It has the feel of war, does it not? I guess we would identify the players roughly as police everywhere against police antagonists everywhere. It's as if angry factions of Americans decided not to wait for any authority to make a declaration and just decided on their own to start fighting and killing each other.
I don't think this is what's really happening, but it sure feels that way when you wake up to news like this out of Dallas:
Police said there are at least four suspects after snipers shot at least 11 police officers, killing 5, in a downtown area of Dallas where protests had been taking place Thursday night. One civilian was also injured. Police also suspect bombs may be planted in downtown Dallas. The FBI and ATF are on the scene, canvassing for explosives.
It is the worst mass shooting of police officers in American history and the deadliest day for police since 9/11, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. There have been 51 police officer fatalities in 2016, 21 of which have been “firearms related.”
The shootings occurred during a rally in which a crowd of about 800 protested the recent police shootings of black men — Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota. The Dallas Morning News reported the shots were fired around 9 p.m. local time near the intersection of Market and Main streets, which is near the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza. The protesters were marching from the Belo Garden Park to the Old Red Courthouse.
So far, no evidence has surfaced of protester involvement in the deadly assault or of any connection between the protest and the killings.
If it's possible to say there's good news here, it would be that three of the four suspects are in custody. Police remained in a standoff with the fourth as I was writing this. One woman said she brought her children to the protest, figuring it would be a "positive experience" for them, but it "turned negative." You think?
In addition to the shooters, you can lay the murder of these five police officers directly at the feet of the news media. Here's why:
Individual incidents that occur in this country are no longer presented in a straight factual manner. They are now crammed into the media's favored political narrative, regardless of whether the facts actually support that narrative. The media's favored narrative is out-of-control racist white cops are running wild shooting black men. Every time a black man is shot by the police, the media immediately report it through the lens of that narrative, knowing full well that massive protests will spring up and that, as happened in both Ferguson and Baltimore, they may very well turn violent.
Both the prominence of the coverage and the level of sensationalism that attaches to the coverage are directly in the service of this narrative. Sometimes the shootings in question have some facts that seem to fit the narrative. The one in St. Paul in particular looks awful from what we know so far, although the idea that it was racially motivated is 100 percent supposition. The one in Louisiana is harder to assess from what we know. The ones in Ferguson and Baltimore were sold as fitting the narrative but turned out not to be even close.
It didn't matter. Either way, the narrative had to be serviced above all else, and the notion of cops as enemies of the people was further advanced. I know the media didn't tell these four men to take up arms and shoot the cops, but they enthusiastically fed the notion that cops in general are out for black blood - and that gave these guys the rationale they needed to commit mass murder.
The Dallas cops had done nothing to anyone. It didn't matter. They were cops, so according to these cretins who bought the media's narrative, they had to die.
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Let me use a different news story to illustrate my point: Remember when Kermit Gosnell's abortion butcher shop was discovered in Ohio? The national news media were predictably slow to pick up on the story, and at one point someone asked then-Washington Post health care reporter Sarah Kliff why she was completely ignoring it. She said she didn't cover "local crime stories."
In other words, she didn't want to cover it, so by categorizing it as a local crime story, she gave herself the excuse she needed not to. The shootings of these men by police are by definition local crime stories, yet the media are all over them. Why? Why doesn't the Sarah Kliff principle apply? Because every shooting of a black man by a white cop now fits a national media narrative, or to put it another way, they want to cover it so they do. They don't want to cover things that reflect negatively on the practice of abortion, so they don't.
I'm not saying the shootings necessarily shouldn't be news at all. I'm saying the prominence of the coverage is not driven by the story's actual importance, but by the agenda of those doing the reporting. They're trying to whip up anger and resentment, and as you see in Dallas, they're having tremendous success. Racial strife is the news media's favorite story, and if none is happening organically, they will make it happen.
They should be very proud of themselves, I guess.
It has the feel of war, does it not? I guess we would identify the players roughly as police everywhere against police antagonists everywhere. It's as if angry factions of Americans decided not to wait for any authority to make a declaration and just decided on their own to start fighting and killing each other.
I don't think this is what's really happening, but it sure feels that way when you wake up to news like this out of Dallas:
