I Can't Breathe
David Horowitz delivers a tour de force.
[Order David Horowitz's new book -- I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America: HERE.]
Consider the following facts outlined in David Horowitz’s new book, I Can’t Breathe: How A Racial Hoax is Killing America:
Every year, more than 10 million arrests are made by police departments nationally. In 2019, 14 unarmed blacks and 25 unarmed whites were killed by police. A 2001 Justice Department report stated that “when a white officer kills a felon, that felon is usually a white…and when a black officer kills a felon that felon is usually a black.” Nothing has changed in the years since then, the report states.
Autopsy reports show that George Floyd could not breathe at the time of his containment by police because of the lethal dose of fentanyl that he had voluntarily ingested into his system.
A 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that of all suspects killed by police from 2003 to 2009, 41.7 percent were white, and 31.7 percent were black. In this period, blacks accounted for 38.5 percent of all arrests for violent crimes—that is, the type of crime most likely to trigger potentially deadly confrontation with police.
Horowitz further points out that the evidence that police do not shoot and kill African Americans in disproportionately high numbers has grown stronger. In 2017, blacks were arrested for 37.5 percent of all violent felonies, but were just 24.7 percent of people killed by police. Corresponding figures in 2018 were 37.4 percent and 26.4 percent. In 2019, the numbers were 36.4 percent and 29.3 percent.
Horowitz writes:
If we look at the raw numbers of fatal shootings by police in recent years, we find that more whites than blacks are killed by police every single year, without exception. In some years whites account for twice as many victims of police shootings as blacks… while blacks make up only about 13 percent of the U.S. population, they commit nearly 40 percent of all violent crimes and more than half of all murders, statistics which would predict a significantly higher rate of police shootings of blacks than we actually see.
It’s hard to argue with the facts. Horowitz does a dispassionate job of looking at the cases of blacks claimed to be unjustly shot by police. He judiciously examines the circumstances surrounding the shootings, outlining the never-before nuances and details of the attenuating circumstances that gave rise to the deaths of these individuals. His book analyzes the riots, murders, vandalizations and planned mayhem orchestrated by members of the Black Lives Matter movement that ensued after the death of George Floyd. The book is a deep-dive into the nature of the movement, its goals, and the targets its members have in mind as models for destruction.
This book is a tour de force. It is not journalistic minutiae that constitute the bad behavior of a significant, uncivilized segment of our populace. Horowitz is no statistician of gutter trivia.
This book, above all, describes the new metaphysics of politics overtaking our republic. This new metaphysics we may call systemic nihilism. It is not the garden variety nihilism that is bent on destruction for the sake of destruction. This is strategic destruction with the purpose of bringing our citizens to the brink of a civilizational and psychological breakdown. The strategic destruction Horowitz describes that the rioters deployed—mainly under the auspices of Black Lives Matter and Antifa – was enacted for the sole purpose of establishing a new socio-political order: one that will change the political DNA of our country; one in which systemic violence is normalized and mainstreamed; one in which traditional institutions like courts of law and law enforcement agencies are demonized as a matter of routine because appraisals of them as evil are viewed as unassailable truths. To change the socio-political DNA of a country facts must not only be ignored. As Horowitz has shown, they must also be deemed racist, stacked, and biased in strangely hidden ways that are obscured from the normal criteria to which transparency and scrutiny avail themselves.
The attack on our civilizational institutions and the principles that undergird their foundation must themselves be seen as intrinsically racist and designed to keep minorities outside the domain of the ethical and the human community. The rioting and looting and murders of police officers are erected as a morality play in which the riotous players have no choice but to act as they do because they are pitted against (in their minds) an irremediably evil status quo. The major players here, BLM, are regarded as having the upper hand because their case is presented as a zero-sum game. For them, the whole edifice that constitutes justice is a vicious charade with built-in entrapments. Its alleged appeal to an objective reality, in their minds, is a fictitious construct that betrays the lived experience of existential plights created by the racist status quo: it must be destroyed. There can be no reform, no modifications, no appeal to a dialogical method of reasoning together as Americans. The Big Lie must be exposed.
Against the backdrop of facts, however, Horowitz’s book—aside from showing the massive collusion of the Democratic party and the left in general in spawning, aiding, and abetting these racial hoaxes—leaves us asking some profound questions.
Why do so many of us, in knowing the facts, at worst, suspend all lucidity of thought, dispense with evidence, and give a moral blank check to the destroyers of our civilization? Why do so many well-meaning Americans become not just blind, but willfully blind to the facts and support their destroyers? Why have so many Americans, knowing the national security threat BLM poses to our civilization, continue to pay unconscionable lip service to its agenda—knowing full well its members advocate the destruction of the nuclear family, the breakup of U.S. banks, and the advancement of a Marxist-communist state? How could such a significant percentage of Americans have lapsed into this type of psychosis?
Horowitz has laid out the existential, political, and socio-cultural map for us to raise such questions. It is up to Americans to look within and answer them.
Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago specializing in ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, and moral psychology. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center. Dr. Hill is the author of five books, including “What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression.” Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.
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