Rich Lowry, editor of National Review magazine, has a plan for restoring stability to America’s currently troubled inner cities: Arrest and imprison more black people. It’s basically a long-running conservative argument, but can we get real for a minute about how he’s making it?
Here’s the profoundly cynical and callous way that he’s decided to tweak some social media language to argue in Politico that the #BlackLivesMatter movement is “a lie.” Its supporters, he suggests, are opportunistically anti-police and don’t otherwise care about inner city deaths that don’t make national news:
That high-octane trolling is accompanied by an equally cynical take on the underlying problem. Baltimore reportedly saw an uptick in murders in recent weeks, which Lowry blames on police “shrinking from doing their job” in the wake of upheaval over Freddie Gray’s death in police custody. The city’s “dangerous, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods,” he writes, “need disproportionate police attention, even if that attention is easily mischaracterized as racism. The alternative is a deadly chaos that destroys and blights the lives of poor blacks.”
Never mind that a rising awareness of policing problems in America may also have something to do with acute socioeconomic ills, which, you know, destroy and blight the lives of poor blacks.
Rich Lowry. National Review Online
Lowry’s theme ignores the reality of what many Americans have found so outrageous about the cases that have drawn national media attention. Say, the fact that the white cop who instantly shot a 12-year-old black kid and then watched him bleed out on the pavement without providing first aid still hasn’t been questioned by investigators six months after the killing. Or the fact that a black woman whose family called 911 in need of mental health assistance for her ended up dead from police use of force less than two hours later.
Perhaps Lowry should spend a little time watching these 13 videos from the past year that show mostly white cops killing mostly black men who were mostly unarmed. They are a kind of vivid, disturbing evidence that may well bring some different hashtags to mind.
