Revolver.news
October 2, 2021
September 2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was a somber occasion, as millions of Americans looked back on one of the worst atrocities in American history, and that calamitous foreign policy America embarked on in response to it.
Revolver writes “one of” the worst atrocities, because there are deeds that killed far more Americans than 9/11 did. In fact, America is living through one of those atrocities right now. Newly-released FBI numbers confirm something that has been apparent for the last year: The Black Lives Matter movement is the deadliest entirely-preventable atrocity inflicted on the American public in the past two decades.
On first hearing, that might sound preposterous. But it’s not. The human cost of the Black Lives Matter movement has been worse than 9/11, worse than the War on Terror, worse than Pearl Harbor, worse than every spree shooting in American history combined. And the very government that enabled so much of BLM’s carnage has produced the numbers to prove it.
On Monday, the FBI released its official tally for homicides in the U.S. for the year 2020. The numbers confirm what was obvious even before last year ended: 2020 was the worst explosion of murder in American history, and it wasn’t close.
The United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, according to data gathered by the F.B.I. for its annual report on crime. The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29 percent. The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. [NYT]
That 29% increase amounts to just under five thousand additional murders in 2020 compared to the year before.
And that’s only the beginning, because murders did not return to normal in 2021. Instead, murders have stayed high, and will likely end this year even higher than the year before.
The evidence from big cities suggests murder is still up in 2021 relative to 2020, although the increase is not nearly as big. My collection of data from 87 cities with publicly available year-to-date data shows murder up by 9.9 percent relative to comparable points in 2020. Some cities like Portland, Ore., and Las Vegas are seeing big increases relative to last year; some big cities like Chicago and New York are seeing flat numbers after sizable increases in 2020; and some places like St. Louis (which had the nation’s highest murder rate in 2020) are seeing sizable declines. The first half of this year largely followed the pattern begun in the second half of last year. [NYT]
Leading the way in America’s murder explosion are some of America’s most fervently left-wing cities. In 2016, Portland, Oregon had only 16 murders all year. Even in 2019, it had only 36, and it had only six in the first five months of 2020. But all of that has vanished. Portland ended 2020 with 57 slayings.
This year, it eclipsed 60 before the end of August. It is nearly certain that the old record of 70 homicides will be obliterated.
In Austin, proudly the most liberal city in Texas, 2020’s 48 murders were its most since 1991. This year, the city passed that figure in July. In fact, the city has already set a record for the most murders in a single year, and it has three more months to run up the score.
In 2019, Minneapolis recorded 48 murders. In 2020, it had 82. This year, it’s already cracked 70 and the 1995 “Murder-apolis” record of 97 is in striking distance.
Revolver could recite more gruesome city stats all day. But instead, let’s put it all in perspective. If that 10 percent increase in murders holds this year, then across 2020 and 2021 America will suffer twelve thousand more murders than it would have if the murder rate held steady.
What is 12,000 murdered Americans? Well, for starters, it’s more than double the number of lynchings in all of American history. According to the NAACP, there were 4,743 lynchings in America between 1882 and 1968. Of those, 3,446 were black.
Twelve thousand murdered Americans is three times the number of Americans under 30 who have died of COVID-19, according to the CDC. Adjusting for the America’s extreme aggression in counting any death with COVID as a COVID death, it may very well exceed all deaths under 40, perhaps even under 45.
Twelve thousand murdered Americans is more than the number of American combat deaths in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War… combined. It’s more than the number of Americans killed at D-Day, Pearl Harbor, and in the North Africa campaign of World War 2… again, combined. It’s three times the number killed at Antietam, the deadliest single day in American military history. It’s more than any single year of the war in Vietnam, except for 1968.
Twelve thousand murdered Americans isn’t just four times the number killed in the 9/11 terror attacks. If you combine 9/11 with the 2,218 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan, 4,497 deaths in Iraq, and 76 deaths in the battle against ISIS, you get 9,787 deaths. That’s right: America’s murder spike has claimed more American lives than 20 years of the War on Terror.
What happened? You know. Everybody knows. America’s murder surge isn’t statistical noise or a sociological quirk. It was inflicted on America by an activist class and the politicians who willingly enabled them.
But the press prefers to play dumb. The New York Times, and every other major publication, pretends that this surge in homicides is deeply mysterious:
The reasons for the rise may never be fully sorted out, but analysts have pointed to many possible contributing factors, including various pandemic stresses; increased distrust between the police and the public after the murder of George Floyd, including a pullback by the police in response to criticism; and increased firearm carrying. [NYT]
To speak bluntly for a moment, bullshit. There is no mystery here, no dizzying array of confounding factors that makes causes and effects impossible to untangle. You know the truth, they know the truth, everyone knows the truth: This murder surge is the Black Lives Matter murder surge.
Murders in 2020 didn’t surge when coronavirus lockdowns hit, and they didn’t surge when they ended. No, America’s murder explosion coincides almost exactly with the precise moment George Floyd’s sad life came to its sad, predictable end from a fentanyl overdose on a Minneapolis street.
What happened after Floyd died? Again, it’s no mystery. America’s cities large and small erupted in an explosion of “mostly peaceful protests.” Politicians and major papers talked seriously about “abolishing the police” (in Minneapolis, it’s actually on the ballot this fall). The left vilified and defamed police officers as a class. Police got the message. Stops went down, tactics were scaled back, and experienced officers quit in droves. Criminals became emboldened to commit more flagrant crimes and carry illegal weapons.
But the Times cannot concede such a fact to its deranged base of radicalized readers, so instead it must play dumb for them. The self-induced stupidity comes as the Times waxes about 2020’s exodus out of big-city police departments.
The evidence on police officer employment had been mixed. An earlier survey of 200 police departments found large increases in retirements between April 2020 and April 2021, while data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed virtually no change in the number of people employed at local police departments. The new data showed little overall change. But large agencies were substantially more likely than small ones to report a decline in officers. Newark and New York City reported some of the largest percentage declines, with New York dropping by more than 2,500 officers from 2019 to 2020, according to the F.B.I. data. This data is useful in describing the overall trend, but it does not provide insight into the question of why some agencies lost officers. Was it because of poor morale and increased difficulties in doing the job, or did retirements surge because increased overtime in 2020 made it a more attractive prospect? [NYT]
Meanwhile, back in reality, the cause of the exodus from big-city police departments was obvious. In Minneapolis, within two months of charges being filed against Derek Chauvin, nearly a quarter of the department had filed paperwork to quit. In Chicago, officers can’t quit quickly enough:
In just the first six months of this year, 367 officers retired. CBS 2 spoke to a recently retired officer who gave some insight into the rising numbers. The person spoke with us, if we agreed to conceal their identity. “People see us as the enemy and we’re not. All we’re trying to do is help the people of the community, the city of Chicago.” … In 2018 there were 339 retirements. The following year in 2019, there were 475. In 2020, there were 560 retirements. And already this year: 367 just through the month of June. For this retired officer, who left with the department with numerous commendations, the streets of Chicago, became too much. “We get spit on. We get things thrown at us, you know, you, they’re fighting with us. People are protesting, calling us names and not just the protestors,” said the retired officer. “But you’ve got the people who are supposed to have our back in government.” [CBS Chicago]
This has happened before. While the U.S. murder rate rises and falls from year to year, it mostly does so slowly. But the three years with the largest surges on record are all years marked by urban political discord.
In 1968, the spark was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. After King’s death, riots scorched Chicago, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and other cities… and in their wake came a surge in murders all over the country. By year’s end, murders were up 12.7 percent.
The other big jump, in 2015, is the other year where Black Lives Matter enthusiasm was at a peak. In August 2014, Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Even though Brown was attacking Wilson and the shooting was a justified self-defense, dishonest witnesses created the myth of “hands up, don’t shoot,” and Ferguson was convulsed with civil disorder.
The following spring, Freddie Gray died in Baltimore police custody, sparking riots where dozens of businesses were looted or burned. In a foreshadowing of the reaction to George Floyd’s death, Baltimore police were instantly vilified. Anti-cop prosecutor Marilyn Mosby charged six police officers in Gray’s death (those charges later were dropped or ended in acquittal), but that wasn’t enough to save Baltimore from its worst riots in half a century. The fabric of law and order in the city was destroyed. The murder rate rose 63 percent in a single year, and Baltimore ended 2015 with 344 homicides. The murder rate has never dropped since; in the five years since the city has averaged 330 killings a year.
That was the Freddie Gray effect. And now, thanks to the triumph of Black Lives Matter, the Freddie Gray effect has been brought to the entire country.
Fittingly enough, one of the best symbols of the new American criminal order is Oakland, the birthplace of Black Lives Matter. In 2020, Oakland logged its first three-digit homicide total since 2012. This year, they broke 100 murders before the end of September:
Monday marked Oakland’s somber milestone, the 100th homicide of the year. With several months in the year left, the loss of life is nearly that of the total number of homicides Oakland had in all of 2020 — 109. At this time last year, the city had reported 70 homicides. … Asked why homicides are again on the rise in Oakland after there had been several steady years of decline, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf also pointed to the pandemic. She said resources have been stretched thin. “Once the pandemic happened many of our tools were taken away from us, and a sense of desperation, a huge increase in the purchase of fire arms, and the flooding of our streets with untraceable ghost guns,” the mayor said. [ABC 7]
Once again, the deliberate cluelessness, the desperate will to ignore the obvious, is stunning and inexcusable. It isn’t “the pandemic” that caked Oakland’s streets with blood. From January through May of 2020, the city recorded 24 murders, high for most cities but pedestrian for Oakland. After the George Floyd “racial reckoning” commenced, though, murders went up and have never come down.
And they will never come down, so long as American leaders embrace lies. As long as they blame police for America’s high crime rates, as long as they focus on ignoring crimes instead of punishing them, and as long as they worry more about the phantom threat of racism than stopping actual predators, then America’s crime rate will stay out of control.
But the most important lie of all is the lie about Black Lives Matter. BLM is a movement built on the complete myth that American police are systemically racist, and the fabrication that America has an “epidemic” of police executing unarmed black men. As long as America’s most powerful institutions (including many figures in the GOP) willingly embrace the lie that BLM is a positive movement that has done good for America, no recovery is possible.
The data is in and it is clear. The time has come for a total and absolute rejection of BLM and its tenets, and recognition of reality: BLM is one of the most destructive and lethal movements ever in American history. Other failed political causes might be measured in lower economic growth, urban blight, or declining happiness. But the failure of BLM is a simple one that can be measured only in blood.
Two weeks ago, Revolver wrote about the U.S. government’s effort to impose Covid-19 vaccinations on America’s young men, even though they are at near-zero risk from coronavirus and see by far the most severe reactions to the vaccine. This vaccination push, we wrote, symbolizes something deeply sinister about Globalist American Empire:
[A]s is so often the case in the Globalist American Empire, the nanny state our leaders force Americans to endure isn’t even an effective one. Despite exalting safety as a premier national value, we don’t even get the safety we might expect from the trade-offs in liberty. Americans aren’t kept safe from predatory criminals. Americans aren’t kept safe from the urban decay that turns once-great cities into massive homeless camps. Americans aren’t even protected from Covid-19. Instead, we have a menagerie of policies that limit our freedom (mask mandates, restaurant closures) and don’t even do anything to stop coronavirus. [Revolver]
The BLM murder surge symbolizes this truth even better than the Biden Administration’s vaccine authoritarianism. America’s blue cities and states have strict gun laws. They have vast health surveillance systems, with forced shutdowns and business-destroying fines, all created to keep people “safe.” Yet they are indifferent to murderous crime that destroying neighborhoods and cause the public to live in fear. It is true anarcho-tyranny: The state will relentlessly punish restaurants or gyms that want to admit unmasked or unvaccinated patrons there of their own free will, but they will be entirely hands-off when it comes to deadly criminals.
Americans in blue cities would indisputably be better off in an actual authoritarian state, like Singapore. Sure, Singapore doesn’t have as much “freedom,” but it does have security, cleanliness, and efficiency. And truthfully, how much less “free” is it than 2021 America? America’s constitution may guarantee freedom of speech or religion, but the actions of the Globalist American Empire make a mockery of those guarantees every day, just like the repression of the Soviet Union flagrantly violated that country’s own constitution.
The BLM/Covid-19 regime of 2021 America is the worst of both worlds. America gets all the totalitarian restrictions of a dystopian surveillance state—and all the anarchy and dirt and violence of a Third World slum. In its rotting urban cores, the Globalist American Empire merges the the most repugnant elements of East Germany, South Africa, and Brazil.
And as befits a toxic dystopia, America’s leaders aren’t even allowed to honestly mention the problem. On Wednesday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley appeared before Congress to answer questions about America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. Those questions are, of course, the only “accountability” Milley will ever face. Generals in America aren’t fired for losing wars, or turning America’s defense into a woke farce, or even (in Milley’s case) for committing insubordination and potentially treason.
Now imagine if instead of all those things, Milley had publicly denounced Black Lives Matter. Imagine he had called it a violent, dangerous movement and is built on lies and a threat to the well-being and liberty of Americans. Imagine if he called its leaders scammers and grifters, and said that anybody involved with the movement was a disgrace to the United States. Imagine, in short, that Milley vocally told the truth about BLM. That would indisputably get him sacked from his post, because the Globalist American Empire cares more about coddling the feelings of its violent underclass than it does about winning wars—or anything else, really.
Ultimately, though, movements like BLM play a much more integral role in the Globalist American Empire than as mere expressions of PC piety. There is tragically a good deal of method to the woke madness that has engulfed our nation. The existence and political mobilization of groups such as Black Lives Matter are integral to the means with which the Globalist American Empire projects power overseas and consolidates power domestically.
BLM reflects a familiar model of political control that relies on identifying racial/ethnic tensions, exacerbating these tensions in the media, and then leveraging NGOs to mobilizing mass protest movements based on these tensions. We see precisely this “Color Revolution” model in the way the Globalist American Empire exercises influence, control, and sometimes even regime change in target regimes abroad. We see it in the mobilization of the Rohingya minority to undermine the Myanmar regime, in the mobilization of Uiguhr grievances to undermine the Chinese Communist regime, and we see it in mass mobilization of women and gays in Eastern Europe to counter perceived Russian influence.
Revolver News first gained international attention with its reporting on the similarities between certain mode of mobilized, mass protests at home with the “color revolution” model of projecting power and effecting regime change abroad.
Whereas our previous reporting focused on contested election scenarios as the flash-point for mass mobilization, BLM shows how America’s ruling class uses the death of George Floyd and other radicalized flashpoints in nearly identical fashion to wield and consolidate power during election seasons.
The bad news is that groups like BLM and the “woke” ideologies that sustain them are absolutely central to the way the Regime operates. To remove the “woke” ideology from our present power structure would be less like skimming icing off a cake, and more like performing a heart transplant—difficult and dangerous, but possible and, at the moment, necessary. The first step toward performing this operation is understanding the nature and severity of the disease. And at this point, it is clear that the disease has progressed to the point that the American Regime cannot afford to give up wokeness, or groups like BLM that weaponize it, no matter how many innocent Americans have to die as collateral.
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