(Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The question was, “Just to pick one statistic, a black man in the United States, statistically, is far more likely to be shot by a police officer than someone of a different race. Why do you think that is?”
And the answer?
Well, there are 8,000 Blacks who are killed every year. Eighty-five percent of them are killed by gunshots. Virtually all of those are Blacks on Blacks. I think that there are a number of the statistics on police shootings of unarmed, unarmed individuals are not skewed toward the African American. There are many whites who are shot unarmed by police.
Police brutality is caused by Black-on-Black crime, says our distinguished Attorney General in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. What an extremely nuanced take!
Let’s go out on a limb and speculate that our fearless Attorney General watches a lot of Fox News. Only a person well-ensconced in Rupert Murdoch’s White Grievance Ecosphere would fail to realize that answer falls squarely into the category of “Racist Sh*t You Do Not Say.”
There’s also the little matter of it being untrue. As The Washington Post points out, African Americans “account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.” And if possession of a weapon is legal for white people, then it’s legal for Black people, and cannot be used to justify disparate levels of police violence.
In fact, the whole interview was full of recycled nonsense from Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Asked about the Justice Department’s multiple statements blaming Antifa for organizing the protests when no arrestees have been connected to the group (because it’s not a group!), Barr insisted that it was simply obvious from watching protest video.
You don’t see agitators in hoodies with earpieces, you know, distributing things to throw and things like that? You don’t see that? You don’t see people walking through districts with high-end stores, methodically breaking out the windows with sledgehammers or skateboards? Who are they?
Earpieces? Does he mean AirPods? More to the point, if he doesn’t know who these purported skateboarders are, how does he know they’re antifa?
He just does, okay? The same way he knows racism is totally over, since we elected a Black president and African Americans were really starting to “participat[e] in the economy.” Which couldn’t possibly be an invocation of racist tropes about lazy welfare queens, could it?
I mean, we elected Barack Obama as president. I think the economy was becoming more inclusive. And I think Blacks were participating more in the economy and at record numbers. But I do think that there are some impediments to the advancement of African Americans in society. The principal, one of the principal ones, not the principal one, is that they are being deprived of equal opportunity to attend good schools. And that’s, I think that’s one of the civil rights issues of our time. I think that they should we should essentially give these inner-city families the buying power to send their kids wherever they want to send them.
Racism would just go away and the playing field would be level if “Blacks” could just get their kids into charter schools. Take it from a 70-year-old white shoe lawyer with an Ivy League education, it’s “one of the civil rights issues of our times!”
Barr staunchly defended his intercession to reduce punishment for Trump’s allies Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Michael Cohen.
“I mean, do you think someone, do you think a 68-year-old man, with no prior criminal history record, should have gone to prison for a decade for what happened?” the author of “The Case for More Incarceration” said of Roger Stone, who was convicted by a jury on seven counts of lying to congress, obstruction, and witness intimidation.
Barr had thoughts on the Founding Fathers: “They were Christians and so if you’re talking about them, they were Christians.” (They weren’t.)
Also, the Attorney General has proof that mail-in balloting, which was the pre-COVID standard for the 7 percent of Americans living in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, is inherently dangerous: “I know people move, a very high percentage in the United States, people move all the time. And I also know that you can easily take things out of mailboxes.”
Will Barr be dropping the Durham report about unmasking “abuses” and the supposedly defective predicate of the “Russia hoax” investigation as an October surprise during the election?
Well, as I’ve said a few times, no one under investigation in the Durham matter is running for president. And I’ve said publicly that neither President Obama or Vice President Biden are under investigation. And I’ve also said I’m committed to having the American people have a free choice in this election between the candidates and I don’t want the Department of Justice to be interfering in that.
So, that’s a “yes.” Quite a credit to the profession, eh?
Transcript: NPR’s Full Interview With Attorney General William Barr [NPR]
Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.