Horowitz on Glenn Beck on Gates

I will be on the Glenn Beck show this evening (afternoon on the coast) talking about the Henry Louis Gates case. It must be said at that outset that Gates is no Michael Eric Dyson, an intellectual airhead and compulsive race baiter. He’s a smart sophisticated and usually quite balanced and modulated commentator on racial matters. Which makes this incident all the more interesting and illuminating. The first thing to be said is that it’s obvious that Gates is lying about what happened. There were three officers present — a black, a Hispanic and the arresting officer who was white but who had been teaching other officers how not to racial profile for a ten years, a position he was selected for by a black superior. To believe Gates you have to believe that when officer Crowley arrived on the scene, Gates was cooperative with officer and maintained his calm and that the officer arrested him out of racial spite. This is utterly ridiculous on its face. The officer’s story is all too credible: A neighbor reported to men breaking into the house. In fact there were two men breaking into the house — Gates and his driver, since Gates had forgot his tree. The officer asked for Gates’ id and Gates basically said piss off. You don’t know who you’re dealing with here, and the fact that you would ask for my id in my own house is just instance of how black men are treated by cops in America. When the officer did not back off, Gates panicked and began calling him a racist and it descended from there. In other words it was Gates’ arrogance not his race that got him in trouble.  The cop didn’t recognize him — friend of the president, millionaire Harvard professor, host of a PBS TV series etc. That was sin.

Lying about the embarrassing details of one’s own arrest is understandable. Pouring gasoline on racial tinder is not. “This is the way black men are treated in America,” Gates said. In fact a black man in America can slit his wife’s throat from ear to ear and be acquitted. A racial arsonist, convicted liar and lynch mob agitator responsible for 8 racial deaths — I’m referring to Reverend Al — can if black revive himself as an elder civil rights statesmen and be treated respectfully not only on MSNBC but Fox. Perhaps the lowest point in Gates effort to pin his rap on the Cambridge police is his invocation of the canard that a black man with a PhD in America is still a nig—r. (Look at that — it’s 2009 and it would still be a risk for me to spell the word out.) This big raciall lie (with his PhD Gates as a black man is world famous and rich) originated with Malcolm X,. himself a anti-American racist. It libels all other Americans and sends a disgusting message to African American kids that America is rigged so they can’t succeed. Shame on the professor.

But none of this would be possible without the soft racism of American liberals which takes this racial garbage coming from Gates and uncountable others seriously.