On March 25th, a white police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck for nearly 9 minutes during an arrest, which led to his tragic death. Three fellow officers did not stop him. Video footage showed what had transpired, and the collective outrage brought together the whole nation in condemnation. Unfortu-nately, three weeks later, the country is more polarized than ever over the subsequent reactions to the death, than the actual tragedy itself. All of it has been engineered by the Dem-ocrats, the news media, anarchists and race arsonists, and fear that the cancel culture will erase you. The justification for the subsequent riot-ing, looting, and burning of our cit-ies is that we live in a society with systemic racism. It's open season on black men, that white cops are murdering racists, and the perennial favorite of the left, Its Trump's fault.

The Washington Post has main-tained a comprehensive database of fatal police shootings since 2015. "In 2019 the Post logged 1,003 killings. Even one is too many, but of the to- tal 13 unarmed black men and one black woman were fatally shot by police. Of the 14, most either were involved with the officers physical- ly or tried to run them down with a vehicle, and just two fatal shootings were deemed chargeable offenses. Could more of these police cases deserved criminal proceedings, that's certainly possible, however, these numbers are far from a genocidal rampage as the media would have you believe. Buried in the 36th paragraph of the Post's recent recap of the data, shootings of unarmed Blacks are down 60% since 2015, shouldn't that be the lead, not 1000 killed. In a 2016 study, Harvard's Professor Fryer found no evidence of bias in police shootings (blacks are 20% less likely to be fired on). His conclusions have been echoed by researchers at the University of Maryland and Michigan State Uni-versity.

The Left's incendiary contention of fault has been wholly dishonest. Democrats run the vast majority of the cities that have experienced the worst of the current rioting, some of them for decades. Sadly, the good citizens of those communities con- tinued to re-elect these negligent politicians inexplicably expecting a different outcome. This is not a new phenomenon, remember Rodney King (L.A.), Freddie Gray (Balt.), Eric Garner (NYC), Tamir Rice (Cleve.), to name just a few, all that occurred before Trump descended the golden escalator. The Demo- crats have notoriously been soft on crime. They do it to curry favor with their inner-city constituents in the hostile environments they've created, but it continually dimin- ishes the quality of life. Thousands of NYC protesters disregarded "strict" curfews set by the city, causing millions in damage. Over 500 were arrested, and nearly ev- ery one of them was released the next day to bail "reform" laws.

In St. Louis, the Soros backed prosecutor released every single looter and rioter back on the streets. This was after four police officers were shot, and one retired (black) police captain was murdered while doing security duty. Do you know his name, it's David Dorn. His life doesn't matter. Ground zero in Minneapolis, Minn. They have a democratic governor. The AG Ellison is a Farrakhan defending, Antifa embracing radical, Ilhan Omar is their Congresswoman, Klobuchar is one of their Senators, the mayor is a democrat, the police chief is black. The city evacuated the precinct where the officers in- volved in the Floyd death were stationed, allowing it to be taken over by rioters and burnt to the ground, followed by four nights of unchecked rioting pushing the unlawful contagion across the rest of the country. Our own pandering Senator Tim Kaine in floor debate said, "The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it." My ancestors would likely take issue with that, though the Pyramids are quite lovely. The Twitter account of the Fairfax Va. Democratic Committee retweeted, "Riots are an integral part of this country's march towards prog- ress," Knowing all this, the only conclusion the media and the democrats could deduce was its Trump's fault.

We have seen an unprecedent-ed rise in totalitarian authority sweep our nation. Professor William Jacobsen, author of the wide- ly-read blog, Legal Insurrection, and a professor at Cornell Law re- cently wrote at great professional peril: "We are living in extraordi- narily dangerous times, reminis- cent of the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, in which pro- fessors guilty of wrong think were publicly denounced and fired at the behest of students who insisted on absolute ideological orthodoxy. It's a way of instilling terror in other students, faculty, staff, and society so that others shut up and don't voice dissenting views. We are seeing monuments destroyed in Taliban-fashion because they represent an uncomfortable his- tory, movies, and TV shows can- celed, and individuals disappeared from employment due to even the slightest deviation from the prevailing political culture. This is not going to end well unless people of good conscience support black lives but not the Black Lives Movement as it was founded and currently operates, to speak up and refuse to cower in fear." As a Jew, I've watched nightly in horror as the mobs rampaged throughout the country, looting, murdering, shat- tering storefront after storefront unopposed (and in some places encouraged) by local authorities. I couldn't help but think that this must have been like what Kristall- nacht felt like in Germany, though this time, it's retribution for the crime of being white. Seeing a po- litical opportunity, the Left is now exerting thought control, demand- ing absolute unquestioning com- pliance. Corporations are cower- ing before them, hoping not to be singled out in the mob's cleansing of perceived privilege. They have pledged nearly $2 billion to black causes since the Floyd death to help them all spread the word on how systemically oppressed they are.

I believe the whole country would voluntarily, not through fear and intimidation, join in addressing the concerns of the Black community in further reforming the police. Still, the discussion can't start with defunding and disarming them be- cause a society without laws and enforcement would be in chaos. BLM has a platform calling for reparations, abolishing prisons, redistribution of wealth, rejecting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, removing cops from schools cutting funds from school discipline programs. They should instead acknowledge that progressive Democrats have en- joyed complete power over every large city in the country for six de- cades and have, by default, caused the disintegration of the black fam- ilies in those locals. In 1960 22% of black children lived in a singleparent household now that number is close to 70%. Obama said, in 2008 when the percentage was in the mid-'50s, "children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit a crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison." Call for defunding and reorganizing the education sys- tems in our cities, which in those 60 years have failed to provide those students with equal opportu- nity. They demand more commu- nity control of the police force, but they'd find it's more difficult to re- move a tenured failed teacher from their failed schools. They should demand school choice. Stop play- ing the victim and being hypocriti- cal and acknowledge that all black lives matter and decry the carnage from 90% of black homicide be- ing committed by other blacks (7,406 total 2018) and that blacks on a population-adjusted basis are more than seven times as likely to commit violent crimes and thus have more encounters with po- lice. Stop embracing socialism and more government that has al- ready failed the black community. Embrace capitalism and disavow higher taxes, which drives away business. A job is the best way out of poverty, along with keeping more of your hard-earned income. We've spent over $20 trillion in the War on Poverty over the last 50 years, which was designed, ac- cording to President Johnson, to lift people from welfare and gov- ernment dependency and trans- form the poor from "tax-eaters" to tax-payers." The experiment failed as the family unit has failed, as the money has undermined self-suffi- ciency, discouraging work, and penalized marriage.

In a recent interview, civil rights leader Shelby Steele sum- marized where Black America stands today, I hold it in contrast and hope for solutions vs. what is being drilled into our homes nightly:

"It seems to me that in many ways, it's about power. In order to pursue power as they do, you have to have victims. Wow, the excite- ment that creates on the Left. It validates their claims that America is a wretched country, and they must get their recourse. It feeds this old model of operation that we've developed, that America is guilty of racism, guilty of this sin, and has been for 400 years, and minorities are victims who are entitled. When people start to talk about systemic racism, built into the system, what they're doing is expanding the territory of entitle- ment. We want more. We want so- ciety to give us more. Society is responsible for us because racism is so systemic. That's a corruption, and I know it's corruption because the truth of the matter is blacks have never been less oppressed than they are today. Opportunity is around every corner. In all of this, no one ever stops to say, well, you're unhappy with where mi- norities are in American life, and blacks continue to be at the bottom of most socioeconomic measures. You're unhappy about that. Well, why don't you take some respon- sibility for that? Why don't you take more responsibility? I would be happy to look at all the usual bad guys, the police, and so forth if we had the nerve, the courage to look at black people. To look at black Americans, minority Ameri- cans, and say, you're not carrying your weight. You're going to have a fit and a tantrum and demon- strate, [but] are you teaching your child to read? Are you making sure that the school down the street ac- tually educates your child? Are you becoming educated and fol- lowing a dream in life and making things happen for yourself? Or are you saying, I'm a victim, and I'm owed, and the entitlement is inad- equate? I need more, and after all, you whites, you know racism has been here for four centuries with slavery and so forth, so it's time for you to give to me. Well, that's an exhausted, fruitless, empty strate- gy to take. We've been on that path since the 60s. We're farther behind than we've ever been, and we keep blaming it on racism, blaming it on the police. I'm exhausted with that…We have allowed ourselves to be enabled in avoiding our real problems by a guilty white society. It keeps using us and exploiting us as victims. If you really care about how minorities do, why don't you ask them to do it? Why don't you ask them to drop the pretense? There's always going to be some racism, in every society. My own sense is that it is endemic to the human condition. We will always have to watch out for it. As I like to always say, stupidity is also endemic to the human condition, and we have to watch out for that too. That is no excuse for us to be where we are right now in Ameri- can life. We have let this sort of guilty society, and our grievance industry put us in this impossible situation where we are a perma- nent underclass."