friends,

“Lies! And damn Lies!” That’s what we have been drenched with for the past week or so: lie after lie, bald-faced lies, insane and patently false assertions put forth by almost the entirety of the media, assented to and propounded by nearly all our politicians (including most scaredy-cat, deer-in-the headlight “I-don’t-want-to-be-called-racist” Republicans and establishment conservatives), and now taken as dogmatic, undeniable truth that makes the claims of Infallibility by the Supreme Pontiff look like idle speculation.

“Never let a crisis go to waste,” once famously said former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel. And certainly not this one which can be trotted out to accomplish a whole host of things—advance the radical left/social justice revolution (that increasingly dominates the Democratic Party) while furthering the template of the ineradicable “first sin” of America: “systemic racism.”  And, more, that can be employed to maybe, just maybe, bring down President Trump, or better yet, bring down what he supposedly represents.

Now everyone from most of the talking heads over on Fox News, the Martha MacCallums, the Brian Kilmeades, the Marc Thiessens (who recently said that the riots in DC were preventing his daughter from demonstrating peacefully against racism!), to the more exalted types on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and in The New York Time and Washington Post, has been herded onto the reservation and you can’t get off of it without being labelled and formally damned ex cathedra as a racist or defending “white privilege.” And the list of “racist” offenses—even the most innocent and rational comments which would have never drawn the slightest demurrer two weeks ago—has grown and continues to grow exponentially, day by day, it seems.

Oppose defunding or abolishing the police? Why, you’re obviously a bigot and a racist. Just consider the president of the Minneapolis, Minnesota, city council, Lisa Bender. When asked what would happen if there were no police force and someone called 9-1-1 to report an emergency and violence, she responded indignantly that asking such a question most likely implied white privilege. After all, she reiterated, fumbling with her answer,

…community trust in this existing [police] department is so low that there is an urgent need for change now and we have a state action and the human rights department took against our police department for patterns of racial discrimination…So there’s clear need for urgent change and as one of my colleagues said, it’s clear that we need to dismantle this department.

Or consider what happened over in upscale Cary, North Carolina, filled with rich transplants from north of the Mason-Dixon Line which is about twenty-five miles from me. Facing fierce demonstrations in that city of 80,000, the police knelt down in obeisance bowing to the mob and proceeded in ritual fashion to wash the feet of twelve of them, a Holy Thursday mockery if there ever was one.

But, then, with no backing from authority, with utter cowardice from the city fathers—again, who fear in their bones being called “racist”—is it any wonder that law enforcement reflects that same despicable pusillanimous behavior?

While what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was a tragic occurrence, what has ensued has been a virtual canonization of a man who, by all accounts, was an habitual criminal, something of a drug addict, with a long record of criminal charges…he may have had traces of drugs in his system when he died. 

But in the frenzy to proclaim Floyd’s sainthood—the untouchable “new martyr” of a radical civil rights movement mired and based in falsehood and lies about equality—just about everyone has signed on to a fake narrative: a simple case of perhaps an excessive police action (although there has been NO trial and the evidence and motivations are in dispute), but no one is allowed to dissent or raise questions, even very reasonable ones. Thus Texas Governor Greg Abbott—a “conservative” Republican—who joins the disgraceful huckster Reverend Al Sharpton in Floyd’s funeral exequies,  spent time with Floyd’s family declaring that they would hopefully be a “centerpiece of helping America bridge our racial divide & ensure equality, justice & fairness in America….”

But, if you read the response to Abbott’s Twitter message you will also see a response from someone who knows George Floyd’s criminal record: “[Governor Abbott] Did you spend any time with the family of the pregnant woman he [Floyd] held a gun to for drugs and money?”

And it took a black woman, Candace Owens, on June 4, 2020, to blow the whistle on Floyd and his dark and seamy criminal past, and to do it fearlessly while almost all white conservatives and Republicans shivered in fear in the tall grass or hoped to somehow convince the farther Left social justice mob that they, too, were fighting even more strenuously against racism in memory of the sainted George Floyd. Her eighteen minute podcast was still up on Youtube the last I looked, including the account of how Floyd pointed a gun at a woman’s unborn fetus and threatened to kill them both. But who knows if the zealous and fanatical “woke” censors won’t take it down and ban it? (It had over five million views as of June 9, 2020.)

Here is the access link. It’s a riveting commentary. Notice, also, in particular her precise and correct use of statistics, official government stats which even appeared in The Washington Post, which give the lie—another big fat one—to the rampant view that somehow the police have engaged in a “war” against blacks, in particular black males. That charge, now propagated in every news media, from CNN to my local leftwing garbage dispenser, WRAL-TV, is now established truth: you cannot question it, you can only accept it and accede to the new religious cult that makes the frenzied Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre seem like child’s play.

Almost alone among major pundits Tucker Carlson publicly questioned that fevered and hysterical narrative, in contradistinction to his fellow commentators on Fox.

On June 5, Dr. Heather MacDonald, author of the book The War on Cops, joined Carlson to discuss the narrative that there is a huge wave of police murdering unarmed black people. Here was Carlson’s central question:

We are being told by demagogues on television, officeholders, people who run the country are telling us genocide is occurring, there is a never-ending wave of racist attacks on African-Americans by police officers in which many are dying. We came up with ten in 2019, how can they say something like that? When there are no facts to support it.

And MacDonald’s response:

The irony is it is The Washington Post's own database [which] collects the statistics…[that documents] a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be murdered by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be murdered by a cop, or killed by a cop. So there are so many facts about crime, about policing. We should not racially profile blacks for any crime rates, we should also not racially profile cops for one absolutely horrific arrest.

Carlson continued:

Are African-Americans being "hunted," as Joy Reid recklessly claimed on MSNBC recently? Or is something else happening? Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie, a lie used by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife and race hatred is their path to power -- even if it destroys the country…. are the numbers we just read correct and what do you make of them?

And again MacDonald:

This is a narrative that is both false and dangerous. In 2015 and 2016, when we went through what now is in retrospect a minimal amount of civil unrest and riots throughout the country, 2,000 additional black males were killed because cops backed off of policing. Right now, we are already seeing crime going to the roof, we've seen the assassinations of cops, and I fear we're going to see more.

And who are the people who are going to be hurt when these cops back off, if we defund cops, defund the cops. The delegitimization of them is so great, the hatred being arrested when they arrest gang bangers, gun toters, people who have just shot innocent children in the city, the hatred being directed at officers is extraordinary. Who is going be hurt? The thousands of law and abiding residents in inner-city neighborhoods, people like a cancer amputee in the Bronx who told me, "please, Jesus, send more police," because the only time she feels safe to go into her building lobby is when the cops are there because it's otherwise colonized by trespassing youth selling drugs and smoking weed. There was an elderly lady in the 41st precinct of the South Bronx who stood up in the middle of the community meeting and said, how lovely when we see the police, they are my friends. These are the voices that the media deliberately silences because they completely undermine their phony narrative about systemic police racism and white supremacy in this country.

All of this, of course, is not really important to pro-demonstrators Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, and General “Mad Dog” Mattis…or to dodo brained (but avariciously ambitious) Nikki Haley, who would just love to replace Donald Trump at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue supported by a “delivered” GOP, saved from all those uncouth “deplorables” and once more back in the manicured, secure hands of the Republican/conservatives elites. So, they harshly condemn the president for his racism or march like Romney with the “peaceful rioters” in Washington DC.

Like all compromisers and cowards historically, the Romneys and others of his ilk think they can temporize and “engage” with the radicals. But the radicals have sheer and unbounded conviction on their side, while Romney is little more than a cipher for intellectual and moral decrepitude and cowardice, an execrable example of those who will—as all others of such praxis in history—perish just the same at the hands of the revolutionaries, despite their craven surrender.

Once again, the words of Irish poet William Butler Yeats (in his poem, “The Second Coming”) come to mind, words written shortly after the end of the Great War, the horribly destructive conflagration of 1914-1918:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

I am not at all sanguine about our prospects, about the future of the American nation. There can be NO compromise with pure evil, with the Satanic forces which openly deny Natural and Divine Positive Law, which destroy our civilization and now parade fiercely in the streets in opposition to everything held dear in Christian and Western tradition…indeed, against Our Lord Himself.

Yes, our prospects do look grim. Yet, I also recall later in Yeats’ poem in which he echoes Holy Scripture: Surely some revelation is at hand;    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

We hold fast to that conviction. As President Jefferson Davis said eight years after the end of the War for Southern Independence:

Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.