RUSH: Okay. I want you all to listen to this, and particularly those of you in the audience who are African-American. It struck me when I ran across the story. The story is actually… I found it at Power Line, the great blog. It was written by Paul Mirengoff in this case, but what he’s done, is he found a couple of polls of black people and has analyzed them and reported on them.
It struck me that I don’t see polling data where the respondents are exclusively African-American, and that kind of surprised me. It’s one of these realizations that, “Wow, I’ve never seen that.” Yet you think it happens all the time because what happens is that African-Americans just get lumped in with the Democrat Party because African-Americans vote 93, 95% on average every presidential election for the Democrat candidate.
So it’s assumed that blacks believe whatever Democrats believe, and then — I know I’ve heard it a number of times; so have you — usually a white liberal will get in your face. “You don’t even know what it’s like! You don’t even know what it’s like to be African-American. Go talk to them! They don’t think they’re gonna see their 21st birthday. They think cops are gonna shoot ’em for a bad taillight or something.”
A couple pull quotes from the piece: “[B]ut for African-Americans, Bernie Sanders probably would be the Democratic nominee for president. African-American voters saved Joe Biden’s campaign, even though, as some of his opponents liked to point out, he collaborated with Dixiecrats, opposed school busing, and led the charge for stiff sentencing of drug offenders.
“Michael Javen Fortner, author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment focuses here on black attitudes about the police. Do blacks in America really believe … that ‘they can be killed anywhere at any time by anyone, but especially by [cops]’? Fortner argues that they don’t” believe this.
“When asked, ‘How satisfied are you…'”? Remember, this is a poll of black respondents. “When asked, ‘How satisfied are you with the job your local police department does,’ 21% said ‘very satisfied,’ 51% said somewhat satisfied, 12% said somewhat dissatisfied, and only 5% said that they were ‘very’ dissatisfied. These results do not suggest a complete endorsement of contemporary policing, as many blacks report negative interactions.
“Yet nearly [75%] of surveyed African-Americans report themselves satisfied with their local police departments.” What? Who would believe that? I mean, isn’t virtually everything happening here under the guise of social justice, isn’t it happening because we’re told that African-Americans…? We gotta defund the police departments because African-Americans think that police departments exist only to harm them.
We’re told this. We don’t dare argue it or refute it. “The Washington, D.C. area has a large number of black immigrants from Africa.” Paul Mirengoff writing here. “My impression (and it’s only an impression) is that these immigrants make up a considerable percentage of people who care for the elderly in this area, and are well represented among local taxi drivers.
“I gather they are well represented in certain other job categories too, but it is in these capacities that I encounter them. Do blacks from Africa view America as a racist nation? Not likely. They wouldn’t have come here if they did. My impression (and again, it’s only that) is that these immigrants find America a relatively congenial place.
“They appreciate not just the economic opportunities, but also the presence of order and the absence of rampant corruption. I might be wrong,” Mr. Mirengoff writes, “but I don’t sense that they detest the police or that they want America to be radically transformed.” These are African immigrants in Washington that he’s talking about here.
“But then,” he says, “I doubt that many native African-Americans want this either. Keep in mind that, but for African-Americans, Bernie Sanders probably would be the Democratic nominee,” then he writes about, “Michael Javen Fortner, author of Black Silent Majority, and black attitudes toward the cops. He says This: “‘Polling data suggest that most African-Americans do not share [the] bleak view of their experiences'” that you think they do.
“‘In a 2019 Pew survey, 44% of blacks reported being “unfairly stopped by police” because of their race; 54% said, “No, has not happened to me.” In a Monmouth poll taken after Floyd’s death, 44% of African-Americans reported that they or an immediate family member felt “harassed by police,” but a majority did not share this experience.
“‘When asked, “How satisfied are you with the job your local police department does,”‘” just to repeat, this is Pew and Monmouth, “‘21% said “very satisfied,” 51% said somewhat satisfied…” Folks, that’s a total of 75% somewhat satisfied with the job of local police departments, African-Americans, in 2019. Things could have changed, obviously, but I don’t think that dramatically.
“‘These results do not suggest a complete endorsement of contemporary policing… Yet nearly three-quarters of surveyed African-Americans report themselves satisfied with their local police departments,'” and then it says, “These results shouldn’t come as a surprise. But polling data present at least one counter-intuitive result:
“‘A 2015 Gallup poll found that black adults who believed police treated black people unfairly were also more likely to desire a larger police presence in their local area than those who thought police treated black people fairly.'” That is stunning. Now, admittedly, it’s 2015. But to me, it doesn’t matter. This runs counter to everything we’ve been told.
Why would the color of your skin somehow make you not want a police department where you live? It makes no sense. And yet this is what we’re being asked to believe, that a majority of African-Americans do not want police departments. And this effort to defund police departments in Democrat cities and states is being run in the name of African-Americans, and it isn’t true. But because there’s never any polling data exclusively of black Americans there’s never any refutation of it.
Here’s the conclusion from Mr. Fortner, who did the poll and analyzed it: “‘Elite institutions have committed themselves to a theory, program, and performance increasingly detached from the aspirations, worldviews, and everyday concerns of millions of blacks. Activists have secured pledges to “defund” or “dismantle” police departments, but black Americans haven’t received concrete, alternative public-safety plans to curb violence.'”
In other words, get rid of the cops; it doesn’t make things safer. How are you gonna do that? “‘Most African-Americans clearly desire police reform over abolition. … Any “antiracist” movement that disregards how working and middle-class African-Americans define and pursue the good life is not worth its name.'” Boy, is that ever right. The idea that just because of skin color, certain people don’t pursue, don’t want to pursue, don’t think it’s possible to achieve the quote-unquote “good life”?
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