5

WHY BLACK LIVES
MATTER HATES ME

I love black people. I love black people so much, my Grindr profile once said “No Whites.” Alas, some black people—the ones conned by Black Lives Matter—don’t love me as much as I love them.

And after everything I’ve done for the black community! I’ve lost count of the number of black guys I’ve personally lifted out of poverty. (Admittedly, I send them back the next day in an Uber.) Sometimes I get depressed just thinking about it. But then I remember that Black Lives Matter are only a small, vocal section of the black community, bankrolled by malicious progressive white billionaires and elevated by a disingenuous press.

Really, Black Lives Matter should be thanking me. In August 2015, I published a story on Breitbart highlighting the extraordinary case of Shaun King, who was then claiming leadership of the movement (as were Johnetta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson).

King claims to be half-black, born to a black father and white mother. However, a closer examination of King’s family tree by blogger Vicki Pate revealed a shocking truth in King’s birth certificate: it identified Jeffrey Wayne King, a white man, as Shaun King’s father.

It also identified Shaun King as ethnically white.¹⁰⁴ That’s right: a self-appointed leader of Black Lives Matter, who attended a historically black college, on an Oprah Winfrey scholarship targeted at disadvantaged black kids, had—according to his birth certificate—a white mother and a white father.

For more than two days after I reported on the questions about Shaun King’s background, King tried to ignore the issue, blocking people on social media who brought it up and refusing to answer media questions, despite massive international interest in the story. Finally, in an article for the left-wing blogging platform Daily Kos, he delivered the only argument that had a chance of getting him out of the scandal: that his mother had an affair with a light-skinned black man, a man King could not name.¹⁰⁵ The implication was clear: King had no idea who his father was, and had thus been making representations about his ancestry he could not justify.

My response to King’s claim that his mother had slept around was simple: take a DNA test. If his claims were true, taking a DNA test and putting its results on the public record would have put the matter to rest once and for all. He still hasn’t done so.

As it turned out, these explosive racial allegations are just the latest in a string of controversies surrounding Shaun King. On July 21, Daily Caller reported that his account of a “brutal, racially-motivated beating” in 1995, which at least two reports have described as “Kentucky’s first hate crime,” did not match up with a police report from the case.¹⁰⁶

“King, 35, has related the story of the hate crime on his blogs and in his recent self-help book, seemingly to bolster his credibility as an activist and as a self-help guru,” wrote Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross. “While King has said that he was attacked by up to a dozen ‘racist’ and ‘redneck’ students, official records show that the altercation involved only one other student.”

“And while King has claimed that he suffered a ‘brutal’ beating that left him clinging to life, the police report characterized King’s injuries as ‘minor,’” Ross reported.

Left-wingers, especially on campus, are fond of faking hate crimes to boost their own public profiles and bolster support for their political causes. But King was doing far more than that—he was using his position as one of the unelected figureheads of Black Lives Matter to drum up sympathy, and ultimately line his own pockets.¹⁰⁷ In an America where victimhood is a currency, it’s highly profitable to be oppressed.

King’s story is mirrored by that of Rachel Dolezal (aka Nkechi Amare Diallo), who built a career in the NAACP by pretending to be black. After she was exposed, Dolezal claimed she “identified as black.” Months before the Dolezal story broke, I joked that after transgender people, the next frontier of left-wing identity politics would be transracial. I didn’t expect to be proven right so soon.

Unlike Shaun King, Dolezal did not attempt to convince anyone that she was ethnically black. She might have succeeded had she done so. But she didn’t, and as such she attracted huge volumes of hatred from BLM in return for her honesty. I felt sorry for her, more than anything. Her case is ridiculous, and I was happy to ridicule it, but it’s also sad.

Sad, but not surprising. The Left has made victimhood prestigious, profitable, and in some respects almost revered. Even with all the legitimate problems faced by black people in America, it makes sense that some people would pretend to be members of the race to reap all the attendant rewards.

With all the benefits that come with victimhood, it’s little wonder that so many wealthy and powerful people do so much to sustain the political edifice that supports it. The Black Lives Matter movement, indisputably the primary vehicle for black victimhood today, is a campaign propped up by hundreds of millions in donations of grants, including $33 million from progressive billionaire George Soros.

The point of these donations is strictly to advance the cause of identity politics and racial division. It can often seem as though BLM isn’t so much a black civil rights movement as an anti-white hate group.

Black Lives Matter does nothing to serve the black community or black lives.

Worse, it does extraordinary damage to both.

THE POLICE PROTECT BLACK LIVES

There is a malicious, violent force in America that seems to kill only black people and ignore whites. Its presence can be felt in every city. In some areas, this threat means black people cannot walk the streets without fear of being shot.

This force isn’t the police. It is inner city gangs, who are primarily black themselves. The numbers are indisputable, and yet just for printing them in this book, I’ll be deemed a racist. Between 1980 and 2008, blacks made up 52.5% of homicide offenders, despite making up just 12.2% of the population. In the same survey, it was found that 93% of black homicide victims were killed by other black people.¹⁰⁸ Black Lives Matter focuses exclusively on deaths caused by the police, yet these are far eclipsed by the black deaths caused by other black people.

In 2014, there were 238 black deaths at the hands of police, a number sensationally reported by Raw Story as “more black deaths than on 9/11.” But in the same year, there were 6,095 black victims of homicide—more homicide victims than any other race, and double the 9/11 death toll for all races. And virtually all those black homicide victims died at the hands of other black people.

The dramatic gap between deaths at the hands of police and deaths at the hands of other black people raises the question of why Black Lives Matter focuses its energies exclusively on the police, and so-called “white racism.”

Like the men’s health gap, the black murder gap is very real, and simply isn’t discussed by black activists. I suspect it’s a matter of tribalism, or ingroup/outgroup psychology, a common occurrence in politics. Like feminists who blame their everyday grievances on an invisible “patriarchy,” or Wi-Fi-enabled Waffen-SS wannabes who think Jews are responsible for everything bad, or Democrats who blame the Russians for Hillary losing the election to Daddy. It’s very easy to dodge responsibility if you have a boogeyman to lump the blame on.

Leftism, which combines tribal identity politics with a disdain for personal responsibility, is the ultimate political expression of this destructive instinct to blame other people for your problems, instead of undergoing the difficult process of self-reflection.

BLM isn’t just ignoring the murder gap—they’re making it worse. Whenever Black Lives Matter torches another (usually) black neighborhood, police are left with no option other than withdrawing from proactive policing until tensions cool. That means fewer patrols in black neighborhoods and fewer stop-and-searches of black people, which would save black lives.

It can be almost impossible to reason against Black Lives Matter-inspired action, peaceful or otherwise, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. But I’ll try anyway.

In 2015, after Black Lives Matter rioted in Baltimore, the city suffered its deadliest year in history, with 344 homicide deaths in 2015. Progressives at Raw Story were wringing their hands over 238 black deaths caused by police officers across the entire country the year before. Baltimore’s black deaths passed that number by 106—in just one American city.

At first, the Left vociferously denied that there was a spike in violent crime across America caused by the rolling back of proactive policing in response to Black Lives Matter. Those of us with common sense knew otherwise, and we called it “The Ferguson Effect.” Eventually, the evidence grew so compelling (10 heavily black cities saw a homicide surge of over 60%¹⁰⁹) that even Vox admitted the problem was now “too clear to ignore” and grudgingly conceded that the Ferguson Effect was “narrowly correct, at least in some cities.”¹¹⁰

Black Lives Matter claims that police hurt black people. It is true: police shootings disproportionately affect black people—they make up 26% of police shooting victims, despite making up roughly 13% of the population.¹¹¹ But as has been tirelessly pointed out by every conservative journalist who covers this topic, they are also vastly overrepresented in crime statistics.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. When paired with these crime statistics, it’s no surprise blacks make up 26% of police shooting victims. Moreover, it is not always white police officers who are doing the shooting, a fact that casts doubt on claims from BLM activists and progressive journalists that there is an epidemic of white racism in America’s police force. From the same article:

The Black Lives Matter movement claims that white officers are especially prone to shooting innocent blacks due to racial bias, but this too is a myth. A March 2015 Justice Department report on the Philadelphia Police Department found that black and Hispanic officers were much more likely than white officers to shoot blacks based on “threat misperception”—that is, the mistaken belief that a civilian is armed.

A 2015 study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway, formerly acting director of the National Institute of Justice, found that, at a crime scene where gunfire is involved, black officers in the New York City Police Department were 3.3 times more likely to discharge their weapons than other officers at the scene.

On the rare occasions when police officers do shoot a black suspect, they’re just as likely to do so if the officer is black. Or even if the officer is a Black Lives Matter activist! Whenever black critics of the police have dared submit themselves to “use of force” simulations, which put participants in police scenarios where the use of force against a suspect is an available option, they end up pulling the trigger just as often as white policemen.¹¹²

There are white people that Black Lives Matter should look up to, and they’re not Shaun King. They’re Heather Mac Donald, the tireless Manhattan Institute researcher who has outlined the damage done to black lives by the Black Lives Matter movement in meticulous detail (many of the citations in this chapter are from her work). They’re Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, whose proactive policing caused gang violence in the city to plummet, saving countless black lives. Or Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is The New Black, who used her experience in the U.S. penal system to create a national conversation about prison reform. And they’re the hundreds of thousands of police officers, of every color, who patrol America’s streets at night, preventing young black men from murdering each other and their neighbors. Black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter. If they did, they wouldn’t focus on police-related deaths, which make up a tiny part of preventable black deaths. They would focus on the problems of their own community, rather than dwindling “white racism.” Above all, they wouldn’t force police off America’s streets.

The great truth obscured by the media and left-wing politicians is that police are not the enemies of black lives, but their greatest defenders.

THE FACTS

Not even a proud dissident conservative like me would deny that there are real, enduring issues in America that make it more difficult to be a black person. If I were a partisan hack, I’d shy away from making that admission.

Unlike the largely bogus complaints of feminists and gays, who at this point are largely privileged classes, some African-Americans, especially women, are still second-class citizens in America.

Education is a prime example. Schools in America are still largely segregated—black pupils overwhelmingly go to schools in lower-income neighborhoods, where class sizes are large, the standard of teaching is poor, and gangs prey upon adolescent boys, especially if they distinguish themselves academically. In 83 out of 97 large American cities, the majority of black students attended school where most of their classmates were low-income. In 54 of those 97 cities, that majority number was over 80%.¹¹³

Fixing America’s schools would go a long way to solving the deep-seated issues that cause black people to remain stuck in a cycle of crime and poverty. But unlike the angry, tribal politics of Black Lives Matter, the political dividends of such reforms could only be reaped in the very long term. Efforts to fix America’s weakest schools, as George W. Bush discovered when he attempted to do so, typically cause more political damage than support.

The problem of black schools is part of a wider maelstrom of disadvantage faced by black people in America. Black children are more likely to live in inadequate housing, are more likely to grow up in conditions of relative poverty, and more likely to have uneducated or poorly educated parents—one of the strongest indicators of future academic and professional success.

You’ll notice “parents” is plural in the previous sentence, but 70% of black children are born to single women.¹¹⁴ Black fatherlessness is widespread and socially and educationally devastating for black children. Furthermore, black children are more likely to grow up surrounded by crime, which makes them more likely to fall into the lifestyle themselves, and more likely to be affected by crime, which has a host of ramifications that affect educational attainment, including absenteeism and stress. Real stress, not the “triggering” that feminists experience when they encounter something they disagree with.

Then there’s the war on drugs, which needlessly puts hundreds of thousands of black people in jail. Entire generations of young black men have been lost to the prison system. It must end. If Black Lives Matter’s main purpose was instituting prison reform, I’d carry one of those dumb protest signs myself, but I assure you my sign would have much better production value than these activists can muster.

I don’t claim to have the answer to these problems, but I won’t pretend they don’t exist. In fact, Republicans need to take these issues seriously. I’m no libertarian, but it’s no surprise that Senator Rand Paul was polling so well with black voters before he dropped out of the Republican presidential race in 2016.¹¹⁵ Paul’s proposals for drug reform, prison reform, and education reform were specifically designed to address issues in the black community.

Discussing continued racial disadvantage in America will be frustrating for conservatives who are sick of constant, bogus complaints about racism. But that’s no excuse for ignoring the facts. The Left responds to uncomfortable facts with handwringing and denial. It’s time for the grownups to take control. Disadvantage does still exist, and something has to be done about it.

The Left is only making it worse, with ill-advised welfare programs that try to fix black poverty by throwing money at the problem. I know somewhere in this country there’s a brilliant conservative mind that has just the solution, but he is too fearful of being called a racist to bring it to the table. I hope this book will show him you can’t let idiots get in the way of real progress.

THE NARRATIVE

Black Lives Matter is instructive, because it illustrates how the political and cultural establishment can spread misinformation even when the truth is in plain sight. Anyone can access the information needed to debunk the selective truths promulgated by Black Lives Matter.

But that takes time and effort. Activists, cultural elites and the mainstream media know that most people have too much going on in their lives to fact-check the narrative. Especially if the narrative is blasted out of every TV network, broadsheet newspaper and online social network.

Take, for instance, the most popular slogan of Black Lives Matter: “hands up, don’t shoot.” The genesis of this rallying cry came from the death of Michael Brown, a black man, at the hands of Darren Wilson, a white police officer.

The prevailing narrative of this sad event is that Brown was surrendering to Wilson, with his hands in the air, when Wilson needlessly and fatally shot him. This story came mostly from Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown at the time.

The problem is, multiple witnesses, as well as all the evidence, show that this narrative is a lie.¹¹⁶ Brown didn’t have his hands in the air; Johnson simply made it up. His lie led to massive riots throughout the country. Incredulously, mainstream media continues to pedal the “hands up don’t shoot” lie, with the exception of conservative voices, even RINOs like Megyn Kelly. Johnson has never been punished in any way for his lie, nor the riots he directly caused, and the narrative that Officer Wilson shot a man who had his hands up continues.

There is perhaps one major mainstream newspaper—The Wall Street Journal—that regularly publishes articles critical of Black Lives Matter. Virtually every other publication is completely on board with the poisonous message that America’s police officers, one of the most important groups defending black lives, somehow have it in for black people.

Here’s a selection of op-eds from mainstream outlets published in the past two years:

Washington Post: “Black Lives Matter And America’s Long History of Resisting Civil Rights Protesters.”

New York Times: “Dear White America.”

Chicago Tribune: “I Never Have To Worry I’ll Be Shot in Chicago. I’m White.” (This article amazingly manages to talk about the problem of gang violence while simultaneously condemning allegedly overzealous policing.)

You know, if I was fed a constant stream of articles telling me that the world hated me because of the color of my skin, I might burn down a city or three. But I don’t read the white supremacists at Daily Stormer. I don’t believe my race is under siege. Unfortunately, African-Americans rarely hear anything else.

I tried reading Ta Nehisi-Coates Between the World And Me, a dreadfully dull book/letter he wrote to his son. In it, Coates explained how he’d grown up in a bad neighborhood and had to be tough to survive. Incredulously, he went on to lament over the fact that his son would grow up to be treated…like he’d grown up in a hard neighborhood and thus had become tough. Between the World And Me won a National Book Award only because it was so unreadable. Everyone assumed that meant it was brilliant. It wasn’t.

Progressives have considerable power to shape the narrative. They control the mainstream media, all the prestigious awards, Hollywood, and the commanding heights of the new social media economy. If they were so motivated, they could use this power to create inexorable pressure to solve the real issues of America’s black population.

Instead, they’re using it to push Black Lives Matter, one of the most destructive movements in the country’s history.

And you know, it’s actually worse than that.

RACISM

Whenever you reveal truths about problems in the black community, or call out the hypocrisy of the cherished Black Lives Matter movement, as I have done above, charges of racism are not far behind. This is compounded by my level-headed analyses of the alt-right, which has led media organization after media organization to brand me a “white nationalist”—almost always followed by a groveling apology to me and a public retraction after my lawyers get in touch.

The Left in America is so stupid that they seem to genuinely believe that “disagrees with Black Lives Matter” is the same thing as “hates black people and wants a white ethnostate.”

Racism is the second most absurd of all the charges the Left has foolishly used in their futile attempt to sink the Battleship Milo, with the exception of the few leftists who are desperate enough to insult my hair.

Literally the worst thing I’ve ever said to or about a black person is: “Not tonight baby, I have a headache.”

In addition to the fact that I’m part Jewish, and thus have no love for anyone who hates or discriminates against minority groups, have you seen the people I sleep with? They come in a lot of colors, and very few of them are hues of white.

The Left’s usual response is to resort to a cliché. “Having black friends doesn’t mean you aren’t racist!” The reason they use this argument so often is because it eliminates the best possible defense against charges of racism. My question to people who make this argument: if it doesn’t satisfy you that I spend time with, make love to, and, for Heaven’s sake, fall in love with, black men when nothing is forcing me to, what would persuade you that I’m not a racist?

I already know the answer. Nothing.

Many of the most cherished people in my life are black men. Because I love and respect them, I believe they deserve truth, not lies, in the face of the harsh reality of black America today. It’s a reality that includes problems created and sustained by the Left, and by the black community itself—as well as real problems of enduring racism. The Left, by contrast, seeks to patronize minorities by preventing them from coming into contact with anything that might offend them.

There’s also the riposte from race baiters that you can be a racist and still sleep with black men because all you’re really doing is “fetishizing black bodies,” whatever that means. Their argument seems to boil down to how much it sucks that everyone finds them attractive. I’ve yet to hear a coherent argument, however, that explains how I could, for instance, get engaged to a black man and still be a racist. I’ve also never seen a black man get offended by the stereotypes about penis size. I guess some stereotypes are larger than others.

Leftists are convinced that my criticism of Black Lives Matter is motivated by racism. But real racists tend not to hide their motivations: they reveal it plainly in their language. Ask a white supremacist if he’s a white supremacist and you will get the answer: “Yes, I am a white supremacist.” (Daily Stormer helpfully puts swastikas and fasces on its front page.)

The same can’t be said of counterparts in the Black Lives Matter movement. Take Yusra Khogali, a leader and co-founder of BLM in Toronto, who described white skin as “sub-human” (she actually used the word “sub-humxn,” the alteration of the word “man” being a popular trend among intersectionalists). She claimed that white people are a “genetic defect of blackness” and that melanin, the pigment that gives human skin its color, “directly communicates with cosmic energy.” Because of this, Khogali proclaimed that black people were in fact “superhumxn.”¹¹⁷ It seems Black Lives Matter is happy to have open racial supremacists as leaders.

Creative biology is nothing new to black supremacists and separatists, like the belief that a black scientist named Jakub created the white race as a “race of devils.” In the past these could be laughed at and considered as loopy as flat-Earth theory. Now believers in this stuff are lauded by mainstream politicians and commentators.

That wasn’t the first time Khogali had made a racist comment on social media, by the way. In February 2016, she tweeted “Plz Allah give me strength to not cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today. Plz plz plz.”¹¹⁸ We don’t need to guess at Khogali’s motivations. Her hatred is plain for everyone to see. Yet the mainstream media seems more interested in trying to explain how a sassy gay British columnist with Jewish heritage and a black boyfriend is the real racist.

There are some who argue that racism against white people doesn’t exist. For a time the top result on Google for “is it possible to be racist to a white person?” was an article from Huffington Post arguing that such a thing was impossible, because racism is “prejudice plus power” and whites “control the system and economic structure in society.”¹¹⁹

I’m not sure this argument would be very convincing to the mentally disabled white kid who was kidnapped and tortured by four black people in Chicago. They livestreamed the ordeal on Facebook, gleefully hurling racial abuse at him (“Fuck Donald Trump, nigga! Fuck white people, boy!”) slapping him, and slicing his scalp with a knife.¹²⁰

I’m also left to wonder if, under this new definition of racism, an immigrant cab driver in New York who doesn’t pick up black guys is a racist. I’d like to see a BLM activist explain how a Pakistani immigrant has any “power” over a black American U.S. citizen.

It’s a bit like walking into a carnival house of mirrors when definitions of words are changed in order to support a bogus argument. Are there black people who hate white people? Yes. Are there black people who think whites are inferior to blacks, and have no problem admitting to it openly and publicly, with no fear of reprieve? Yes. Are these same black people racist? Of course they are.

BLOOD IN THE STREETS

When Lyndon B. Johnson discussed the need to tackle racism in America, he was under no illusions about the gravity of the problem facing the nation. “The Negro fought in the War [World War II],” Johnson reportedly told Horace Busby, an aide. “He’s not gonna keep taking the shit we’re dishing out. We’re in a race with time. If we don’t act, we’re gonna have blood in the streets.”

It’s been more than fifty years since Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, and America has blood on its streets. But it can no longer be blamed on racism—at least, not on white racism.

On July 7, 2016, the black supremacist Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire on police officers in Dallas, Texas, killing five and injuring nine others, as well as two civilians. It was the deadliest incident for U.S. law enforcement since September 11, 2001.

Just ten days later, another black supremacist, Gavin Eugene Long, opened fire on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He killed two officers and hospitalized three others, one critically.

Both Micah Xavier Johnson and Gavin Eugene Long grew up in a society in which university professors, celebrities, and mainstream news outlets told them that the police were racist and wanted to kill them. Both men turned to virulently racist forms of black nationalism, which—unlike, say, Pepe the Frog—receives scant scrutiny or attention by media and political elites. In many university departments, the racist, anti-white views held by Long and Johnson are virtually encouraged.

Both men are individuals responsible for their actions, but it would be simplistic to argue that they weren’t also products of their environment and the messages they were bombarded with since birth. While the progressive Left harangues white twerkers and dreadlock-wearers as racist, and while the establishment media wrings its hands over alt-right memes, black people in America are being fed a diet of anti-white, anti-police hatred that, inevitably, spills over into violence.

The greatest tragedy is that the primary target of this violence is the police, one of the greatest, largely unacknowledged allies of black communities. It is the police who stand between black people and the greatest threat to black lives: gang violence. It is the police who disperse black rioters when they’re burning down black neighborhoods. And, amazingly, cops will continue to do both, despite seeming to receive only contempt in return.

When violence is committed against the police, it doesn’t discriminate by ethnicity. The two NYPD officers who were shot “execution-style” at the height of Black Lives Matter unrest were Asian and Hispanic.

I’m proud to enjoy the support of police officers and other men and women serving America. I am never more humbled and grateful than when I receive praise from these people, who risk and give so much for their country, often in return for nothing but scorn from the public and politicians. Few things rustle my jimmies, but this persistent injustice is one of them.

Black Lives Matter hates me, and I hate them. But I don’t hate them because they pose a threat to white people. I hate them because they do precisely the opposite of what they claim to do. They cause more black lives to be lost, not less. And they do so by attacking the one group of people trying to help their communities.

The people who really ought to hate Black Lives Matter are black people.