2014: The year it turned

Why did race relations go from optimistic to damned?

In case you missed it …

• Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Marty Makary told Congress, "the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government," and gave multiple examples. Those examples included that Covid was spread through surface transmission, that masks were effective, that vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates, and many more.

• There’s a misleadingly edited video going around the internet that makes it look as if Zelensky says “the U.S. will have to send their sons and daughters” to war. He actually said if Ukraine loses, Russia may enter NATO states and America would the be obliged to send troops.

• Speaking of misleading clips online, no, George Soros did not endorse Ron DeSantis for president.

Dear Friends—

To many of us, it feels like race relations have been declining over the past few years. And while there are several events that stick out as touchstones, it’s hard to pinpoint in our minds exactly when this began.

Gallup pollsters managed to do it, though.

The polling

Since 2001, almost every year Gallup has quizzed Americans on the state of relations between black and white citizens. In 2015, the number plummeted and it has continued to decline since. The National Review says that through “Gallup’s other race-related questions” they were able to conclude that 2014 was the year everything went to hell.

In 2014, 55% of those polled said they were “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with the state of race relations. In 2015, that number was 30%, and the number of Americans “very dissatisfied” with race relations went up 10 points.

What happened?

The answers seem to point to an event in mid-2014 that quickly changed Americans’ minds about the state of race in America.

In the summer of 2014, Eric Garner was put in a chokehold by an NYPD officer and died after selling loose cigarettes on the street. Several weeks later, Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, MO. In both cases, grand juries did not prosecute the officers involved.

You know what happened next. Protests which occasionally turned violent. Anti-racism theory, which teaches that white Americans are inherently racist and there’s nothing they can do about it. A re-examination of American history that insists it was founded on racism.

New York magazine reporter Benjamin Wallace-Wells calls it the year we turned from “the attentions of the post-Occupy American left, away from the subject of economic inequality and towards the problem of race.”

It’s been almost ten years since that summer, and now, people do not dare hold an optimistic view of race relations or hope that they’re improving (that’s a sign of racism, too, you know).

But now, we have a good idea of when our opinions of ourselves and our fellow Americans started declining.

— Ken

PS: At the last minute, Fox postponed (cancelled?) my appearance scheduled for tonight. Hopefully it’s still to come.

That didn’t age well …