Hi everyone,
Don Lemon had the unmitigated audacity to claim that "white men" are a problem because they "believe that violence is the answer." On his YouTube show, he said "Men who look like you, men who vote like you, and men who sound like you, white men, something is broken. Something is cracked deep inside when so many of you believe the answer to fear, to loss, to change is violence. Are you listening to me? I hope I'm saying it loud enough for the people in the back."
He was speaking about the public, political violence that has rocked the nation in recent weeks. A school shooter intent on gunning down Catholic children in Minneapolis; an assassin who trained his sights on beloved conservative activist and leader Charlie Kirk; a young man inspired to murder ICE agents in Dallas, and a Michigan vet who opened fire inside a Mormon church before setting it ablaze were the apparent basis for Lemon's remarks.
These killers were driven to kill over ideological disagreements. But the violence Lemon leaves out, that so much of American media leaves out, is the non-politically motivated violence, the crime inspired violence. This isn't important to Lemon because it doesn't help him make his point—in fact it negates it.
He wants us to believe that innate white maleness is the problem in this country, and he's been beating this drum for a long time. But how often is there black male violence in America? According to the FBI, while "white juveniles comprised 50.3 percent of all juveniles arrested for violent crimes, and black juveniles accounted for 46.4 of violent crimes." The black population in the US is about 14%, whereas the white population is 59%. So how can Lemon justify his claim that white men are the problem?
It's a bogus narrative that is predicated on the victim/oppressor ideology that holds that white people, innately and because of their race, are the bad guys. It doesn't matter to Lemon that the statistics are disproportionate because he and his ilk would say that policing is racist and over-arresting in the black community. It was that view that led to massive riots in the summer of 2020 across the US, which led to a decline in policing across the US, which just led to more crime.
I guess it's not that hard to spout off claims when you can just make up stuff to back them up. The answers, of course, are not to make blanket assumptions about who is at fault based on race or to vilify people because of their race, but to arrest and keep violent criminals locked up.
And as for ideologically based violence, our media, academia, and activists need to stop calling everyone they disagree with fascists, Nazis and all the rest. This rhetoric leads to violence, saying that race is an innate characteristic for violence allows others to feel justified in committing violence against that group.