“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” —John Adams (1770)

Democrat Party leaders insist there is an epidemic of racist police violence against black people, the result of “systemic racism.” They have spent the last six weeks blame-shifting decades of their disastrous leftist urban policy failures onto police officers based on the criminal actions of one bad cop in Minneapolis. That has, with their intervention, unleashed a flood of looting and violence across the nation.

As I have noted previously, those in charge of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, where an MPD officer detained a drug thug, George Floyd, under his knee, and who later died, are ALL Democrats. But leftists never let facts get in the way of their political agenda, especially when they can use all the hate as fodder to defeat Donald Trump in November.

(Update: Floyd’s autopsy determined that his “blood contained a fatal level of fentanyl,” and that, combined with methamphetamine, caused Floyd’s lungs to fill with fluid – which is why he could not breathe. It is likely he would have died on the scene regardless of whether he was being held on the ground or in the patrol car.)

Blame-shifting to the men and women in blue, who are on the front lines protecting Americans from the effluent of generations of Democrat policies, is a deadly ruse, given the black-on-black slaughter taking place every day in our major cities. That is not a “police problem,” and every person involved in the diversionary protests, ostensibly about the death of one Minneapolis resident, have the blood of THOUSANDS of mostly black men, women, and children on their hands.

Blaming cops has resulted in a couple of immediate consequences.

First would be the escalating assaults on law enforcement officers, and the mass resignation of police nationwide. They risk their lives every day for ungrateful legions, and their leadership’s failure to back them is, for many, the last straw.

Trump has uniformly backed law and order, and for that reason, the National Association of Police Organizations, which had previously endorsed Obama/Biden twice, announced its endorsement of Trump’s reelection bid. The NAPO, which represents over 1,000 police associations and 241,000 sworn officers nationwide, praised Trump for his “steadfast and very public support” for law enforcement. The endorsement letter, signed by NAPO President Michael McHale, acknowledged the importance of having the president’s support “during this time of unfair and inaccurate opprobrium being directed at our members by so many.”

The second would be the fact that when Beltway and big-city Demos pander to the racist “Burn Loot Murder” (BLM) radicals, bowing to their hateful Marxist and black supremacist leaders, while simultaneously throwing their police under the bus, they are throwing their black constituents under that same bus.

We call this the devastating results of this political malfeasance “The Ferguson Effect.”

They have unleashed an epidemic of violence, including the murder of children. This has been most evident in big cities like New York, where Mayor Bill de Blasio leads the “defund the police” parade. That prompted former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly to declare, “We have de Blasio here for another 18 months and that’s very, very discouraging.” According to de Blasio, the dramatic increase in crime last month, the bloodiest June in 24 years, was the result of tension caused by COVID-19 social-distancing policies.

Sidebar: For the record, New York, our nation’s largest city, has become a socialist cesspool under Bill de Blasio (formerly known as Warren Wilhelm, Jr.). De Blasio is the effluent of his elitist socialist parents, Warren Wilhelm Sr. (Harvard and Yale) and Maria De Blasio (Smith College), both of whom had government jobs but were accused of being communists. His father left when Warren was seven, and later committed suicide, which de Blasio claims prompted him to take his mother’s maiden name. After de Blasio’s marriage to a radical leftist lesbian Chirlane McCray, they honeymooned in Cuba. He was an outspoken backer of Nicaragua’s murderous Marxist Sandinistas, even traveling to Nicaragua to show his support. According to The New York Times, de Blasio returned from that visit with “a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.”

When asked in a 2017 New York Magazine interview why he has not made greater strides toward “income inequality,” Mr. de Blasio replied, “What’s been hardest is the way our legal system is structured to favor private property.” He added: “I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be. I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too.”

Back on topic, in Chicago, the weekend after George Floyd’s death, there were 25 murdered — the deadliest weekend in 60 years. Chicago crime researcher Max Kapustin noted, “There’s suddenly this vacuum that opens up” once cops stand down, and “you see an absurd amount of carnage.”

Last weekend, there were 15 more people murdered in Chicago, including two children. That prompted CPD’s chief of operations, Fred Wallerblack, to protest: “Where is the outrage? Our babies are being shot. These are our babies.”

Where has the outrage been for all those black folks murdered every year for decades?

In his recent letter to the Chicago mayor Illinois governor, Trump wrote: “Your lack of leadership on this important issue continues to fail the people you have sworn to protect…. More Americans have been killed in Chicago than in combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq combined since September 11, 2001, a deadly trend that has continued under your tenure.”

In Washington, DC, 11-year-old Davon McNeal was murdered. “[His parents] lost this great, beautiful boy,” said Demo Mayor Muriel Bowser, “because someone senselessly shot up his neighborhood.”

Well, they’ve been senselessly shooting up your neighborhoods for decades and under your watch, mayor. Thanks for finally noticing.

In Atlanta, where eight-year old Secoriea Turner was murdered by BLM activists, Demo Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms declared: “We are doing each other more harm than any police officer on this force. … You shot and killed a baby. You can’t blame this on a police officer. You can’t say this is about criminal justice reform. … Enough is enough. If you want people to take us seriously and you don’t want us to lose this movement, we can’t lose each other.”

But Bottoms and other Demo mayors can’t be taken seriously because they have been ignoring black-on-black violence every day they have been in office — until now — and have turned their back on police with devastating consequences.

Black citizens have been “doing each other more harm than any police officer” and “losing each other” in staggering numbers for decades, and only now are they concerned because this might overshadow “the movement”?

So why the newfound concern for black lives that haven’t mattered before? Well, it could be a genuine awakening — a moment where some Democrat politicians are lifting up the rest of the lives being taken every day in their systemically impoverished urban centers. That awakening does not comport with the Democrat Party narrative.

Make no mistake, the faux “concern” is a layup for Joe Biden’s effort to frame all the “gun violence” as a “gun problem” in order to advance the Left’s assault on the Second Amendment.

According to Biden: “We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.” The presumptive Demo nominee is clearly trying to pick up where Obama’s “fundamentally transforming the USA” left off. But Biden is no Barack Obama. In fact, he is a far more dangerous threat to Liberty because he is viewed as a docile non compos mentis dupe. However, unlike Obama, Biden will be a puppet for the most radical Marxist elements in our nation’s history, a political trojan horse for the far Left.

That notwithstanding, the Left’s dangerous assault on law enforcement, and by extension Rule of Law, is based on myths, a web of BIG Lie fabrications.

Let’s first look at the claim that cops are racist and that there’s an epidemic of racist police shootings of black people. The fact is, based on the findings of the nation’s leading researcher on crime, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, there is no such epidemic.

According to Mac Donald’s exhaustive research: “The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019. The number of unarmed Black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began. There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total. Ideally, officers would never take anyone’s life in the course of their duties. But given the number of arrests they make each year (around 10 million) and the number of deadly-weapons attacks on officers (an average of 27 per day in just two-thirds of the nation’s police departments),” there is no evidence of an epidemic of racist police shootings.

That is confirmed by a National Academy of Sciences study that found no such racial link. As Mac Donald concludes: “It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley notes: “Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. … Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force, and that the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior. The problem isn’t a shortage of data but a race-based narrative that is immune to any data that challenge it.”

Indeed, as Mac Donald notes, “The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization.” According to the latest data, “Nationally, African Americans between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of white Americans.”

After a lifetime observing how leftists manipulate black constituents, Walter E. Williams notes, “The true plight of black people has little or nothing to do with the police or what has been called ‘systemic racism.’” He adds, “We need to look at the responsibilities of those running our big cities.”

So, what happens when police are condemned by their political leaders and told to stand down? Mac Donald, author of the definitive book The War on Cops, notes in a report this month: “Today’s violent-crime increase — call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect — has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned — but the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history. Every day, another mainstream institution — from McDonald’s to Harvard — denounces the police, claiming without evidence that law enforcement is a threat to black lives.”

(Read more in the Law and Liberty study on “Race, Crime, and Policing in America.”)

Further, Mac Donald has thoroughly documented the interracial crime disparity. According to the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of criminal victimization (2018), Mac Donald notes: “There were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations … between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.” This disparity is better understood in context when considering that black Americans represent just 13% of our population but perpetrate 90% of violent interracial crimes – and adult black males who committed most of those crimes represent less than 3% of the population.

Mac Donald adds: “That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democrat claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.” Mac Donald concludes: “Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50 percent — according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.”

Equally alarming is the fact that, in the latest year for available data, where victim race was known, there were 4,884 white people murdered and 6,318 black people murdered — and black-on-black assault is much more prevalent than white-on-white. The overall murder trend dropped substantially since 1993, though it ticked up in 2010 and in 2015. But again, the fact that black citizens are 13% of the population but their murder victim rate is 22% higher than for white victims should be the starting place for every meaningful conversation about resolving the racial disparity associated with violence.

This gross racial disparity in criminal assailants is not a new issue, as made clear by a 2015 Harvard study on black-on-black violence. In that study, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted: “Ninety percent of all people killed in our city — and 90 percent of all those who commit the murders and other violent crimes — are black and Hispanic. It is shameful that so many elected officials and editorial writers have been largely silent on these facts.” Review again what the Democrat police chief in Milwaukee said about this disparity in 2014, which we covered here, after a racially charged death of a black man by a white officer.

Further, this racial disparity is also true in other crime categories, which dispels the assertion that somehow prisons have more black inmates because of “systemic racism.” And regarding those policies, the most alarming data on murder is that the suspect in 88% of black murders is also black.

In other words, not only is interracial violence predominantly perpetrated by black offenders, but violent assaults on black people are predominantly perpetrated by other black people.

Mac Donald notes the inconvenient truth about black assailants: “Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic murder victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. Blacks between the ages of ten and twenty-four are muderef at twenty-five times the rate of whites between those same ages. Their assailants are not the police, not other whites, but other blacks.”

Don’t expect to hear a single objection about either of those issues from Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer. Democrat politicians studiously avoid any discussion of this disparity because it would require studious consideration of the Democrat policies that have created it.

Unfortunately, the fact that violent black assailants are far more prevalent in inner cities is the data-driven reason why police officers of any race often approach black suspects with a greater sense of caution — they simply want to survive their shift.

Of course, as I noted at the top of this column, leftists never let facts get in the way of their political agenda.

As for the epidemic of blame-shifting, Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, observed last month, “Politically, there are few ideas more potent than the notion that all your problems are caused by other people and their unfairness to you.”

He also declared flatly, “Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on Election Day.”

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Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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