by Greg Gutfeld
September 20, 2013
Last night, thirteen people were shot in a Chicago park, including a three-year-old boy hit in the head. This is not rare . . . there. Yet the same people who scream about gun control after a horrible mass shooting are always AWOL in these cases.
Both kinds of atrocity suck. The one gets a spotlight and the other, crickets. There are way more victims of daily gang shootings, but they are forgotten by the media and political classes, because it’s easier to condemn a rifle than gangs, for you escape uncomfortable truths about besieged communities plagued by thuggery and government cowardice.
By ignoring the terrible numbers in Chicago, we turn communities into animals, and by animals, I mean sitting ducks—targets at a fairground that’s anything but fair.
You just know the left was hoping that when I said “animals” I was referring to criminals. Which would then be cast as dog-whistle racism. I tricked them—I’m tricky like that.
Is it a statistical coincidence that since the stop-and-frisk law was ruled unconstitutional in New York, shootings rose 13 percent as gun seizures dropped 17 percent? Weird. Perhaps the police reduced frisking for fear of legal hassles, which emboldened prisoners to pack heat.
And who are the victims? Look at communities where stop and frisk was used. It’s the minorities who get hurt. So, if you think about it, ending stop and frisk is a racist’s dream.
Meanwhile, New York has appointed professors to review police behavior, which is like hiring me to write a book on height.
I doubt they see the numbers, too. Although stats speak louder than words, it’s doubtful anyone will listen. If there’s no microphone nearby that can boost their career, then why bother?
Bottom line: Demonize police in neighborhoods full of minorities, and it’s the minorities who suffer.
Now, I admit the stop-and-frisk debate is ongoing, and there’s plenty of ammo on both sides to defend or condemn it. But what’s definitely unfair is assuming it targets minorities, rather than protecting minorities. Most of the communities besieged by criminals are low-income, minority neighborhoods. I don’t see stop and frisk in high-end ’burbs of Atlanta or Chicago, where wealthy blacks live. There goes your racial narrative.
But, as I write this, New York City had another dramatic reduction in murders, in the year 2017. Does that refute the “we need stop and frisk” debate, or is it a sign of something else? I think it’s a testament to the NYPD, a force made up of minorities, doing such a great job under the biggest boob of a mayor—one who is so incompetent he brings out the best in everyone. But also, there is more targeted enforcement, better technology, and really at the thirty-thousand-foot level, you’ve got momentum. Safety breeds safety. As unsafe neighborhoods were rendered newly safe, people moved in and performed the evil of all evils: gentrification! Yes, the mortal sin of white privilege!
The “broken windows” theory maintains that disorder [broken windows and other visible bad stuff] is linked to occurrences of more serious crime. So, as whole ZIP codes gentrify, people just behave better. Which drives the crime level even lower. It happens on a microcosmic level in my own bedroom. When my wife enters the room, I immediately stop breaking wind. I call that the “breaking wind” theory.
March 5, 2014
So, a nomination vote failed in the Senate today. The loser, a staunch defender of a cop killer named Debo Adegbile, was going to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division despite obsessively defending Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had denied the civil rights of a police officer by killing him back in 1982.
Fortunately, the vote failed, but it’s not over. Harry Reid actually voted against it just so he could bring it up again. Creep.
Interesting side nonsense: According to Wikipedia, Debo also was a child actor on Sesame Street during the 1970s, playing the character Debo for nine years. I knew there was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way. I was more of an Electric Company guy. Everyone had jobs, there.
Meanwhile, Maureen Faulkner, the wife of the slain officer, Daniel, wasn’t allowed to testify. That’s how it works. If only she were a victim of oppression, had dreadlocks, and belonged to a death cult, then she would be the cherished radical and documentaries would be made about her instead.
Instead, being widowed by a racist militant doesn’t rate, and the White House now fumes that their guy lost.
For Eric Holder’s balkanized America, race must always win the race, and killers earn respect just by living longer. Gray hair makes the truth less black-and-white.
Look, we get it—every perp gets represented. That’s how it’s done, but this lawyer crusaded, revealing a bitter bias. Worse, his nomination speaks to an administration steeped in its own bias. After all, isn’t the defense of Mumia kind of racist? You think if Mumia was white, he’d be a hero, or if the dead officer was black, would Holder even know Mumia’s fake name? I doubt it.
You can’t build a career on black-on-black crime.
The great story here is Maureen Faulkner, Daniel’s widow, God bless her. She called a lot of senators who were on the fence, got them persuaded.
Her husband would be very proud of her. Even if the media ignores her.
And then the president responded.
He called it a travesty based on wildly unfair character attacks against a good and qualified public servant.
Whatever.
I summarized Obama’s quote here, because the transcription seemed muddled.
Even now, it’s pretty amazing that the widow of a police officer had to make the calls to stop this nomination from being approved. If anything caused the Democratic Party to implode, it’s this ghoulish blind spot that allowed thuggery a sickening lionization, while those who protect us get smeared with the brush of bigotry. People remember this stuff in the voting booth; they just don’t talk about it. Well, I do, it’s my job.
And it never ends . . . see below, my friends.
November 25, 2014
This monologue pertains to the Ferguson riots, a key moment in the growing crisis over our country’s sense of unity, as well as a targeted trust in our nation’s laws, and those committed to enforcing them.
When buildings burn, any sympathy you have left for protesters goes up in smoke, as you hear so many bragging about the attention they get, taunting the police, or deciding which building to burn. I realized that it wasn’t really about injustice, instead it was a conduit for destruction, a time to break things that aren’t yours, and take things that aren’t yours. Racial conflict became an excuse for the purge. A free-for-all of looting, vandalism, and fun.
You’ve got to love creeps who scream for justice after torching a car. And any tool wearing a Guy Fawkes mask is almost always a white male in his late thirties who still air-guitars to Rage Against the Machine. Chances are he didn’t have to get up for work the next morning, because he doesn’t work.
Theory: This is why liberal protests outnumber conservative ones by ten to one—a stat I made up. Conservatives are invariably too busy trying to earn a living. You know, the whole “employment” thing. If you don’t have to get up early to go to work, then it’s just easier for you to go out the night before to trash everything around you. And everything you trash belongs to those poor saps who have to get up the next morning to go work.
But if you burn businesses to the ground in your community, what does that say about your investment in that community? No person who loves Ferguson would burn Ferguson. Of course they are outsiders, but outsiders are simply those out for themselves. It wasn’t their Walgreens that burned, and there is no value if it doesn’t cost you. Looting is redistribution on meth.
I don’t really think “protesters” think that deeply about this stuff. It’s just fun to destroy shit and get away with it. That’s the real unspeakable truth: People like to loot and vandalize because, well, it’s fun.
But what of the other outsiders? The press who flocked to Ferguson, hoping to capture the story in one stark image? That’s their job. But i
t’s an ugly game we perpetuate: We go and they perform. And when all that’s left are cinders, we can return to our cities. Our stores and our cafés will be fine. But Ferguson is done. It’s dead, and you can’t blame the cops for that.
This monologue was a response to the media’s role in encouraging conflict, by casting criminality as a form of protest.
Not only were we seeing people commit crimes in the name of injustice, we actually had a media manufacturing excuses for it.
The network’s complicity here bordered on a form of co-conspiracy. If the media had worried about the stores being destroyed, that’s one thing. But instead, they portrayed rioting and looting as political expression, paving the way for that pendulum swing in 2016. Millions of people realized a simple fact: If there’s a group of people in the media who think it’s okay to destroy property, then we, the public, must stop this at the voting booth. And the solution wasn’t going to be “vote for a Democrat.”
But it must be worth noting again and again: The looting was all opportunistic crime performed not by the citizenry but by their oppressors. No neighbor torches another neighbor’s home or business. But the media chose to portray it as a community, enraged. No, the community had no interest in such nonsense.
Also, this idea that violence is an acceptable form of protest didn’t occur only in these instances, but also on campuses when certain ideas that were presented were deemed offensive, too. The idea of dialogue became an inferior path for the modern leftist. It’s why so many smart liberal professors are finding sanctuary in the welcoming arms of conservatives.
November 26, 2014
In this monologue, I do my best to address both sides of the police brutality controversy. I think I do a pretty decent job, describing this frenetic game of political Ping-Pong. I’m not sure if I accomplished much.
Here are both sides of the Ferguson debate in ninety seconds.
• It’s open season on black youths by cops.
• Actually, no, it’s open season on black youths by black youths, it’s the cops trying to stop it.
• Well, a black youth didn’t shoot that teen, a cop did.
• While the cop felt threatened, the teen was aggressive and high.
• Well, you don’t kill a kid because he’s high.
• Well, he was violent and he attacked the cop.
• Whatever, you’re just going to side with whitey, because the justice system is rigged in this racist society.
• And you say that about everything. What if it were a black cop?
• Well, find me a black cop in Ferguson.
• Well, whose fault is that? The police? Or a culture that advocates hating cops?
• Well, you try being black in a white cop world.
• Well then, why not become a cop and change things?
• Well, why would we want to be part of a corrupt system that’s stacked against blacks?
• That’s a circular argument. You don’t want to change a corrupt system because the system is corrupt. Not being a cop is your copout? Anyway, can we agree on one thing?
• Sure.
• That Darlena Cunha is a big moron?
• Who’s that?
• In Time magazine, she defends rioting as part of the American experience, necessary for the evolution of society. Lucky for her, as a hack for this irrelevant rag, her office was never in danger of being torched by those she defends.
• Yeah, you’re right, she is a moron.
• Well, at least we can agree on one thing. Thanks, Darlena, your stupidity is so vast, it could unite all of America.
Now, I haven’t checked back with Darlena, but I’m assuming she is still a moron, wherever she is. And Time has become a parody of a newsmagazine. Are interns from Riverdale High writing that thing? Or is that an insult to interns from Riverdale High?
But let me digress on a purely hypothetical question: What if a defender of rioting suddenly sees a rock fly through his window? And everything he owns is taken by a laughing mob? Rioting and looting can only be romanticized in the abstract, a delightful place all leftists tend to inhabit. The opposite of the abstract—what I call reality—is just too dangerous a place to hold idiotic ideas that might get you killed. So, you can hold those ideas. You just can’t let them be practiced near you.
December 4, 2014
This monologue examines the death of Eric Garner, but focuses not on the rift between cop and criminal, but on the laws that create this tragic conflict. Garner should not have died—if the laws made sense, he would be alive right now, one predicts. The poor guy was selling loose cigarettes. Why should that be illegal? And why should a cop be forced to arrest him? That’s the real problem, and that problem led to a man’s death. Remember, again: This case began with cops having to deal with a guy selling loose cigarettes on the street, which for some idiotic reason is illegal. Don’t forget it.
Adding the Eric Garner tragedy to other recent incidents is an understandable thing to do, but it’s off. The factors leading to his death are different.
Still, for many people this decision was a shocker. It doesn’t make sense.
We saw the video. But if you look closer, it’s really not about cops versus blacks, but government versus citizens, the nanny state crushing the individual. The grand jury might have screwed up, the tape paints a grim picture—but who knows.
But the cop wouldn’t have approached Garner if the law didn’t make him. I don’t believe for a moment that any man, even a cop, wants to wrestle a 350-pound man over a single damn cigarette.
But let’s face it, most of what cops must do, they’d rather avoid. Policing is a series of tough spots requiring sensitive and constant assessment. So why make it worse with idiotic, stupid laws? I get it, store owners complain about people selling single smokes and the black market in cigarettes is huge because of the crazy taxes. It’s an old story. I used to buy loosies when I was young and broke. But the only way to gain justice from this mess is to cling to the truth.
Tying this to centuries of racism as a way to indict society may work for some, but for people who truly care about the city and not their own rising status, remember this one fact—you can buy one beer but not one smoke. Garner provided for those who didn’t have the fifteen dollars that a pack of twenty required. Unnecessary laws have consequences, and in this case that consequence was death.
Maybe this is one of the helpful tenets of libertarianism. The fewer laws we have, the fewer ridiculous laws we have. And the fewer ridiculous laws we have, the less likely some poor cop will have to enforce them and some even poorer dude will die during such enforcement.
At this point I would like to recommend a book, which I rarely do in one of my own books. It’s called The Impact of Regulatory Law on American Criminal Justice, by Vincent Del Castillo. The book reveals all the ugly consequences of regulatory laws—most important the lack of resources needed to enforce such violations of the law.
I wrote this next monologue after two police officers were murdered in NYC, while they were sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn. They were shot, point-blank, on a Saturday, by a fiend who traveled from out of state, bent on killing officers. The officers were Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. Don’t ever forget them. I’d mention the name of the killer, who committed suicide afterward—but why bother. Right after it happened, I left my apartment, angry and probably tipsy, to see if there were any protests downtown. All I found were the typical milling tourists, and some isolated clumps of devastated, angry cops. I talked to them, but realized they needed no commiseration from me. They had had enough. I returned home to finish my remaining bottle of wine, wondering if this war on cops would ever end.
So Santa came early for cop haters.
Of course, we will be told that there’s no connection between protesters chanting the desire for dead cops in recent city marches and cop killing. Sorry, a bat could see that connection.
I’m referring here to videos of NYC protesters chant
ing “What do we want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now,” among other things, like “Pigs in a blanket—fry ’em like bacon.”
Seriously, what do you expect after months of demonizing the police? Murderers are not a power structure, but chanting death to cops suggests there’s a fan base. The unbridled protest implied official support—a left-wing version of a half marathon.
God bless the cops for not cracking, because I would.
Saturday night I took a walk to City Hall, it was dead quiet.
I realized that the city only supports the outraged when it’s sanctioned by the left. It would be nice to see a large city with unbelievably low crime support those who have made their lives safer.
This is sooo important. Where is the damn gratitude?
But police are victims of their own success. None of these activists realize that cops have done more to save their minority lives than Al Sharpton ever could. After all, those murdered cops were protecting citizens in a high-crime area. It’s heartbreaking how loud Twitter was this weekend and how quiet New York was, on the streets. Maybe it’s time to change that.
A fact lost in this case: Both the dead cops were “minorities,” which of course shouldn’t matter, but with the narrative the media has constructed, it does. The names of these officers, once again, are Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. But in the entertainment/media/academic complex, every cop is assumed to be a white bucket of muscular, tattooed privilege. In fact, however, they’re the picture of diversity—an amazing sign of progress in an increasingly tribal world. If you put a recent class photo of NYPD graduates up against the yearbook roster of any liberal network, where would you find more color? If you live in any major city, you know the answer—it’s the men and women in blue. To claim otherwise is a smear that ends, ultimately, in violence.
