One of the trite pearls of wisdom repeated ad nauseam for the past several days is that America needs to have an honest conversation on race.  It’s a constant theme repeated in the self-flagellating virtue signaling spewing forth from prominent figures in industry, academia, and even the military, put out in hopes that the Orwellian cultural Death Star doesn’t cast its eye of destruction on them. 

Of course, the media manipulators and leftists have no interest in an honest conversation.  The only thoughts allowed in their version are mostly false ones that have been approved by leftists for the purpose of inciting racial hatred and overthrowing America. 

Anyone willing to throw around words and ideas marked with the liberal stamp of approval like white supremacy, white privilege, microaggressions, or systemic racism will be rewarded mightily with the bonus that these towering giants of moral cowardice also get to humbly brag about their bravery in speaking truth to power.  Bonus points if they take an actual knee in abject surrender.

It takes no courage to adopt these positions.  True courage is displayed by those willing to publicly buck this toxic stew, especially for black Americans like Thomas Sowell, Candace Owens, and Shelby Steele who show more courage on any given day than many people show during their lifetimes. 

People are entitled to their own opinions, no matter how wrong or off base, but they aren’t entitled to their own facts, which is why the left has worked so hard to outlaw both facts and conservative opinion.  True facts that are weighed appropriately for all variables shred the leftist narrative. 

An honest conversation on race would include discussion of plenty of inconvenient facts, such as the fact that black men disproportionately commit violent crime or that police almost never kill unarmed black men.  Indeed, the facts show that nearly 40 percent of cop killers are black and that a police officer is more than 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black American than for a law enforcement officer to kill an unarmed black person. 

An honest conversation on race would express horror at the fact that somewhere around three-quarters of black men are raised without fathers and note the tremendous societal damage this causes.

An honest conversation would ponder why black American homicide-victimization rate is three times the rate of Hispanics and seven times the average white rate, almost exclusively murdered (94%) by other black Americans.  

It would certainly question how defunding the police could do anything other than slamming the pedal to the metal on these horrific and mind-blowing statistics. 

It might also note that those killed by law enforcement were almost always engaging in actions that precipitated their deaths and that black-on-white violent crime in all categories is far more commonplace than the reverse. 

If we were having an honest conversation in America, we would lament all the communities and businesses destroyed by the wanton violence and lawlessness and stop the noxious virtue signaling.  When the final butcher’s bill for this latest leftist lunacy comes due, there will be many black lives that apparently did not matter enough to not be destroyed, sacrificed gleefully by leftists on the altar of horror and misery. 

An honest conversation might notice that all of the worst alleged incidents happened in areas ruled by Democrats for decades, and that failed Democrat policies perpetuated the cycle of violence and victimization (often intentionally) that has come to define these areas, while poisoning the culture.  It might also notice that powerful unions, long a hallmark of Democrat protection, have protected the few bad apples that no doubt exist in police departments. 

An honest conversation would admit that abortion started with strong racist eugenics connections and that the existence of abortion today, with clinics heavily weighted in areas with sizable populations of black Americans, results in the slaughter of entire generations of unborn black babies, something liberal hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg once all but admitted was part of the motivation for it.

There will never be an honest conversation on race because liberal policies are largely to blame for the tragic and terrible state of too many black majority communities and the toxic culture that results in so much death and despair.

As he often does, Thomas Sowell captured this phenomenon perfectly when he tweeted, “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers, and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”

The concept of racism will exist so long as liberalism holds cultural supremacy because it is the most powerful weapon in the left’s arsenal, employed in racist fashion to try to keep black Americans wedded to the Democrat party.

There is nothing surprising about this.  The Marxist left is at war with America.  That has been obvious for many years.  This is the latest front in that war, following on the heels of “Russia, Russia, Russia” sedition, the already forgotten “impeachment,”and the manipulated COVID lockdowns aimed as a stake in the heart of the U.S. economy.

This latest chapter won’t end until it is either clear that these violence-fueled protests are benefiting the president or when the media manipulators are on to their next assault, a new yet unseen front in the war on America.  This will also continue because Democrats are scared that they their iron-fisted control of blacks as a voting bloc is slipping.  So, they agitate and burn communities to the ground even as more people catch on to their depraved and evil game. 

With liberal support starting to coalesce around the clearly Marxist-inspired idea of defunding the police, one wonders if this is the left’s Stalingrad, meaning that this might be such an insane overreach that it starts sapping their energy and resources, resulting in a turning of the tide.  

My fervent hope is that enough sane Americans recognize this for what it is and that a massive silent majority turns out in November to make their voices heard at the polls. 

But, I am not confident in that hope.  The mere fact that this can happen with so few people objecting, cowed into silence by the cultural Marxists, shows that America has already changed in a very fundamental way, even as the provocateurs of that change, responsible for decades of educational brainwashing and media manipulation, continue their subversive mission unchecked.

Time will tell whether this has yet produced the critical mass of voters needed to overthrow the greatest experiment in freedom in human history. 

In the meantime, I will remember and repeat the names of federal protective service officer Dave Patrick Underwood and retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn, two black Americans (no doubt among many) killed in heartbreaking fashion in the leftist carnage.  Their lives mattered.  There will be no mass funerals for them.  They will not be martyrs.  Their lives were little more than an inconvenience for the leftists actively working to destroy their country. 

But they deserve to be remembered, because they died on the front lines, victims of the left’s relentless and unending war on America.   

Fletch Daniels can be found on twitter @fletchdaniels.