Wouldn’t you know it, many on the Left are surprised and angered that in his recent Inaugural Address, President Trump repeatedly repeated the message that he had repeatedly repeated during his campaign — the one that got him elected president: For too long, out-of-touch elitists have been in power, and it’s high time to return sovereignty to the people.
I wasn’t in agreement with everything he said. His “America First” message, saying America will focus only on what’s good for America, guarantees other countries will do the same, resulting in trade wars and the weakening of our longstanding global political and economic alliances.
But what the media really jumped on was Trump’s “dark” vision of America (“Trump delivered a dark inaugural address” – Washington Post; Trump’s “dark, counterfactual picture” – NY Times), and his use of the word “carnage” to describe the rising tide of violence in America’s inner cities, implying that such “carnage” was a chimera.
Actually, Trump was identifying a terrifyingly real problem, and the problem isn’t, as the “Black Lives Matter” crowd insists, racist police officers indiscriminately killing black males. In fact, according to the very same Washington Post, in 2016 the nation’s police killed 16 “unarmed” black males, compared to 20 “unarmed” white males (who, although ostensibly “unarmed,” engaged in acts of violence that resulted in the police using deadly force).
Rather the real “carnage” problem is blacks killing other blacks, mostly male, but some female, ranging from seniors to babies. In Chicago 19 of the 24 children under the age of 12 who were killed in 2016 were black.
In 2015, roughly 6,000 blacks were killed by other blacks, which is 900 more than in 2014, and if we assume that the numbers for 2016 are roughly the same — they will probably be higher —that means that the aforementioned 16 blacks killed by cops in 2016 represent just .2 percent of the total, which means the other 98.8 percent of blacks were killed by someone other than a cop, and overwhelmingly the killer was also black.
This is why, in his Inaugural Address, Trump proclaimed that the mostly black-on-black violence — the “carnage” — “stops right here and stops right now.” “The child born in the urban sprawl of Detroit,” he said, “or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams.”
So they both deserve an end to the “carnage.” As I recently wrote, whether Trump can deliver on this, or many of his promises, remains to be seen, but what the media portrays as being an overly “dark” view, Trump correctly sees as very real danger, not just to blacks, but to all of us.
