A Tale of Four Crimes: The Legacy of Liberalism

Tyre Nichols was a 29-year-old black man who died three days after five black police officers beat him brutally for suspected reckless driving in the city of Memphis.  Ben Crump, a high-profile attorney, who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and others, was also representing the family of Tyre Nichols.  In his comments, Crump implied that race was a factor.  But how could that be?  Blacks attacked a black.  

It is worth comparing how cops treated George Floyd, in Minneapolis.  Here, there were four officers, two white, one Asian, one black. Floyd resisted arrest.  The officers struggled to get him in the back of the car.  He did not cooperate.  He then left the vehicle on the other side.  Because he had difficulty breathing, he asked the cops if he could get on the ground.  The cops did not throw him to the ground.  None of them used racial slurs or abused him in anyway.  He died because he had overdosed on fentanyl. His blood fentanyl level was 11ng/ml, nearly four times the lethal dose.  It was not the knee on the back of the neck.  The cops used standard protocols in subduing Floyd. They called the ambulance and helped Floyd after the medical team arrived.   

The five black officers approached Tyre Nichols very differently.  They screamed at him and shoved him.  When he ran away that infuriated the officers.  But he may have had good reasons.  It was not so much that he was resisting arrest, but that he feared the cops, which turned out to be correct.  

The Tyre Nichol’s case did not create anywhere near the national outrage that you had with George Floyd even though in this case the police behaved far worse than the officers in the Floyd case. The reason is that the police on the case were the wrong race.  They were not white and so did not fit the desired narrative.  And that’s where the racism comes in.  It is not in the police departments; it is in the media and in our dominant institutions.  Not only is the media biased against whites, they are also biased against police.  

There was another case of bigoted media coverage of the police.  This was an incident that occurred in California.  The individual who died was Anthony Lowe Houston, a 36-year-old black man.  The Houston story was unique in that he’s a double amputee.  He was in a wheelchair and the police shot him to death.  He lost both of his legs from the knee down because of a previous altercation with police in Texas. The news stories, all say the police shot him while he was running away.  The implication was that the police had no reason to shoot him, and that he wasn’t a threat.  But when you look at the circumstances, it’s not that straight forward.  

First, the police were arresting him because earlier he stabbed somebody in the chest with a 12-inch butcher knife.  The person he stabbed was Hispanic.  It was difficult to find this information because it disturbed the approved narrative of white racism and instead demonstrated black violence against another “protected” minority.  The man has been identified as Ramiro.  He is a warehouse worker and a father of four and didn’t know Anthony Lowe.  He reported that Lowe pushed himself out of his wheelchair and came running up on his knees and shoved a knife into his side just below the armpit, puncturing his lungs.  He almost died and was in surgery for four hours.  A police officer saved his life by applying pressure to the wound and reassuring him while they were waiting for an ambulance.  

So, a police officer saved a man’s life, and no one in the media mentioned that.  They were more concerned about those officers who took somebody else’s life. Again, the life they took was an individual who attempted to murder Ramiro. His motivation for killing a complete stranger was unknown.  That doesn’t justify the police shooting him, but other things may have.  

First, the police received a call that a man in a wheelchair just stabbed somebody.  They saw the wheelchair and the man.  Furthermore, he runs away, while brandishing a 12-inch butcher knife, which he’s already stabbed one person with.  His action and words at the time were threatening to the police. The police ordered him to stop and drop the knife.  He continued to run.  He threatened to throw the knife at the police.  So, they shot him.  All the coverage, however, is of the mistakes the police made.  But Lowe resisted arrest, stabbed someone he never met, and did not drop a deadly weapon when ordered to do so.  

Another story also illustrates the hypocrisy of the media and the racialist crowd. It involved a cyclist, in California, who was hit by a car and died.  He didn’t die as a result of being hit by the car however.  He died because the man driving the car got out of it after he ran into him and stabbed him to death.  He was a 58-year-old doctor named Michael Mammone, a married father of two.  He worked in the trauma department in an emergency room.  Mammone was white; the one who violently murdered him was black, a 39-year-old man named Vanroy Evan Smith. There had been no prior contact between them.  The final twist in this matter is that while Smith was stabbing Manning to death, a bystander reported that he was shouting about “white privilege.”

This story was not covered at all in the national news.  But what if the doctor riding the bicycle happened to be black and the man driving the car was white; and if witnesses reported that as this white man was violently murdering the black cyclist, he was screaming racial slurs.  It would have been a national story.  But because the race of the murderer and the victim do not fit the narrative, there was silence.  It was not a story the media wanted to tell.  They are looking for examples that prove the narrative they want, of whites killing blacks or police killing blacks and whenever they find one it becomes a major story.  

There are many news stories of racist policemen and non-policemen killing blacks because those are the stories the media want to tell.  But there are many examples of blacks killing whites or Hispanics or blacks killing blacks that do not make the news.  When the only killing appearing on the news are whites killing blacks, or police killing blacks, it creates the perception that it is open season on blacks by whites and police.  This is what the media want people to think.  They want to create the impression that we have a problem with systemic racism in America and with racist police.  

The reason they want to blame “racism” for the many problems afflicting the black community is to deflect from the actual reason.  It’s not racism, it’s government.  It is the welfare state. It is the Democrat party and its failed liberal policies, which have ruined the lives of many blacks.  The Left fears that if blacks discover the reason for their problems, they might become independent and vote Republican.  Sixty years of “Great Society” have inflicted enormous damage on blacks.  It is not “systemic racism,” “racist police,” or the “legacy” of slavery, that has harmed blacks, but the legacy of liberalism.