The Helter Skelter Economy

It Doesn't Have to Be This Way

Welcome once again to the asylum, dear readers. We are going to touch on probably the most inflammatory issue of our time. Unfortunately, the narrative we keep seeing in the public eye is not only entirely false, but also intentional and is driven not by a desire to help or make things better, but a desire for wealth and political power. The modern mainstream narrative about race since the mid-2010s is an entirely fabricated lie. Sure, there are racist assholes out there, but as a society, not long ago, we had almost entirely defeated this issue and made it a past thing. Unfortunately, it is both to profitable and to powerful to allow it to be resolved.

I am not speaking from the comfortable perch of academia, I have no standing there, and I am not speaking from the talking-head circuit who parrot whatever gets them on TV with no real conviction, but from the trenches of actually reading the history, the data, and the primary sources that most people who scream the loudest about racism have never bothered to open. What I found changed how I see everything. And it made me furious. Not at white America. Not at Black America. At the people of every color who figured out that keeping us at each other’s throats is extraordinarily profitable.

This is the story they don’t want you to know. It is documented, sourced, and verifiable. Every major claim in what follows can be checked. I encourage you to check it. The truth, it turns out, is more interesting and more damning than the narrative.

Before the Great Migration, before the waves of southern Black Americans flooded north in search of work and dignity, something remarkable was happening in America’s northern cities. Something that has been almost completely erased from the national conversation because acknowledging it requires acknowledging what destroyed it, and that is a conversation too many people are too invested in avoiding.

Northern Black communities in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit had built something extraordinary. Black professionals doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and educators operated in integrated professional environments. Black students attended integrated schools and competed successfully alongside white peers. Black political representation was meaningful and growing. Interracial neighborhoods functioned without the extreme tensions that would come later. The trajectory was unmistakably upward, and the pace of integration was accelerating organically.

The Harlem Renaissance was not merely a cultural flowering; it was proof of concept. Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s produced extraordinary intellectual, artistic, and economic vitality under conditions that were far from perfect but were unmistakably trending in the right direction. Black newspapers ran not just celebrations of achievement but explicit demands for community standards and self-improvement. The editors of the Chicago Defender, the New York Age, and dozens of similar publications were building something a Black middle class with the social capital, the professional networks, and the cross-racial relationships necessary to make full integration not just possible but inevitable.

It was not perfect. Racism was real. Discrimination was real. But the direction was clear, the momentum was building, and the destination a fully unified society where a person’s character rather than their color determined their prospects was coming into view. Then came the migration.

To understand what happened next, you have to go further back. Much further back. To the Scottish and Scots-Irish borderlands of Britain, whose settlers flooded the American South in the eighteenth century and brought with them a specific cultural inheritance: a code built on honor and violence, belligerence and pride, distrust of education and commerce, contempt for steady work, and a particular relationship to law enforcement best described as adversarial. This was what the historian David Hackett Fischer called Borderer culture, and the economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell spent decades documenting exactly how it traveled.

Here is where it gets uncomfortable, and where I need you to stay with me: this culture did not stay white. Generations of Black Americans living in intimate proximity to white southern culture as enslaved people, as sharecroppers, as domestic workers, as neighbors in the post-Reconstruction South absorbed it. Not through any moral failing of their own, but through the simple mechanism by which all cultures transmit themselves: proximity, time, and the absence of alternatives. Sowell traced the specific markers of the speech patterns, the attitudes toward education, toward work, toward violence, and honor across continents and centuries. The same cultural fingerprints appear in the Scottish Highlands, in the antebellum American South among poor whites, and in the urban Black ghettos of the twentieth century.

And here is what makes Sowell’s argument not just interesting but devastating: the Black newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries documented it themselves. The editors of these papers, Black men writing for Black audiences, with every incentive to defend their community, explicitly criticized Southern Black migrants for bringing what they called backward and self-destructive cultural habits north with them. These were not outsiders making racial arguments. These were Black community leaders watching their life’s work being threatened and saying so plainly.

When the Great Migration arrived, millions of Black Southerners moved north between 1910 and 1970, overwhelming the absorptive capacity of northern Black institutions. Previous smaller waves of migrants had been socialized into the norms of northern Black communities. The Great Migration was simply too large and too fast. The incoming culture, shaped by generations of the antebellum South, became dominant by sheer weight of numbers.

The people who paid the highest price were the ones who had done everything right. The Black professional who had integrated his workplace lost standing as white colleagues began associating Blackness with the behavior patterns arriving from the South. The Black family that had maintained a stable household in an integrated neighborhood watched their neighborhood transform. The Black student who had competed successfully in integrated schools found those schools disrupted and eventually resegregated. Decades of carefully constructed cross-racial trust and reputation built through demonstrated excellence and community standards were confiscated by association.

This pattern, Sowell notes, is not unique to Black Americans. German Jewish communities in America reacted with alarm and sometimes hostility to waves of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth century for precisely the same reason. They had spent generations building reputations and feared, correctly, that the new arrivals’ different cultural patterns would trigger antisemitic reactions that would fall on all Jews regardless of individual behavior. The mechanism is consistent across groups and across centuries. Culture travels with people, and its consequences are attached to perceived group membership rather than to individual behavior.

But here is the thing that gets lost in every modern discussion of this history: the imported southern culture was fading. By the 1930s through the early 1960s, the cultural patterns Sowell identifies were declining in Black communities. The data is unambiguous. In 1960, more than two-thirds of Black children lived in two-parent homes comparable to white rates. Black teenage unemployment was actually lower than white teenage unemployment in the early 1950s. Black poverty was declining at the fastest rate ever recorded. The organic trajectory of Black advancement, interrupted by the migration, but reasserting itself, was pointing back toward the destination the northern Black pioneers had been approaching.

And then the government stepped in to help.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the mid-1960s are remembered as a landmark of progressive governance, the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the New Deal, designed to lift the poor and protect the vulnerable. That is the story. The data tells a different one.

The specific policy architecture that Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams spent careers documenting is not a general complaint about welfare. It is a precise identification of mechanisms. Aid to Families with Dependent Children, in its modified form, made a father’s presence in the home a disqualifying factor for benefits. Read that again. The government literally created a financial incentive for fathers to leave. Benefit levels in northern urban areas were set high enough to entirely replace a low-wage male worker's income. Public housing policies concentrated single-parent families geographically, creating the critical mass necessary for alternative social norms to take hold.

The results were catastrophic and swift. In 1965, 24 percent of Black infants were born to single mothers. By 1990, that figure had risen to 64 percent. The Black family, which had survived slavery, survived Jim Crow, survived the migration, did not survive the welfare state. The two-parent Black family went from being the norm to being the exception in roughly a single generation.

The most devastating aspect of this history, and the one most consistently avoided in mainstream discussion, is its timing. If racism causes family breakdown, why was the Black family more intact during more severe racism? If poverty causes crime, why was Black crime lower during greater poverty? If discrimination causes unemployment, why were Black teenagers more employed during more open discrimination? These are not rhetorical questions. They are direct empirical challenges to the standard narrative, and it has never satisfactorily answered them.

The Great Society did not affect Black Americans alone. White out-of-wedlock births rose from roughly three percent in 1965 to 18 percent by 1990. Every racial group saw significant increases in single parenthood after the Great Society legislation was passed. The same policy incentive produced the same response across racial lines, confirming that the mechanism was policy-driven, not race-specific. But the harm fell hardest on the community that already carried the most fragile family structure, for the historical and cultural reasons Sowell had spent decades documenting. The policy did not create the cultural pattern. It poured fuel on embers that had nearly gone out.

The upward mobility that had been advancing so rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s stalled, then reversed. The Black community that had demonstrated conclusively and against enormous odds that the obstacles were not insurmountable was derailed not primarily by its oppressors but by a combination of the migration’s cultural disruption and well-intentioned policy that systematically rewarded the most dysfunctional adaptations and penalized the most functional ones.

While the Great Society was destroying the Black family from above, another policy was simultaneously destroying Black economic opportunity from below. It had been doing so for decades, and it had been designed at least in part to do exactly that.

The story of the minimum wage and race begins in 1927, when an Alabama contractor won a bid to build a Veterans Bureau hospital in Long Island and brought Black construction workers from Alabama to work on the project. Representative Robert Bacon of Long Island was appalled that Black workers from the South were competing with white union workers on a federal project in his district. He submitted a bill. That bill became the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the first federal prevailing wage law, which mandated wages at union rates on federal construction projects. Since most major construction unions explicitly excluded Black workers, the effect was precisely what some of its sponsors intended: a legal mechanism to price Black labor out of competition with white union labor. Representative John Cochran of Missouri stated openly on the floor of Congress that he had received complaints about “southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics” and getting federal contracts.

The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, the actual origin of today’s federal minimum wage, had racist elements embedded through a different mechanism. At the insistence of Southern Democrats protecting the plantation economy, agricultural and domestic workers were deliberately excluded from its protections. These were the sectors where Black workers were concentrated. The law simultaneously imposed wage floors in covered sectors where Black workers competed with white union labor, and excluded them from protection where they actually worked.

Today’s minimum wage advocates are not racists. But intentions do not determine outcomes in economics. In 1948, Black teenage unemployment was roughly equal to white teenage unemployment, an unusual year when inflation had effectively nullified the minimum wage law. As minimum wages rose through the 1950s and 1960s, the racial gap in teenage unemployment opened and widened until it reached the roughly two-to-one ratio it has maintained for decades. The National Bureau of Economic Research documented this precisely: minimum wage increases reduced employment growth in exactly those industries where Black workers were concentrated.

The Seattle and California experiments of recent years confirmed the mechanism at scale. When Seattle raised its minimum wage, the University of Washington found that hours fell faster than wages rose, leaving the average low-wage worker $74 per month worse off despite the higher hourly rate. New businesses migrated across the city boundary to lower-wage suburbs. Entry-level positions froze. The workers harmed first, and hardest were the youngest, least experienced, and most marginal. California’s $20 fast food minimum wage cost an estimated 10,700 to 18,000 jobs in its first year.

The entry-level job is not just a paycheck. Research is unambiguous: one month of unemployment at age 18 to 20 causes a permanent income loss of two percent for the rest of a working life. That is not a temporary setback. It is a permanent scar, still measurable at age fifty-one in study after study across multiple countries and decades. A policy that began by explicitly targeting Black workers for exclusion from the labor market continues today to exclude the most marginal workers, disproportionately young, Black, and minority, from the entry point of economic participation. The road to that outcome was paved with explicit racist intent in 1931. Today it is paved with good intentions. The workers priced out of their first jobs cannot tell the difference.

Despite everything, despite the Great Society’s destruction of the Black family, despite the minimum wage’s persistent exclusion of the most marginal workers, despite the lingering cultural patterns Sowell traces to the antebellum South, something remarkable happened in the final decades of the twentieth century. America started actually getting there.

The data from the post-Civil Rights era through the early 2000s is almost entirely ignored in contemporary racial discourse. In 1958, four percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 1997, that figure crossed fifty percent for the first time. By 2021, it stood at 94 percent. The rate of opposition by non-Black Americans to a close relative marrying someone Black decreased from 63 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2016, a 78 percent decline in a single generation. In 1964, Black Americans were about 53 percent as likely as whites to have high school diplomas. By 2015, they were about 95 percent as likely. The Black middle class was growing substantially. The homicide rate was falling steadily from a peak of 10.2 per 100,000 in 1980 to a low in 2014 comparable to the mid-1960s.

The colorblind ideal, judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, was not a conservative position or a liberal position. It was Martin Luther King’s position. It was the stated consensus of both races for forty years. It was endorsed by civil rights leaders, by the Supreme Court in its landmark rulings, by both political parties through the 1980s and into the 1990s. And it was working. Measurably, consistently, and on multiple fronts simultaneously, America was becoming the country King described.

And then, in 2008, we elected our first Black president. A moment that should have been that many of us believed would be the final confirmation that the destination was within reach.

I want to be careful here, because this section is the one most likely to be misread, and I am going to ask you to hold two things in your head simultaneously. First: Barack Obama is not provably a racist. Second: the documented consequence of specific choices made by his administration was the most dramatic reversal in measured racial progress in modern American history.

I have studied this obsessively. I go back and forth on whether what happened was incompetence or malice. Some days, the evidence reads as a man who got pulled by political currents he should have resisted. Other days, it reads as something more deliberate. I genuinely do not know, and I want to be honest about that uncertainty. I know it was one of the two. The reader can examine the same evidence I have and decide for themselves. For me, the hardest hurdle to get over is that Obama was so well educated, groomed, and was so careful with everything else he said, it is hard to really believe his slips were accidental, but I do not know. I do know, however, that the result of his actions was blood and unnecessary violence.

What I do know, what the Gallup data documents without ambiguity, is what happened. In 2009, 70 percent of Americans believed race relations would improve because of Barack Obama’s election. By 2016, less than half of Black Americans and barely a quarter of white Americans believed his presidency had represented one of the most important advances for Black Americans. The percentage of Americans rating Black-white relations as good dropped from 70 percent in 2013 to 47 percent by 2016. By his final year in office, concern about race relations had reached its highest recorded level, surpassing even the aftermath of the Rodney King riots.

The inflection points are documented. In 2009, Obama said police “acted stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates before he knew the facts. In 2012, he said that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin before any investigation had concluded. In the aftermath of Ferguson, he found his voice on race in speeches that validated a narrative the evidence did not support. The problem was not that racial injustice does not exist. It does. The problem was the gap between the narrative being built and the evidence underlying it.

Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson became the founding story of a national movement built on the phrase “hands up, don’t shoot.” That phrase, repeated by members of Congress, chanted in the streets, and transformed into policy demands, was found by the Obama administration’s own Department of Justice to be false. The witness who triggered mass riots fabricated the account. The administration had already lent the narrative presidential credibility before the evidence came in. And when the evidence came in, the narrative did not change.

A movement was built on cases that, when the evidence was fully examined, did not support the conclusions drawn from them. And out of that movement, something grew that was far more dangerous than any of its founders’ stated intentions: an industry.

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, supporters donated $90 million to Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. Ninety million dollars, poured into an organization by people who genuinely wanted to help, who believed their money would protect Black lives and advance racial justice.

Federal tax filings tell a different story. A third of it $30 million went to other charitable organizations. Twenty-two million went to expenses, including $1.6 million to the father of co-founder Patrisse Cullors for security services. The organization’s largest single payout of $2.167 million went to a consulting firm owned by a sitting BLM board member. Cullors purchased four properties worth approximately $3 million. The organization spent $6 million of donated money on a California mansion with seven bedrooms, a pool, a sound stage, and a music studio. The U.S. Department of Justice has since opened a federal investigation into whether tens of millions of dollars meant for racial justice were diverted for personal use. The most damning verdict on BLM did not come from conservatives. It came from the mothers of the people BLM used to raise that money. Samara Rice, the mother of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, one of BLM’s most prominent causes, said publicly: “They are benefiting off the blood of our loved ones, and they won’t even talk to us.” Breonna Taylor’s mother called the organization a fraud. The mothers of BLM’s martyrs called it what it was.

The organization was not alone in manufacturing crisis. Wilfred Reilly, a Black political science professor at Kentucky State University, compiled a database of more than a thousand confirmed cases between 2014 and 2019 in which an undisputed claim of a serious bias incident was later utterly debunked. Jussie Smollett paid two Nigerian friends to stage a racist attack on himself, complete with a noose and bleach, in a Chicago neighborhood that went 83 percent for Hillary Clinton. The NASCAR “noose” in Bubba Wallace’s garage was a rope attached to the garage door installed before Wallace arrived at Talladega. Campus nooses turned out repeatedly to be exercise equipment or staging by Black students seeking attention. Reilly estimates a false reporting rate of approximately 15 percent among high-profile hate crime allegations.

Meanwhile, the actual data on police and Black Americans was being suppressed with a ferocity that should alarm anyone who cares about the truth. Roland Fryer, the youngest Black professor ever tenured at Harvard, published a study in 2016 finding no racial bias in officer-involved shootings after analyzing millions of use-of-force observations. He called it the most surprising result of his career. He was placed under police protection for thirty to forty days due to violent threats and was subsequently suspended from Harvard by Claudine Gay, who would later resign the Harvard presidency amid plagiarism allegations and her congressional testimony on antisemitism.

Joseph Cesario and David Johnson published peer-reviewed research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, finding no evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal police shootings. The administrator who funded their work, Stephen Hsu, Vice President of Research at Michigan State, lost his career. The authors retracted their own paper under social pressure, not because their methodology was wrong, but because they were unhappy with who was citing it. Michigan State deleted its own press release praising the study. This is what the suppression of inconvenient science looks like: not book burning, but career destruction, retraction under pressure, and institutional memory-holing. It wasn’t about truth; it has never been about truth. It is always about the ever-contracting narrative.

The trial of Derek Chauvin is the clearest illustration of what happens when a political narrative becomes more important than truth, evidence, or the constitutional right to a fair trial. I am going to tell you what the record actually contains, because what the public was told and what the evidence shows are two substantially different things.

George Floyd attempted to pass a counterfeit $20 bill at a Minneapolis convenience store. When police approached, Floyd ingested the drugs he was carrying, a documented pattern: in a nearly identical 2019 incident, the trial judge noted Floyd had done the same thing and suffered a hypertensive emergency requiring hospitalization. A pill found in the squad car where Floyd had briefly been placed tested positive for fentanyl and methamphetamine and contained Floyd’s DNA and saliva. Floyd resisted arrest, necessitating the restraint that followed. He had severe coronary disease: one artery was 90 percent blocked, two others were 75 percent narrowed.

The official toxicology showed 11 nanograms of fentanyl per milliliter in his blood, more than three times the level at which fentanyl deaths have been certified as overdoses. The Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, privately told prosecutors before the trial that, at that level, if Floyd had been found dead at home with no other apparent cause, it would be acceptable to call it an overdose. He then testified publicly that fentanyl was a contributing factor but not the primary cause of death. Between his private briefing and his public testimony, Baker’s office received hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls. A colleague from Washington, D.C. called him personally, expressed unhappiness, and threatened to publish a critical op-ed in the Washington Post. Baker subsequently added neck compression to his report. He denied under oath that any of this had influenced him.

Forensic pathology literature is clear that fentanyl overdose and positional asphyxia produce overlapping and, in many cases, nearly identical postmortem findings. Baker’s own trained colleague testified that without the video, she could not have determined the cause of death from the autopsy alone. The cause of death in this case was not established by objective physical evidence. It was established by the interpretation of a video in a courtroom surrounded by the National Guard.

The jury was not sequestered during proceedings. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the night before closing arguments, told protesters that if Chauvin was not convicted of murder, they needed to get “more confrontational” and “make sure they know we mean business.” Trial Judge Peter Cahill, who denied the defense’s mistrial motion, stated on the record: “I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.” An alternate juror, dismissed before deliberations, gave an interview saying she had feared being selected because she did not want to see rioting again and was concerned about people showing up at her home if the verdict was wrong. Juror Brandon Mitchell, the only seated juror to speak publicly, was subsequently found to have attended a Black Lives Matter march wearing a shirt reading “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks,” a direct reference to the Floyd case, and had answered “no” on the juror questionnaire about protest attendance.

A juror who lied on his sworn questionnaire about relevant prior activism. A juror pool under documented fear of violent consequences. A sitting member of Congress explicitly threatening consequences for the wrong verdict acknowledged by the judge as potential grounds for reversal. A medical examiner whose report changed after documented external pressure. Defense expert witnesses subjected to intimidation. This is not a fair trial by any objective constitutional standard. I am not telling you Chauvin was innocent. I am telling you that we do not know, because the process designed to determine that was corrupted beyond recognition by a political narrative that needed a verdict more than it needed the truth.

Here is the number the Black Lives Matter movement never discusses. In 2020, the year of the George Floyd protests, the year of the defund the police movement, the year BLM raised $90 million, the United States homicide rate increased by 30 percent. The largest single-year increase since 1960. Over half of the murder victims were Black. Do the arithmetic. Approximately 250 to 350 Black Americans are killed by police in a typical year. The 30 percent homicide surge in 2020 produced approximately 2,000 additional Black murder victims above the 2019 baseline. In a single year. The movement claiming to save Black lives from police through the defund movement, the documented police pullback, reduced prosecution, and the Ferguson and Minneapolis effects on proactive enforcement caused approximately six to eight times as many additional Black deaths as police kill in an entire year.

Minneapolis, the epicenter of the defund movement, saw homicides rise 58 percent in 2020, nearly reaching the body count that had earned the city the nickname “Murdeapolis” in the mid-1990s. African American residents told reporters about children killed while playing and terrified people installing bulletproof barriers in their bedrooms. One longtime Twin Cities resident said that in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, “the criminals were celebrating. They were getting rich. They were selling drugs openly.” His six-year-old grandson was caught in the resulting violence.

The burned neighborhoods are not abstractions. They are communities that were already economically fragile, where local businesses operated on thin margins and served residents who had few other options. When those businesses burned or were looted, most did not come back. Economists who studied the riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 found that property values in affected areas were measurably depressed into the 1980s at least twelve years of documented economic damage from a single episode of civil unrest. The 2020 riots caused an estimated $1 to $2 billion in insured damages, the highest from civil disorder in American history. And the communities that burned were the ones that could least afford to lose what they lost.

The Black community’s own verdict on all of this was clear. Minneapolis voters, including those in the wards with the largest Black populations, resoundingly rejected the ballot measure to defund the police. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who opposed defunding, won re-election with strong support from the city’s predominantly Black north side. Frey observed: “I heard a lot of White activists purport to be speaking on behalf of communities of color. And I was listening to them listening to communities of color, and they weren’t saying the same things.”

White progressives in comfortable neighborhoods promoted policies that destroyed Black neighborhoods. Black residents voted against those policies and watched them implemented anyway. The mothers of the movement’s martyrs called it fraud. And the organization raised $90 million and spent it on mansions and consulting contracts. This is not an accident. This is the structure. The benefits of the rage industry flow to the people running it. The costs fall on the communities whose names and trauma provide the fuel. The rage industry needs the fire to keep burning. An actually improving situation is its worst enemy.

I want to close by taking you back to where we started. To the northern Black communities of the early twentieth century, who built something remarkable against enormous odds. Who demonstrated conclusively, with primary source evidence preserved in their own newspapers, that the obstacles were not insurmountable. Who were building integration organically, through demonstrated excellence and community standards, and the slow accumulation of cross-racial trust and respect.

That achievement has been almost entirely erased from our national memory. Partly because acknowledging it is uncomfortable, it was the Great Migration and then the Great Society that interrupted it, and both are subjects the prevailing narrative cannot examine honestly. But partly because the rage industry depends on a specific story: that Black Americans have always been victims, that white America has always been the oppressor, that the situation is getting worse rather than better, and that the only solution is more activism, more donations, and more rage.

The actual history tells a different story. It tells the story of extraordinary human resilience and achievement under conditions that would have broken lesser communities. It tells the story of a society that was slowly, imperfectly, but measurably becoming what Martin Luther King described. It tells the story of that progress being interrupted not once but twice by forces that claimed to be helping: the Great Society, which destroyed the Black family and revived the imported southern culture, and the modern race grievance industry, which destroyed the post-Civil Rights momentum and replaced organic progress with manufactured crisis.

The colorblind ideal is not a right-wing talking point. It is not a way of pretending racism does not exist. It is the recognition grounded in history, in data, and in the stated aspirations of the civil rights movement itself that the only sustainable path to a unified society is one in which individuals are judged by their actions and their character rather than their ancestry. That path was working. The data proves it. We were on it.

The people profiting from our division need you to believe it was never working and never will. They need you angry, they need you despairing, and they need you sending them money. Every time you share a manufactured outrage, every time you treat a debunked narrative as established fact, every time you let the rage industry define your understanding of race in America, you are serving their interests not the interests of the Black Americans in burned neighborhoods, the Black teenagers priced out of their first jobs by minimum wages with racist roots, the Black families destroyed by welfare policy, or the Black murder victims whose deaths spiked in the year BLM raised $90 million.

The truth is not comfortable. It never is. But it is verifiable. Every claim in this piece, every number, every historical reference, can be checked. I am asking you to check it. I am asking you to share it with people who are more interested in what is true than what is popular.

And I am asking you to remember the people who built what we almost had, the northern Black communities who proved it was possible, whose achievement was stolen from them not by their oppressors but by a combination of migration, policy, and political exploitation, and to honor their memory by refusing to let the rage industry burn down what is left of what they built.

We were almost there once. We can be almost there again. But not while the fire is profitable.

Ephesians 4:1-7

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, 2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. 7 But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.

God Bless you

-Sam

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https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/06/authors-of-study-on-race-and-police-killings-ask-for-its-retraction-citing-continued-misuse-in-the-media/

https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/live-trials-current/george-floyd-death/judge-allows-evidence-that-george-floyd-ingested-drugs-suffered-heart-trouble-in-may-2019-police-stop-during-derek-chauvin-murder-trial/

https://www.startribune.com/witnesses-pill-found-in-back-of-minneapolis-squad-contained-fentanyl-meth-george-floyd-s-dna/600043109

https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/george-floyd/evidence-details-fentanyl-levels-george-floyds-body/89-70cf8552-1810-4462-a726-077b897e7378

https://mncourts.gov/mncourtsgov/media/High-Profile-Cases/27-CR-20-12646/ExhibitMtD08282020.pdf

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6474474/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3576505/

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/medical-examiner-on-stand-at-officers-trial-in-floyd-death/

https://www.ksat.com/news/2022/02/01/medical-examiner-no-pressure-on-floyd-autopsy-report/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/derek-chauvins-legal-team-requests-trial-alleging-jury/story?id=77493595

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/04/23/chauvin-trial-juror-says-she-feared-intimidation-at-her-home-riots-if-verdict-wasnt-correct-n2588435

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/04/closing-arguments-chauvin-murder-trial-george-floyd-jury-deliberates.html

https://www.newsweek.com/alan-dershowitz-says-maxine-waters-used-kkk-tactics-intimidate-jury-chauvin-trial-1585111

https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/11/03/message-from-minneapolis-reform-the-police-but-dont-defund-them/

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/25/us/minneapolis-crime-defund-invs/index.html

https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_nation-turmoil-george-floyd-protests_economic-damage-civil-unrest-may-persist-decades/6190373.html

https://fee.org/articles/here-are-just-10-of-the-many-minority-owned-businesses-destroyed-in-the-riots/

https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/fbi-statistics-show-30-increase-murder-2020-more-evidence-defunding

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/

https://news.gallup.com/poll/149390/Record-High-Approve-Black-White-Marriages.aspx

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/african-americans-in-the-twentieth-century/

https://www.epi.org/publication/poverty-persists-50-years-after-the-poor-peoples-campaign-black-poverty-rates-are-more-than-twice-as-high-as-white-poverty-rates/

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/