A Dangerous Mockery

The latest round of race riots, this one in Charlotte, turns out to have been sparked in part by the blatant mischaracterization of a justified police shooting and deliberately escalated by non-residents. Emily Zanotti of Heat Street notes of the incident reported to have sparked the "outrage:"

Yes, the journalists who've come to North Carolina (just for a few days) are determined to expose police officers as abject racists, and to focus their institutional biases on Charlotte and the South as a whole. They also keep omitting, rather conveniently, the key detail in the Charlotte story: the officer who shot Keith Lamont Scott is also black.

Another detail about the shooting that has gone missing is that the police confiscated a firearm from Scott. Zanotti further elaborates on the usual tired stereotypes about the South "really" being run by bigoted white troglodytes and reverting to its "true" character -- despite the massive cultural change that has largely reshaped the region over the past few decades.

Regarding the rioters themselves, a blogger at Zero Hedge notes something that has been going on since Ferguson: many of the most violent "protesters" are arriving from elsewhere to create mayhem. He quotes from a CNN interview with a local police union spokesman:

"This is not Charlotte that's out here. These are outside entities that are coming in and causing these problems. These are not protestors, these are criminals."

"We've got the instigators that are coming in from the outside. They were coming in on buses from out of state. If you go back and look at some of the arrests that were made last night. I can about say probably 70% of those had out-of-state IDs. They're not coming from Charlotte." [bold in original]

The post goes further to finger George Soros as bankrolling this travesty, but it is clear that many journalists are dupes at best and accomplices at worst.

For a more comprehensive analysis of the many deceits behind this mockery of a real civil rights movement, I refer you to Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, whose book, The War on Cops, is a must-read.

-- CAV