When is someone going to call out the liars in the Black Lives Matter terrorist movement and in the mainstream media who refuse to acknowledge it is criminal lifestyle and cultural dysfunction that leads so many young black men to their deaths?
Why isn’t the popular culture of our country massing to force the truth into the open – that it is thug culture more than any other reason that brings these men to die in altercations with police, or so much more often at the end of some street thug’s gun barrel?
Jesus is quoted in the book of Matthew and pretty much nails it – that those who take up the sword will die by it. To illustrate, just ask the families and friends of George Floyd or Duante Wright or even 13 year-old Adam Toledo, the most recent casket to be carried for the sake of maintaining this despicable aversion to the truth.
All of those families know the truth, but they won’t speak it. If they don’t know it, they’re just flat out stupid. Most of them live it every day. The numbers are there in every annual gathering of crime statistics by the FBI and by local and state law enforcement – and they go ignored.
This lie of omission is the same, over and over, regardless which new name is most recently tossed into the hopper to churn out the newest cops-are-racist, racism-is-the problem storyline.
Nobody ever says something like: “He was living the thug life, and that’s what did him in,” or “if he’d just stayed clear of the drugs and the thugs and put his focus on school instead of the street, he’d probably still be breathing.”
Nobody ever says “if his dad hadn’t been a thug himself, and if he’d stayed around to raise him and teach him right from wrong and how to be a man and how to take care of the woman he’s with and the children he fathers, he would at least have had a better start.”
Yet, what we have is George Floyd with a criminal wrap sheet as long as your arm – posthumously sainted by the BLM movement for dying under the knee of policeman Derek Chauvin – who once pulled a gun on a pregnant woman while trying to rob her drug dealer boyfriend. We have Daunte Wright, not even old enough to buy a legal beer, with a warrant out for his arrest related to an alleged attempted armed robbery in which he tried to steal a female acquaintances’ rent money. He resists arrest at a traffic stop when his warrant is discovered, and a cop mistakenly grabs her sidearm instead of a taser and kills him.
Just over the weekend comes the story of 13 year-old Adam Toledo, who for some ungodly reason was firing a gun in a Chicago neighborhood at 3 a.m. with some other malcontents. Cops show up, he of course runs to ditch the gun he’s carrying and spins toward the pursuing cop, apparently to surrender. Street thug life claims another kid.
Did George Floyd, Duante Wright or Adam Toledo deserve the death sentence they got? No. Did the life track they undertook and circumstances in which they put themselves open the door for their fatal tragedies? Undoubtedly.
Yet the liars will not say so. There is too much political hay to be made on the corpses of these men – too much power to be gained and too much unpleasantness to be avoided. The truth sometimes hurts.
Members of the media are perhaps the most repugnant – it’s supposed to be our job, after all, to speak truth to power. In a CNN editorial, attorney and member of the USA Today board of contributors Raul A. Reyes says regarding the Adam Toledo shooting “There has been a disproportionate focus on the circumstances surrounding the shooting, rather than on the fact that a police officer killed an unarmed child.”
Yet in following coverage of the tearful vigils and the protests of his death, I have seen not a single reporter ask the boy’s mother “why the hell was your son out at 3 a.m. firing a weapon in urban Chicago?
Those questions can’t be broached. Such inconvenient accountability would fracture race-based political alliances and risk drying up the cash cow Black Lives Matter is milking – to the extent recently revealed that one of its Marxist founders is on a shopping spree for high-end real estate in mostly white suburbs. While black men fall by the score to street violence, the only names you know are the ones where a cop – preferably a white cop is involved. Those are the most sellable.
A lie with a purpose is the worst kind, as they say. And the most profitable.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
