Nothing was more ridiculous about the past week’s events than watching Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tell the world that he believed it was a burden to be born black from the very first moment, such that being black required mental health intervention into adulthood.
That is literally what he said.
It is hard to imagine anything more racist.
The next day, Garcetti announced that because he was sincere about doing something to help black people, and not simply talking about it, he would bow to the mob’s wishes to “DEFUND LAPD” and cut up to $150 million from police funding, some 10% of the department’s budget.
The money would be redistributed, or “reinvested,” in black communities and “communities of color,” presumably through various city programs and community organizations.
Garcetti’s astonishing proposal was well-received in the media. What it means in practice, of course — assuming the race-based proposal can survive constitutional challenge in court — is black communities will be less safe.
Wealthy people in Garcetti’s neighborhood will hire private security, but “communities of color” will have to rely on a smaller police force. The LAPD will also have to cut jobs — and it won’t be able to get away with cutting white officers alone.
Around the country, police departments are disproportionately black.
If Garcetti had really wanted to help black people, he would have had the LAPD out in force early, with the National Guard, to prevent looting and to protect local businesses.
While the riots in L.A., unlike Minneapolis, were focused on “white” areas like Beverly Hills, the economic impact is going to be felt everywhere. Few in their right minds will invest in retail stores in the inner city. Jobs will die, tax revenues will fall. And you know who will suffer most.
So why did he do it? Because $150 million less for the police means $150 million more that Garcetti can disperse as patronage among civil servants and community organizers, shoring up his political support and making sure that he faces no real accountability for what happened this week.
The fact that “communities of color” will be poorer, and more unsafe, will just provide the basis for demanding more money, more programs, more empty gestures at solidarity.
“Black Lives Matter” has become a white liberal con, one that liberal politicians and corporate leaders are using to cling to power.
By making “white privilege” the problem, they have come up with a brilliant way of staying on top. Hence the odd spectacle of bourgeois white trust fund kids at the front of protests manifesting black frustration. “Owning their privilege” has become a way of owning the movement.
Somehow, black people are buying it. Some businesses put up signs like “minority-owned business” in their store windows, hoping to be spared — as if looters and white Antifa hoodlums actually cared. If black lives mattered to Black Lives Matter, would “peaceful protesters” have vandalized the Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial in Boston, honoring the black Civil War soldiers who gave their lives to abolish slavery? Would they have smashed the storefronts of charter schools and charities in Minneapolis?
White liberals are finding this all too easy. They can take a knee, or tweet an empty black box, or pretend to “listen,” and they’re good. Few white liberals have the courage or self-awareness to speak out against riots, to tell the black community what is really happening.
They turn a blind eye to the violence because they think can blame Trump, because it is someone else’s problem, because black leadership has been silent, and because they are still in charge.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.