I find it odd when I occasionally hear Americans expressing anxiety about visiting European cities because of the crime. Yes, your mobile phone may be stolen, and no, the police won’t bother investigating it, and yes London’s mayor is pretty useless. But the chances of something really horrible happening to you are very small, and you have little to worry about when it comes to Muslims, despite the impression social media might give you. In fact British Muslims have crime rates pretty close to the average, although it varies by group, and considerably lower homicide rates than white or even Asian-Americans.
Twitter can give a pretty misleading impression of life in different countries, when in reality nowhere in Britain is really a no-go zone; the only western European city which comes close to US levels of violence is Marseilles, which has a murder rate about three-fifths that of New York.
I say this with some anxiety as I prepare to take my family to the Big Apple next month, where I slightly dread the prospect of an insane Michael Jackson impersonator screaming at me on the subway. This concern has undoubtedly been heightened by my social media diet, and I’m fairly confident that I won’t be murdered, especially as violent crime tends to be concentrated in areas I intend to avoid.
This sense of anxiety is made worse by the knowledge that anyone hoping to intervene in such situations faces a. being stabbed or b. having their life ruined by a dishonest and malicious media.
That dishonesty reached its nadir in the weeks after May 25, 2020, during a period that left a deep imprint on millions of people. Stuck at home, we saw on our screen baffling scenes of mass hysteria and violent disorder, then followed by one of the steepest increases in violence seen in any peace time nation. The US murder rate rose by 30 per cent as police forces retreated in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile media pushing the narrative that they were systemically racist. Thousands of people ended up dead as a result, the starkest illustration of identity politics politics having real-world consequences.
The animating idea behind Black Lives Matter, that police were disproportionately killing unarmed black men in large numbers, was built on lies from the very start. The movement took off after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, when journalists helped to paint a distorted picture of events; it was said that Brown was running away, when in fact he was charging a police officer. He was quoted as saying ‘hands up, don’t shoot’, which became a catchphrase with crowds of demonstrations around the country chanting the slogan - but he never said that. In a grim coda, Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, whose version of events became the official media narrative, was murdered on Sunday.
Millions of people seemed to believe the BLM narrative about terrified young black men being hunted down by heartless police; self-described liberals in the US in particular developed a wildly incorrect impression of how often unarmed black men were being killed by police. If your media diet repeated that narrative often enough, that’s hardly surprising.
Millions of Europeans now know about the city of Ferguson, while almost everyone is aware of George Floyd, probably the most consequential figure in British history in the 2020s, whose death led to a shake-up of institutions across the country.
My children’s primary school in north London issued a statement about Floyd’s death, and even changed aspects of their curriculum. Englishmen were sent to jail for making jokes in private chat groups about this martyr. Our football team bent the knee to honour the movement that promoted his cause, even after Americans had dropped it, like the cringing provincials that we are.
Floyd’s death fitted into a powerful narrative, but as Coleman Hughes wrote, it was a misleading one: ‘For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breonna Taylor’s home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Lemp, killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart: Tony Timpa. Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin cracking jokes about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later dropped.’
Much has changed since, and perhaps no movement in history has seen its narrative so discredited in such record time as BLM, most of all by police carrying body-worn video cameras. Since their adoption, a number of fatal shootings have occurred that once would have been framed as excessive violence by the media, and possibly ended in rioting. Perhaps it is understandable that so many believed the narrative, since most sane people would not charge an armed policeman with only a knife. Most people cannot conceptualise how impulsive many criminals are.
Another technological factor is Community Notes, one of Elon Musk’s innovations on Twitter, which dampened further Floyd-like protests by correcting false information being disseminated by journalists about the latest martyr.
Journalists were deeply dishonest throughout this whole period. The Ferguson effect, in which homicides rose in tandem with BLM protests, was denied as a conspiracy theory, or just ignored, until it became too obvious to deny. Similarly, American journalists blamed the ‘pandemic’ for the explosion of crime from June 2020, without contemplating why this didn’t happen in any other country or why the crime rate had previously fallen under lockdown. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has since been hugely influential in changing things, accelerating the long-anticipated breakdown of the traditional media’s narrative control.
This appears to be reaching a tipping point, illustrated in the past few days in the most horrific way, following the murder on August 22 of a young Ukrainian woman in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Iryna Zarutska was a refugee, from a desperately poor country with one-twentieth of America’s average income, even before the war. Seeking sanctuary in the United States, a land of freedom to which millions of Europeans have previously escaped from violence and oppression, she was murdered by a stranger while using public transport.
It is the most shocking type of murder, random and unprovoked, and involving a man with a long history of violence; the image of the killer striking down at his victim has an almost demonic quality.
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