The Black Bogeyman Cometh

[applegrove]

The Black Bogeyman Cometh

By Jamil Smith at the New Republic

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123400/republican-party-black-bogeyman-cometh

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That’s a step beyond the utterly baseless “Ferguson Effect” theory, first referenced by St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson and embraced by Christie and Senator Ted Cruz, among other Republicans. It holds that increased scrutiny of and protest against police brutality is causing officers to be too reticent in their duties, resulting in an increase in crime—or, as Christie called it on Morning Joe, "the lawlessness that’s been encouraged by the president of the United States." It will be difficult to turn the Ferguson Effect into a Willie Horton equivalent, though—a fact highlighted last week when the “war on cops” narrative backfired. You might have heard about the Fox Lake, Illinois, police lieutenant whose recent shooting death was blamed on Black Lives Matter by various politicians and conservative media outlets? Well, we learned last week that he actually killed himself in a cockamamie plot to hide his own crimes. That officer wasn’t alone, either; at least two other cops have recently turned guns on themselves and fabricated shooters from their imaginations. It is fortunate that no innocent civilian was harmed or killed in the resulting manhunts for ghosts.

I can’t predict what kind of horrors the police will perpetrate in the coming election year. But I doubt that Republicans will find the Black Lives Matter movement to be an effective spook (pardon the double entendre)—it lacks the power and simplicity of a focus on a single criminal who stands for all things scary and non-white. The Republican candidates—particularly Trump—have already tried exploiting the shooting death of a young white woman in San Francisco as a symbol of what’s wrong with immigration, because her killer was an undocumented man born in Mexico. But so far, the killer's name has not entered the national discourse like Horton's.

A bogeyman with the potentcy of Willie Horton won't be easy to find. But Republicans will be needing one: After all, the right won't have its most prominent bogeyman of recent elections, President Obama, to kick around anymore. So they, or the eventual nominee, will almost surely pick a Horton for 2016. But first, conservatives will need to reckon with their own problematic black man, Ben Carson.

The famed neurosurgeon has been polling neck-and-neck with Donald Trump, and with that has come increased scrutiny. Since there is no political record to examine, we’re left to pick through Carson’s beliefs and his carefully manicured personal legend, one first immortalized in his 1990 memoir Gifted Hands. And his origin story has changed more times than Heath Ledger’s Joker. Just in the last few weeks, Carson’s tales of nearly stabbing a friend, protecting fellow Detroit high school students from post-MLK assassination riots, and a scholarship offer to West Point have all come under serious question, if not been outright debunked.



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