Quite the opposite, in fact.
It's really not that hard to sell a lie, provided you've got lots of people who are predisposed to believe it. More than that, who desperately want to believe it because it confirms the agenda they are determined to sell.
If you've got that, all you need is a few anecdotes - you don't even have to present them accurately, fairly or honestly - and that will be enough to get people to run with them and push the idea you wanted them to push.
Here we are. All across the NFL, and now all across the country, you've got celebrities and politicians "taking a knee" to protest the widespread racist brutality being committed by white cops against innocent black people. Even if you don't like people refusing to stand for the national anthem, we're told, you should respect the message because it's so important that we stand against the racist mistreatment of blacks by the police.
There's one problem: It's not true. It's not happening.
Anyone who engages in critical thinking knows that a few high-profile incidents, often related by people who jumped to conclusions, do not make for a statistically proven trend. Even if Ferguson, Baltimore and St. Louis were all what the media tried to make you think they were (which they were not), that still wouldn't prove that this is happening on any sort of widespread basis. For that, we need real crime statistics. The entire time this very public debate has been going on, we've had no such statistics. We've just had sensationalized media stories and people reacting to them.
Now we have the numbers, courtesy of the FBI's latest report on national crime statistics.
So. Is it true that we have a widespread epidemic of white cops shooting innocent blacks?
No. Not even close. In fact, quite the opposite, as City Journal's Heather MacDonald presents in devastating fashion:
Newly released FBI data: There is no epidemic of cops shooting black people
It's really not that hard to sell a lie, provided you've got lots of people who are predisposed to believe it. More than that, who desperately want to believe it because it confirms the agenda they are determined to sell.
If you've got that, all you need is a few anecdotes - you don't even have to present them accurately, fairly or honestly - and that will be enough to get people to run with them and push the idea you wanted them to push.
Here we are. All across the NFL, and now all across the country, you've got celebrities and politicians "taking a knee" to protest the widespread racist brutality being committed by white cops against innocent black people. Even if you don't like people refusing to stand for the national anthem, we're told, you should respect the message because it's so important that we stand against the racist mistreatment of blacks by the police.
There's one problem: It's not true. It's not happening.
Anyone who engages in critical thinking knows that a few high-profile incidents, often related by people who jumped to conclusions, do not make for a statistically proven trend. Even if Ferguson, Baltimore and St. Louis were all what the media tried to make you think they were (which they were not), that still wouldn't prove that this is happening on any sort of widespread basis. For that, we need real crime statistics. The entire time this very public debate has been going on, we've had no such statistics. We've just had sensationalized media stories and people reacting to them.
Now we have the numbers, courtesy of the FBI's latest report on national crime statistics.
So. Is it true that we have a widespread epidemic of white cops shooting innocent blacks?
No. Not even close. In fact, quite the opposite, as City Journal's Heather MacDonald presents in devastating fashion:
Newly released FBI data: There is no epidemic of cops shooting black people
