Kevin Drum is a liberal blogger but is always worth a read. He was with Mother Jones. He now appears to be on his own with his Jabberwocky blog. When liberals mocked Republicans for making the national security case regarding admitting scores of Syrian refugees, Drum said that stance was “absurdly out of touch.” He also said Senate Democrats forced him to side with the National Rifle Association when the Left wanted to push prohibiting those on terror watch lists from buying guns. There are serious constitutional issues with this policy, the least being the lack of due process and transparency. We had cub scouts get on this list, folks.
And he also noticed how schools in Irvine, California, which reopened last September, really didn’t suffer a COVID spike. Drum is a liberal, he’s just not insane.
Recently, he noticed something while analyzing FBI data on hate crimes since we’re a nation whose media establishment is obsessed with racism. Anti-black crime is dropping—and it’s not a little dip either. It’s a massive drop:
A number of people, including me, have posited that the Obama era produced a white backlash that eventually elected Donald Trump president. There’s some evidence to support this, but it sure doesn’t show up in the hate crime statistics. Hate crimes against Black people plummeted by nearly half during Obama’s term and have pretty much stayed there ever since. This is despite the fact that presumably the Obama administration put a greater focus on hate crimes than either George Bush or Donald Trump.
Violent assaults on Black people have gone down by nearly half since 2005, far more than violent assaults in general. In this case, however, the decline has been fairly steady over the entire period.
The FBI is not the only authority on hate crimes and the NCVS is not the only authority on victimization. Still, they’re generally well respected and use the same methodology from year to year. This probably represents reality pretty well.
I have been accused—rightfully—of constantly telling you that things are better than you think. The reason is simple: Whenever I look into something, it very often turns out to be better than the media focus would have us believe.
In the graph, he noted that the number of racially-motivated incidents deemed anti-black went from 126 per million in 2004 to 70 per million in 2019.
Could it be better? Sure. We all could do better on the issue of race. We just can’t have that discussion now because liberal America is projecting a narrative for which the data simply does not exist. Why? It’s because white liberals are doing what they do best: being on the wrong side of an issue. Not even black Americans have the same feelings on the issue of racial resentment as white liberals, who go off the charts on this question. The Manhattan Institute did a lengthy study on the social constructs of racism in America and found that ideology is one of the key factors in determining your view on this subject. They also found that black men were more likely to die in car accidents than being shot and killed by police. I know, they’re truly skirting on the edge of being canceled by the woke Left. They provided nuance and data to back up their claims and analyses.
You probably already knew the ideology hook to this, but it’s interesting to see how deep this issue goes. The Skeptic Research Center found that 44 percent of liberals thought that 1,000 unarmed black men were shot and killed by police last year. It was actually 27. And this misinformation feeds into and infests the wider Democratic-media establishment, which claims that America is an irreparably racist country that is becoming a shooting gallery thanks to white guys who can’t stand nonwhites. The data doesn’t support that claim.