The deadly art of lying by omission

You can tell a lie by saying something patently false.  Or you can lie by omission, which can be just as dishonest.

“Fatal police shootings impervious to protests,” said the Washington Post front page headline last Tuesday. “Nearly 1,000 killed every year despite nationwide push for justice reform.”

The article feeds the narrative of excessive, racially motivated police violence by omitting a crucial factor:  the incidence of crime. It leaves the impression that police routinely shoot people, especially blacks, for no apparent reason.

There is one outburst of candor, buried inside: “The overwhelming majority of people killed are armed. Nearly half of all people fatally shot by police are white. Most of these shootings draw little or no attention beyond a news story.”  No kidding.

The media have ignored the 17 people killed during the recent riots, nearly all of whom are black, and downplayed the destruction of black-owned businesses.  They don’t fit the racialist narrative.

They also omit the glaring fact that nearly all the recent riots as well as poverty and high crime rates are in cities or states governed for decades by Democrats, who now stage photo ops of themselves kneeling for “change.”  Like other cities, Democrat-governed Chicago has an epidemic of killings of and by young black men, not police.  In 2019, Chicago recorded 493 homicides, of which only three involved police.

In 2018, blacks “made up 53 percent of homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60 percent of robberies, though they are 13 percent of the population,” Heather Mac Donald wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal.

The offenders are a tiny percentage of all the black people in America, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, God-fearing and patriotic.

During weeks of protests following the horrific death of George Floyd, many blacks have told heart-felt stories about injustices such as being stopped for no apparent reason other than being in the “wrong” neighborhood.  I once asked a black friend, a brother in Christ, why he dressed so nattily all the time. He said he had to; otherwise he couldn’t walk freely in largely white areas. “You can wear whatever you want,” he said. “I don’t have that freedom.”

There’s much more, of course.  Prejudice doesn’t go away overnight, and black crime fuels it.  But it’s wrong and even murderous to stir up racial hatred to keep us divided and deny all the good in America.

Back to the Post’s mendacity via omission: “The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police has declined since 2015, but whether armed or not, black people are still shot and killed at a disproportionately higher rate than white people.”

Ignoring the racially lopsided crime stats when tallying police shootings by race is like lamenting America’s huge military buildup from 1941 to 1945 while omitting mention of World War II.

Blacks are far likelier to be crime victims, too, which is why the insane demand by Democrats to reduce police budgets or disband police departments (Minneapolis) will leave more law-abiding blacks to the tender mercies of criminals.

Meanwhile, the ruling elites’ incendiary cheerleading of the war on police is costing more lives as officers are being shot as “payback,” like the five officers executed by a sniper in Dallas in 2016 during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest.

The overt lie is that BLM is a “civil rights group.” No, it’s not.

Founded by three Marxist women (go ahead, check their website) and funded by far-left financiers like George Soros, BLM promotes a communist, “queer,” anti-Christian and anti-Semitic revolution to transform America.  They follow to the letter Saul Alinsky’s admonition to “first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities …. To agitate to the point of conflict.”

No wonder the media love them.

Led by BLM, America is being subjected to a Maoist-style cultural revolution that cancels America’s history and punishes anyone not toeing BLM’s overtly racialist line.  “Silence is violence,” the signs say.  As Arif Hyder Ali wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The lack of personal culpability can’t excuse inaction.”  Everybody is guilty. Forever.

A partner at a “global law firm,” Mr. Ali insists that “international law” requires that American taxpayers owe trillions in reparations.

Here’s another still-active media lie:  President Trump referred to Nazis and white nationalist rioters in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 15, 2017, as “very fine people.”

No, he did not. Addressing reporters, Mr. Trump began this way:

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America.”

He went on, “you have some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. … You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.”

He added, for emphasis, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

For the life of them, CNN commentators and Post writers still can’t seem to find that in the transcript.

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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.