The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley appeared on the panel of Special Report with Bret Baier last night (video below). He commented on President Obama’s statement on Ferguson (and Iraq) earlier in the day. I can’t find a complete transcript at the White House site; the Washginton Post quotes it in relevant part here.
It was a statement full of the reigning leftist clichés, even retrieving the “anger” of “looting” and “carrying guns” from the dustbin of the sixties. Frantz Fanon must be making a comeback among the White House speechwriters. What next? Perhaps R.D. Laing and The Politics of Experience. You know, reality is crazy, man, and mental illness is a path to transcendence.
RealClearPolitics posts a transcript of Riley’s comments:
We don’t have all the evidence and I’m hesitant to try and litigate this in the press, but there’s also this false narrative being pushed out there by folks like Michael Eric Dyson and [Al] Sharpton and the rest of the hustlers is that black men live in fear of being shot by cops in these neighborhoods. That too is nonsense. I know something about growing up black and male in the inner city and it’s not that hard to avoid getting shot by a cop. They pull you over, you answer their questions, you are on your way.
The real difficulty is not getting shot by other black people if you are a young black man in these neighborhoods and again that is something we need to talk more about. Cops are not the problem. Cops are not producing these black bodies in the morgues every weekend in Chicago, in New York and Detroit and so forth. That’s not cops. Those other black people shooting black people.
Riley’s new book is Please Don’t Help Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
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