Don Lemon on CNN: Stop Demonizing People; Blame White Men
“We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white-guy ban. So what do we do about that?”
Um...I love ya, Don...but...uh...
Look, facts are facts and they have to be faced, regardless of how unpleasant they might sound or be. And unpleasant facts about race aren't racist merely in virtue of being unpleasant. So if Lemon's right, he's right.
Thing is...he's not really right. Whites are still a majority, vastly outnumbering any other racial group, so it'd be pretty crazy if they didn't commit the most crimes of any given type. Without worrying too much about recent fluctuations, here are two facts that make it a bit weird...to say the least...to focus too much on white dudes in this context:
First, black men commit a radically disproportionate percentage of all murder in the U.S.
Second, Middle Eastern men commit a radically disproportionate percentage of terrorist killings in the U.S.
So, if you insist on going all racial on this sort of thing, you've gotta explain why you are skipping over those two facts.
The vocal vanguard of the progressive left loves to spew anti-white rhetoric, and isn't too concerned about getting the facts straight, nor referencing the most salient of them. Given how enthusiastic they are about their anti-white and anti-male propaganda, it's a bit hard to believe that they aren't racist and sexist...but I'm not sure I want to get sucked into that game right now. There's more than one possible explanation, and it's complicated. Such things are matters of degree, anyway, contrary to leftist theories.
But Don Lemon's never given me the slightest reason to think he's racist. So I expect his is just an honest error--or maybe not even an error but a quirk of emphasis?--on his part. Or maybe he's been mislead by the drumbeat of anti-white, anti-male propaganda on the left, and he mistakenly thinks he's speaking truth to power. Or maybe I'm just making excuses because I like the guy.
Also, he's not exactly an intellectual powerhouse...which is, of course, racist to admit...because...uh...it's a stereotype?...and...stereotypes are...never true? God knows...
I suspect that the more-or-less open contempt for white men and the problems they face is likely responsible, at least in part, for the emergence of the "alt-right" and similar phenomena. The cultural superstructure has begun to express anti-white and anti-male sentiments pretty openly and commonly, even as it treats other groups with kid gloves and even reverence, wallowing in official theories of their mistreatment...at the hands of...well...you know who... And imagine an article in the New York Times discussing the scientific and cultural achievements of white guys qua white guys... Also, reflect on the the dust-up consequent on people posting "It's okay to be white" signs... Obvious double-standards are repulsive. As is pissing on someone's leg and insisting that it's raining.
Incidentally, there was no reason to end up where we are now. For most of my life, people erred on the side of just not dragging race into things if they really didn't have to. I mean...we all did a lot of cheerleading for women, gays and nonwhites...but basically we tried to cheerfully ignore the subject to the extent that we could. But the new progressive left basically harshes on whites, males and straights recreationally...and as a matter of principle. The actual rates of the relevant crimes give them plenty of reason not to try to use the numbers as part of their anti-straight, white, male jihad. Because the numbers just don't say what they want them to say. So the race card gets played in a fruitless and destructive way, stirring up things that didn't need to be stirred up.
OTOH, the Vox-y crowd might say that Trump stirred things up, and they were just responding. I don't find this response absurd, but I don't find it very powerful, either. And I'm tired of typing.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:40 AM
1 Comments:
There's also a hidden no true scotsman fallacy in comparing white terrorism to migrant terrorism in the US, because you're artificially limiting the category of criminal activity to a very unusually defined category of "terrorism". Most migrants to the US come from central and south america, and the cost of that migration in terms of criminal activity is mainly around gang activity (MS-13 is the most brutal example, but there are tons of others). There's simply no native analogue to that among whites. The Hell's Angels just ain't that big.
Also, if we were closer to the Middle East and North Africa, like, say, Europe, the migrant flow would suddenly become much different, and the cherry-picked statistics would suddenly be much more clearly obtuse and moronic. No one will say the primary domestic terror threat in Europe is among whites. And white people significantly outnumber Muslims even in Europe.
These aren't hard observations to come by. In fact, anyone with modest intelligence spending a day on an article or show prep should be able to come to them (it took me like 2 minutes). So it's hard for me to presume the Don Lemon's and Vox's are acting in intellectual good faith here.
(There are of course other egregious errors, like artificial time bounding and not weighting the attacks by lethality, if our time horizon simply moves back to 2001 for instance...)
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