A (dis)Honest Conversation About Race

Soledad O'Brien claims she wants to have "an honest conversation about race", then proceeds to lie to her audience.

O'Brien tells so many lies of both omission and comission that it would take too long to break them all down, so I'll focus on only one of them.

In a roughly 10-year period in New York [City], approximately five million people were stopped [and frisked] by police. Eighty three percent of them were black and Hispanic men... What does it do to people to be considered a suspect constantly in their own neighborhoods because of the color of their skin?

O'Brien believes that the only reason police officers in NYC - and the rest of the country - stop and arrest more blacks than whites is because police officers are racists. That's a lie. Heather Mac Donald explains why. 

Blacks commit over 75% of the shootings in NYC, even though they make up only about 23% of the population. Whites commit about 2% of the shootings in NYC, even though they make up 34% of the city's population. As Ms. Mac Donald explains, using 2011 and 2012 data...

Blacks are 53 percent of stop subjects, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Whites are 9 percent of stop subjects, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population. Therefore, conclude Stringer and others, the NYPD targets individuals for stops based on their race rather than on crime patterns and suspicious behavior.

...

The claim ignores the reality that the preponderance of crime perpetrators, and victims, in New York are also minorities. Blacks, for example, constituted 78% of shooting suspects and 74% of all shooting victims in 2012, even though they are less than 23% of the city's population. 

Whites, by contrast, committed just over 2% of shootings and were under 3% of shooting victims in 2012, though they are 35% of the populace. Young black men in New York are 36 times more likely to be murdered than young white men—and their assailants are virtually always other black (or Hispanic) males. 

Given such a crime imbalance, if the NYPD focuses its resources where people most need protection, the effort will inevitably produce racially disparate enforcement data.

Police departments that do their job concentrate their efforts in the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates. In NYC, those neighborhoods are largely populated by blacks. Because of that, most of the people the NYPD stops and frisks are black. But Soledad O'Brien blames that on racism.

To illustrate the audacity of Ms. O'Brien's lie, think about this for a second.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 93.3% of prisoners in the US are male. Clearly that must be the result of anti-male sexism, right? Of course not! Obviously, most prisoners are male because males commit the vast majority of crimes. Likewise, the incarceration rate among black Americans is much higher than the incarceration rate among Hispanic Americans, white Americans and Asian Americans (in that order) because the crime rate among black Americans is far higher than the crime rate among Hispanic Americans, white Americans and Asian Americans (in that order).

In her speech, Soledad O'Brien stated that...

You cannot advance good if you don't confront bad, and you cannot seek renewal if you're not willing to dig into the uncomfortable truths about how we got here today.

She's right. But she also refuses to confront uncomfortable truths about crime rates among black Americans, and the reasons for them. Larry Elder doesn't have that problem.

As I pointed out before, fatherlessness is the number one correlating factor among violent criminals...

According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. With regard to girls in particular, those raised by single mothers are more than twice as likely to give birth out-of-wedlock, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation.

And as I also pointed out in that article, and Larry Elder points out in his video, our welfare system promotes fatherlessness by encouraging women to "marry the state". Soledad O'Brien can't admit that crime rates actually are higher among blacks than whites because if she did she'd have to begin asking why that is, and as every "good" "liberal", she supports the welfare state that rewards fatherlessness and therefore promotes criminality.

In his video, Larry Elder relates the following advice his hard-working, WWII Marine veteran father, who was born in the Jim Crow South, gave him.

Hard work wins. You get out of life what you put into it. You can't control the outcome, but you are 100% in control of the effort. And before blaming other people, go to the nearest mirror and ask yourself, "what could I have done better to change the outcome?" 

Those are the words of a man who sees himself as an active moral agent, not a passive, perpetual victim. A truly honest conversation about race would ask black Americans to go the nearest mirror and ask themselves what they could do to change the out-of-control criminality in their neighborhoods, but Soledad O'Brien wants them to blame white people for all their problems and pretend that black crime rates are no higher than anyone else's.

Apparently, Soledad O'Brien doesn't see black Americans as moral agents, which means she sees black Americans as either not fully human, or as perpetual children, which is ironic, considering that she accuses others of racism. A person who sees black Americans as fully adult humans holds black Americans to the same standards to which he/she holds white Americans, not the lower, childlike standards to which Soledad O'Brien holds them.



A truly honest conversation about race in America would include discussions about how embracing a victim mentality, a sense of entitlement and fatherlessness, glorifying thug culture, and rejecting individual responsibility can only lead to violence, poverty and dysfunction.



Jason Riley, who wrote Please Stop Helping Us, converses honestly about race in America. He explains how embracing a culture of underachievement holds black Americans back (6:36 - 9:40), and much more. Listen to his whole speech and the Q&A if you have time.



Obviously, Soledad O'Brien told some truths. The most effective lies are seasoned with truth to make them more palatable. For example, it's true that the Tuskegee Institute found that 3,446 black Americans were lynched between 1882 and 1968. It's also true that even one is one too many.

But even then she lied by omission, because it's also true that - according to the FBI's Unified Crime Report - black criminals murdered 4,585 black Americans between 2014 and 2015. That means that black criminals murdered more black Americans in two years than racist Southerners lynched in 86 years.

Which is the bigger, more immediate problem; 3,446 black Americans lynched over 86 years ending 49 years ago, or 4,585 black Americans murdered over two years right now? Why does Soledad O'Brien focus on a smaller problem that ended 49 years ago, and ignore a much bigger problem that is ongoing right now?

Because focusing on the current, bigger problem wouldn't help her sell her lies.

What makes me think that Soledad O'Brien is lying, and not just wrong? She worked for CNN, and CNN devotes itself to spreading the lie that blacks are perpetual victims, whites are perpetual victimizers of blacks, and therefore blacks are not responsible for any crimes they commit. For example, CNN pushed the "hands up don't shoot" lie.

Source: News Busters

Michael Brown died because he was a violent thug who stole from a store, assaulted a store employee who confronted him, then attacked a police officer, not because he was an innocent victim of police racism. But CNN pushed the lie before knowing the facts, then, even when it was clear they'd pushed a lie, they refused to admit to their part in pushing the lie and suppressing the truth.

More recently, four black suspects (two males, two females, ranging from 17 to 24 years old) kidnapped and tortured a white 18-year-old mentally disabled man while yelling "f**k Donald Trump" and "f**k white people" at him, and live streamed his torture on Facebook.



If you have the stomach for it, you can find the whole video online, but I won't link to it here.

Chicago kidnapping & torture suspects: ABC News.

CNN's Don Lemon refused to call this horrific crime evil.

I don't think it's evil. I don't think it's evil. I think these are young people and I think they have bad home training. 

When I say who is raising these young people, I have no idea who is raising these young people because no one I know on earth who is seventeen years old or seventy years old would ever think of treating another person like that.

See? It's not their fault, even though they're well above the age of conscience. Why would CNN's Don Lemon refuse to call this horror evil? One of his guests, Symone Sanders, gives us a clue.

We’ve talked about white nationalists and white supremacists and the KKK, but there also, when this inflammatory rhetoric is out there, when someone is repeatedly telling you that your community is the worst of the worst, it brings out the worst of the worst in people. 

That is not a hate crime. Hate crimes are because of a person’s racial ethnicity, their religion, their gender, a disability, it isn’t your political leanings, because someone doesn’t like you’re political leanings and they do something bad to you, that is not a hate crime.

See? It's white people's fault. No matter what four black criminals did to a mentally disabled white man, it's not their fault, because the black criminals are victims of racist whites. Clearly, neither Don Lemon nor Symone Sanders see these four black criminals as active moral agents, like Larry Elder's father saw himself and taught Larry Elder to see himself. Don Lemon and Symone Sanders both display the same refusal to hold black Americans responsible for their own actions that Larry Elder, Chloe Valdary and Taleeb Starkes referenced in their videos.

Clearly, CNN is devoted to pushing lies about race in America, and it stands to reason that they hired Soledad O'Brien because she too is devoted to pushing similar lies.

There's another reason that Soledad O'Brien is clearly lying, and not just repeating a lie she believes. Soledad O'Brien is a professional investigative journalist with the resources of one of the world's biggest news organizations at her disposal. What's more likely; that her investigation never uncovered the facts I presented here, or that she omitted them deliberately? Is it more likely that I'm better at her job than she is, or that she omitted facts that contradict the narrative she wants to push?

The answers are obvious.

Why take the time to expose these lies?

First and foremost, because the truth matters... always. Second, because the lies that CNN and Soledad O'Brien are spreading have gotten hundreds of people killed, the majority of them black.

As Heather Mac Donald states in her video, crime rates - especially murder rates - skyrocketed in many US cities when the "Ferguson Effect" - spurred by media lies about endemic racism among police officers - caused police departments to pull back from high crime, inner city, majority black neighborhoods.

University of Missouri at St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld has had "second thoughts." Like many academic criminologists, he had pooh-poohed charges that skyrocketing murder rates in many cities in 2015 and 2016 result from a "Ferguson effect" — a skittering back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of racism like those that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. 

Now, after looking over 2015 data from 56 large cities, he tells The Guardian that he has changed his mind. Homicides in those cities were up 17 percent from 2014. And ten cities, all with large black populations, saw homicides up 33 percent on average. 

"These aren't flukes or blips, this is a real increase," Rosenfeld told reporter Lois Beckett. "The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect."

It gets worse when you look at specific cities. The murder rate in DC increased by 54%. In Baltimore it was 56%. In Cleveland, 90%.

In Chicago, 768 people were murdered in 2016 (as of 27 Dec 2016), compared to 468 in 2015, and 416 in 2014.

How many hundreds (thousands?) of people - most of them black - are dead today because of the lies that Soledad O'Brien, CNN and the mainstream media in general spread?  We'll never know. And Soledad O'Brien, Don Lemon, Symone Sanders and the rest will never care.