By Larry Johnson –
Been waiting for the dust to settle before giving you my thoughts on last night’s massacre in Dallas. Watching the news last night around 6:30 pm EDT it was clear that most of the media was hell bent of ginning up public outrage over the meme that Whites are Racists and want to kill young black men. The most recent events–the shooting of a recently released sexual offender in Louisiana and the shooting of a black driver in Minnesota–had the media salivating. By God, they could push their political agenda and get ratings at the same time.
You could sense the excitement as protests “broke” out in New York City, Washington, DC, Minneapolis and Dallas. The media cretins would never admit this out-loud but they were secretly longing, filled with intense desire, to broadcast images of police clubbing young black men into a bloody mess. Can you spell Pulitzer?
The media propaganda campaign happily chose to ignore several key facts.
For starters, as I noted above, the fat guy shot in Louisiana was not exactly a model citizen. Had a criminal record and was carrying, probably illegally, a firearm. None of that was brought up.
The police responsible for shooting the motorist in Minnesota was actually a Latino (at least he, Jeronimo Yanez, appears to be). He is NOT WHITE. But you did not get that message. The media’s meme was the Police, shorthand for white racists, brutalize black people for nothing. Although many more black people were shot in Chicago over the Fourth of July holiday weekend than have been shot by police in the last three years, the media story is that every cop is on the prowl to shoot them a nigger.
One little glitch to this meme is that many police and many police chiefs are African Americans. The ain’t black, they’re blue.
So, as the protests got underway the cable news shows lined up their various racist pundits ready to pontificate on why racism is bad. Geez. I certainly could not figure that out without the assistance of Van Jones or Spike Lee.
Anyway, I flipped on Megyn Kelly’s show to see what was going on and the very first report came in about a shooting in Dallas. Those images were stunning. The cameraman was close up on several police vehicles that had clearly been raked with gunfire. A tire was flat and the front right bumper of one police cruiser was shredded. And laying on the ground were at least four police officers. All but one were face down, not moving. They looked dead.
Normally Fox is not very good with breaking news. They have been weak on that front in my view. CNN has been quite good. Imagine my surprise when I popped over to CNN and they were still beating the meme of Racist Cops and innocent Black Men. In fact, Fox had the story for at least 15 minutes by my watch before CNN finally woke up and realized there was blood in the street in Dallas.
Even then there was the secret hope that this was a cop gone crazy or a member of the KKK or, better yet, Corey Lewandowski. God. Wouldn’t that be ratings heaven? The fired Trump campaign manager living out the media’s racist fantasy.
Then the horror of what was taking place began to sink in and the damn Dallas Chief of Police refused to cooperate with the meme. An articulate, good looking black man with a commanding presence, almost a military bearing, stood up and took control. Damn him!! He was destroying the meme of racist cops. It is easy to sell the racist cop meme when the guy in front of the camera is a fat southerner that sounds like a reject from the Dukes of Hazard. But this Dallas Police Chief came across like Sydney Poitier without a sense of humor. Serious, thoughtful, tough and thoroughly professional.
When it became clear that the shooters were black, not white, then the media fantasy theme for the evening was obliterated completely. Blue Lives suddenly mattered.
It did not help that our Chief Racists, Barack Obama, had weighed in earlier to decry the shootings (still waiting for his comments on the slaughter in Chicago by black gangs) in Louisiana and Minnesota. He helped stir the pot and promote the racist meme.
Here is the reality. There are a very small number of bad actors out there who wear a badge and carry a gun and are genuine racists. Then you have a much larger number, still a minority, of improperly trained police who get into situations like Louisiana and Minnesota, where they either panic or accidentally pull the trigger. The majority of police, however, come from all races, include men and women, and try to do their thankless job in a professional manner. But that is not the picture the media, especially most of the cable shows, want to present. They prefer to create the fantasy that we are still living in Mississippi in 1963 and that cops wake up each morning eager to turn a waterhole on all these uppity, nappy headed Negroes.
One final point. The actual protests last night were very small. That did not stop the cable shows from intimating that these were large, mass movements of angry people.
America has problems, but that has more to do with the lack of quality leadership. When we are looking at Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump as our present and future leaders it is troubling. But the age of racism is over. This is not the Jim Crow South. But if you are relying on CNN and MSNBC to figure that out you will be deceived.