The situation in Milwaukee has spiraled out of control so quickly that it seems even our ever-ready MSM aren’t sure how to respond.
Fortunately, Milwaukee has Sheriff David Clarke and Governor Scott Walker to assess the situation and make decisions about it. Walker called up the National Guard on Monday, responding to a recommendation from Sheriff Clarke. This is clearly a good and necessary measure, considering that on Sunday night, after rioters had reportedly spent the weekend “hunting whitey,” a white 18-year-old was shot in the street at the scene of some of the rioting.
VIDEO: 18 year old White kid carried out by police after getting shot in the neck in #Milwaukee. https://t.co/GUaJO3S8He
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) August 15, 2016
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Several social media correspondents have told me of their sense that the shooting has gotten little MSM coverage. ABC did report it shortly after it happened, including this ominous detail (emphasis added):
Police said one person was shot at a Milwaukee protest on Sunday and officers used an armored vehicle to retrieve the injured victim and rush the person to a hospital, as tense skirmishes erupted for a second night following the police shooting of a black man.
But it’s true that you’d only know the shooting victim was a white 18-year-old if you caught that on social media.
The indispensable Sheriff Clarke points out that what we’re seeing in Milwaukee is a social order in collapse, and “tribal behavior” taking over. This isn’t a racist slur, although it will be taken as one by the usual suspects. People of all races have lived at times in history in “tribal behavior” conditions. Everyone does it pretty much the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1qv6RXEoHk&feature=youtu.be
Wayne Dupree has a transcript of some of Clarke’s comments (on Fox; video below) on the magnitude of the social breakdown:
What causes riots are failed liberal urban policies in these ghettos like Milwaukee. Milwaukee has inescapable poverty, they are like the sixth poorest city in America, they have failing public schools, the K-12 public schools here, there are only two school systems that are worse, Cleveland and Detroit. You have massive black unemployment. I think the black unemployment rate in Milwaukee is 32 percent. You have dysfunctional families, you have father absent homes, you have questionable lifestyle choices.
Those are the ingredients for a riot, and then a police shooting comes along just acts as an igniter to an already volatile situation.
Well, a police shooting comes along – and an internationally organized radical-thug group dedicated to incitement. Matt Palumbo at Allen B. West has a very informative video of the role of Black Lives Matter themes in sparking the riots. The riots didn’t just erupt spontaneously. They were fomented by people who weren’t content for Milwaukee to settle for a few candle-lit-vigil protests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76DpmOAYVBM
Watch all the way through; it’s slow and tedious in the beginning (although see next paragraph), but you can watch the situation developing, with the tensions rising and the incitement and level of attack increasing, as the video progresses.
Like the sister of Sylville Smith, the original shooting victim, who urged her fellow blacks to “take that sh*t to the suburbs. Burn that sh*t down!”, the riot-fomenters on-scene were out for blood.
At the 35-second mark, a rioter can be heard yelling to the officers, “We do not want justice or peace anymore. We done with that sh*t. We want blood. We want blood. We want the same sh*t ya’ll want. Eye for an eye. No more peace. F–k all that. Ain’t no more peace. Ain’t no more peace. We done. We cannot co-habitate with white people, one of us have to go, black or white. All ya’ll have to go!”
(Look for the guy in the droopy basketball shorts.)
Presumably, it would do no good to tell this individual that the rest of us don’t want blood, or “an eye for an eye.” It’s a 100% certainty that this guy couldn’t articulate in any way what it is he thinks that means – for himself, or for the “y’all” he attributes the same sentiments to. He’s a young man who was born, like everyone else, full of promise, but has lived his whole life up to now having his worst human instincts cultivated by the American welfare state, the American public schools, and the criminal culture that feeds on both.
The New Black Panthers, of course, have stepped in with their brand of encouragement: “This is war!”
Remarkably, at just this moment, the father of Sylville Smith has come forward to apologize to his children for the bad example he has set them over the years.
This is what the political left and the mainstream media should be listening to, as the flames engulf Milwaukee. That progressive-left alliance has lied about these very points for decades, insisting that the things this father now regrets were only the oppressive mandates of a racist, heterosexist patriarchy anyway.
But Patrick Smith knows better.
“I had to blame myself for a lot of things too, because your hero is your dad, and I played a very big part in my family’s role model for them,” Patrick Smith told WITI-TV. “Being on the street, doing things of the street life: entertaining, drug dealing and pimping, and they’re looking at their dad like, ‘He’s doing all these things.’” …
Patrick Smith, who said he has “been going back and forth in jail,” then apologized for not setting a different example for his kids.
“When they see the wrong role model, this is what you get,” he said. “I’ve gotta start with my kids, and we gotta change our ways, to be better role models. And we gotta change ourselves. We’ve gotta talk to them, put some sense into them.”
“We’ve gotta change ourselves. We’ve gotta talk to them, put some sense into them.” What father of any race or background can fail to relate to those words? That’s just what fathers do. They change themselves – rein in the foolishness of youth, live the best way they know how, set the best example they can – for the benefit of their children. “Putting sense into” their sons, in particular (but also their daughters), is what fathers are for.
It’s impossible to overstate the travesty it is, that state-collectivism has been laboring to breed that inescapable truth of human existence out of our moral consciousness.
We can complete the circle here by cycling back to the first link in this post, where National Review’s Jim Geraghty notes the relatively short shrift the MSM have given the Milwaukee riots so far. He speculates on why, but his suggested explanations don’t satisfy me.
I think there are more likely a couple of things in play. One is that the MSM don’t know how to fit this into their routine narrative, because the rioters went to guns and bloodthirst immediately. There was no sympathetic period of, well, the candlelight vigils. There was no perfunctory nod to the political niceties; the thugs just took over immediately.
But the other is that these riots are seriously dangerous. It’s hard to assess the size of the media contingent covering them. But we do know that an independent blogger who specializes in covering protests had to pull out on Monday, because he judged it simply too unsafe to remain there on the streets trying to cover the events.
Due to escalating racial tensions I am pulling out of #Milwaukee and will no longer be covering it. https://t.co/SRuN9U100Z
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) August 15, 2016
Even if the MSM have the normal amount of presence, in the conditions there in Milwaukee, their cameramen and reporters probably can’t get as close to what’s going on as they could in Ferguson or Baltimore. They may simply not have as much to report. I know I wouldn’t expect a news team to get up close and personal where the police themselves won’t go unless they’re in armored vehicles.
With Milwaukee, in the last 72 hours, we’re seeing not the MSM narrative, but the stark human face of meltdown. Ultimately, that’s what has to be juxtaposed with one last piece of imagery. This is what President Obama is doing on Monday, 15 August 2016.
