Black Rhetoric Matters

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has dared to go where most politicians have feared to tread. In a recent CBS interview the mayor got on a roll about the race problem in America and said a lot that's hard to deny but doesn't often get said:

It's hard to believe that John Dickerson, the CBS interviewer, isn't aware of the rhetoric at some of the Black Lives Matter rallies. Here, for example, are BLM demonstrators demanding dead cops:

Here are BLM demonstrators chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon."

And then there are people like this woman calling for the murder of whites:

As Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review:

[T]here is something particularly vile and disgusting in the way many of the leading masters of sanctimony keep changing their standards. When a registered Democrat and Muslim murdered people in Orlando in the name of ISIS, it was outrageous to suggest that maybe we shouldn’t point fingers at Christian conservatives or the NRA.

When Gabby Giffords was shot by an utterly apolitical schizophrenic, Paul Krugman blamed it on Michele Bachmann’s “eliminationist rhetoric.” The Democratic party almost en masse blamed it on some crosshairs on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. The Orwellians leapt out of their bunkers and started memory-holing martial metaphors.

But now, I gather, any suggestion that rhetoric from Black Lives Matter influenced these murderers is beyond the pale.

Barack Obama does nothing to help matters whenever he cites statistics like these:

According to various studies — not just one but a wide range of studies that have been carried out over a number of years — African-Americans are 30 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over.

After being pulled over African-Americans and Hispanics are three times more likely to be searched.

Last year African-Americans were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites.

African-Americans are arrested at twice the rate of whites.

African-American defendants are 75 percent more likely to be charged with offenses carrying mandatory minimums. They receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than comparable whites arrested for the same crime.

So that if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.

The problem is not that his numbers are wrong, but that he misleads by neglecting to give them any context. The sentencing stats, for example, make no mention of the circumstances of the arrest, whether the suspect was cooperative or defiant, whether he had a prior record, or any of the other factors taken into account when a sentence is handed down.

In any case, BLM, or at least a lot of people who associate with them, have blood on their hands, five good men are dead in Dallas as a result of rhetoric like theirs, and Giuliani is correct to identify them as haters.