I have
not watched any of the videos out of Minneapolis or listened to any of the
commentary. I have not watched because I resent having to watch only
one genre over and over again. This is the genre in which a white
antagonist, presumed guilty at the outset, kills or injures a black
protagonist, presumed innocent.
More than 15,000 Americans were murdered in 2019, but no movies for
national release were made about blacks killing blacks, the most common
scenario. Nor were any made about blacks killing whites, Hispanics,
or Asians. In fact, these movies are generally suppressed.
No, only one genre of movie
is allowed. In
recent years, we have seen the Trayvon movie; the Ferguson movie; the Baltimore
movie; and, for comic relief, the Jussie Smollett movie among
others. The most lethal of the movies was the one filmed in
Ferguson. The most dishonest one was the Trayvon movie, filmed on
location in Florida.
In 2019, in his film and book The Trayvon Hoax, filmmaker
Joel Gilbert proved beyond any doubt that the State of Florida's star witness
in its murder case against George Zimmerman, Rachel Jeantel, was an
imposter. Gilbert enlisted a private investigator, as well as two
prominent handwriting analysts, an audio expert, and a forensic DNA
lab. After poring through page after page of text messages, phone
calls, tweets, Facebook messages, high school yearbooks, and crime reports,
Gilbert was able to find the real "phone witness," a
then-sixteen-year-old Haitian-American hottie Trayvon knew as
"Diamond." Diamond had the good sense not to regurgitate
the media's false narrative under oath.
A Pulitzer awaited the intrepid reporter who followed Gilbert's
leads, but the media were not about to reshoot this movie. Not a
journalist could be bothered — not in New York, not in Orlando, not even in
Miami. Only twelve minutes elapsed from the time Gilbert sent an
email to the Miami Herald's managing editor asking for his help to the time
Gilbert was told, "Thanks for reaching out. We are going to
pass." The ensuing email flurry from the Herald newsroom
quickly built to Category 5 level contempt, and this was Miami,
Trayvon's home.
The fact that Trayvon's mother, Sybrina Fulton, undeniably at the
heart of the conspiracy, was running for county commissioner did not pique the
media's interest. Nor did the fact that her co-conspirator, attorney
Benjamin Crump, has gone on to star in several subsequent movies, including
Minneapolis.
In Ferguson, only the media were corrupt. Not too long
after Michael Brown was shot, I spent an afternoon with the officer involved in
the shooting, Darren Wilson, pushing his infant daughter in her swing,
reviewing his past, and assessing his future. He had no job and no
prospect of getting a job, certainly not in the St. Louis area, at least not as
a police officer. Were it not for the courage of St. Louis County
prosecutor Bob McCulloch, a Democrat, Wilson suspected he would be in
prison. McCulloch's grand jury introduced too much legitimate
eyewitness testimony for the DOJ to ignore. Grateful Democrats
responded by defeating McCulloch in the next primary.
The cops got the picture. They
knew they too could face termination, lawsuits, criminal charges, and death
threats, all driven by the mandates of mob justice. They knew, as
well, that the political class, from President Barack Obama on down, would
gladly throw them to the wolves to preserve the peace.
Nationwide, but especially in cities where rioting followed lethal
police-citizen encounters, cops instinctively began to pull back from actively
policing black neighborhoods. Sensing opportunity, criminals moved
into the void. Attorney
and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has dubbed this phenomenon
the "Ferguson Effect."
Observed Mac Donald in
a 2016 Washington Post column, "Arrests, summonses and pedestrian stops
were dropping in many cities, where data on such police activity were
available. Arrests in St. Louis City and County, for example, fell
by a third after the shooting of Michael Brown. Misdemeanor drug
arrests fell by two-thirds in Baltimore through November 2015."
At an emergency session of police chiefs held a year after the
Ferguson incident, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel explained the phenomenon to Attorney
General Loretta Lynch. "[Cops] don't want to be a news story
themselves," said Emanuel. "They don't want their career
ended early, and it's having an impact."
The impact was deadly and
undeniable. According
to FBI data, the murder rate in the United States declined steadily from 2006
to 2014 except for a minor blip in 2012. As a result, there were
three thousand or so fewer murders in 2014 than in 2006.
After Brown's death in August 2014, the trend sharply reversed
itself. In 2015, the murder rate rose nearly 11 percent, its
greatest one-year jump in a half-century. In 2016, the trend
continued with an 8.5-percent increase over the year before. What this means is that nearly
three thousand more Americans were
murdered in 2016 than in 2014, an estimated eighteen hundred of them
black. After Donald Trump took office, the murder rate began
to decline once again.
Missouri proved particularly
vulnerable. There, the spike began almost immediately after the
August 2014 shooting in Ferguson. As a result, St. Louis had the
highest murder rate in the nation in 2014, a dubious honor it held through
2017. Statewide, the murder rate nearly doubled from 2014 to 2017,
and there was no good explanation for the surge in Missouri or nationwide other
than the "Ferguson effect."
I'm sorry George Floyd died in Minneapolis. He may well
be as innocent and the cop as guilty as everyone says, but until the media try
to undo the damage created in Florida and in Ferguson, I have no interest in
helping them create a "Minneapolis Effect."
