The Race Card Is Nothing To Play With. It Can Ruin Us All.

'It is far easier to start a revolution than to control one.'

- The Dead, Guillotined Maximilien de Robespierre/SoRo

By Dr Thomas Sowell

The cold-blooded murder of two New York City policemen as they sat in their car is not only an outrage but also a wake-up call. It shows, in the most painful way, the high cost of having demagogues, politicians, mobs and the media constantly taking cheap shots at the police. 

Those cheap shots are in fact very expensive shots, not only to the police themselves but to the whole society. Someone once said that civilization is a thin crust over a volcano. The police are part of that thin crust. We have seen before our own eyes, first in Ferguson, Missouri and then in other communities, what happens when there is just a small crack in that crust, and barbarism and arson burst out. That can happen anywhere. So can what happened in New York. 

"Send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." 

It is a painful irony that, on the eve of the murders of these two police officers in New York, some of the city's police were already saying that, in the event of their deaths, they did not want Mayor Bill de Blasio to attend their funerals. We can only hope that Mayor de Blasio has some residual decency, so that he will not defile these two officers' memorial services with his presence. No politician in the country has done more to play the race card against the police and spread the notion that cops are the big problem in minority communities. 

It so happens that the police officers killed were both members of minority groups — Officer Rafael Ramos, Hispanic, and Officer Wenjian Liu, Asian. It so happens that a substantial part of the New York City police force are members of minority groups. But you might never know that from the story told by demagogues who depict the black community as a "colonial" society being "occupied" by white policemen who target young blacks. 

Mayor de Blasio joined the chorus of those saying that they have to warn their black sons how to cope with this situation. 

"What can we say to our sons?" some demagogues ask. 

They can say, "Don't go around punching strangers, because it is only a matter of time before you punch the wrong stranger." 

Mayor de Blasio has made anti-police comments with Al Sharpton seated at his side. This is the same Al Sharpton with a trail of slime going back more than a quarter of a century, during which he has whipped up mobs and fomented race hatred from the days of the Tawana Brawley "rape" hoax of 1987 to the Duke University "rape" hoax of 2006 and the Ferguson riots of 2014. 

Make no mistake about it. There is political mileage to be made siding with demagogues like Al Sharpton who, as demagogue-in-chief, has been invited to the White House dozens of times by its commander-in-chief. 

Many in the media and among the intelligentsia cherish the romantic tale of an "us" against "them" struggle of beleaguered ghetto blacks defending themselves against the aggression of white policemen. The gullible include both whites who don't know what they are talking about and blacks who don't know what they are talking about either, because they never grew up in a ghetto. Among the latter are the President of the United States and his Attorney General. 

Such people readily buy the story that ghetto social problems today — from children being raised without a father to runaway rates of murder — are "a legacy of slavery," even though such social problems were nowhere near as severe in the first half of the 20th century as they became in the second half. You would be hard pressed to name just five examples from the first half of the 20th century of the kinds of ghetto riots that have raged in more than a hundred cities during the second half. Such riots are a legacy of the social degeneracy of our times. Calling this social degeneracy "a legacy of slavery" is not just an excuse for those who engage in it, it is an excuse for the ideology of the intelligentsia behind the social policies that promoted this degeneracy. 

Let those who have laid a guilt trip on people in our times, for evils done by other people in past centuries, at least face their own responsibility for the evil consequences of their own notions and policies. 

If they won't do it, then the rest of us need to stop listening gullibly to what they are saying.

The race card is nothing to play with. It can ruin us all.

Playing with Fire.

By Peter Kirsanow

Yes, the responsibility for the assassinations of two NYPD officers lies with the individual who pulled the trigger. 

That said, it’s no coincidence that the first execution of NYC police officers in years occurred on the heels of a months-long orgy of incendiary rhetoric from our political leaders, academicians, community agitators, and members of the media regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner — rhetoric wholly unhinged from the crucial fact that there was not a scintilla of evidence that racism played any role in the incidents. 

Responsible people understand the imperative to exercise great caution when making potentially inflammatory comments involving race. A brief review of history demonstrates why. 

But for the last several months, responsible behavior has been on short supply among our elites. So many rushed to abandon their roles as objective leaders to don the clothing of community organizers, accuse cops of pervasive racism, and allege that not only is the “system” intrinsically racist, but the very essence of the justice system needed to be jettisoned. Again, without a shred of evidence that racist cops or institutions caused the deaths of either Brown or Garner. 

So “leaders” ranging from the president to the attorney general to the mayor of the nation’s largest city engaged in opportunistic bouts of moral preening that gave credence to claims that police were engaged in a nationwide war against black males. The most powerful man on earth invited Al Sharpton to the White House, seemingly unconcerned (or perhaps expecting) that such an invitation would necessarily grant legitimacy to the propaganda that cops were mowing down blacks across the land. Colleges gave precious students dispensation to recover from the fraudulent trauma of black genocide perpetrated by racist cops. An almost delirious media slanted their reporting to support that there is, in fact, a war being waged by the entire law-enforcement apparatus of the United States against blacks. Again, without an iota of proof that Brown and Garner were victims of a racist regime. And, without even a nod to the fact that blacks are more than 60 times as likely to be killed by other blacks than by cops of any race. Narrative, after all, trumps facts. 

A major political party went so far as to use Ferguson to boost black turnout in the November elections – without any condemnation whatsoever from a president and attorney general who otherwise are quick to decry any real or imagined irregularities in the electoral process. Once again, neither the politicians involved nor their media cheerleaders saw fit to note that there was no evidence of racism in Brown’s death. 

The responsibility for the shootings in New York rests with the shooter. 

But the responsibility for the worst racial climate in two generations lies largely with the demagogues in our nation’s leadership who are too busy whining about the horrors of being mistaken for a valet to do the hard work of confronting the country’s toughest challenges.

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