If I were a North Korean leader, or even an ISIS head chopper, I’d be reveling in the fact that a former American black basketball star spoke more plainly about race in America than any member of our political class or media.  Charles Barkley doesn’t mince words.  Many of his fellow blacks were not pleased when he told young African-Americans to forget about basketball and stay in school.  After Ferguson, Barkley did not join the race hustlers, liberal media, and the rest of the self-promoters inciting violence; instead, he said in a radio interview that there was no excuse to be torching cars and burning down people’s businesses.  Bravo Barkley, says Taki.  Here’s a great athlete who tells it like it is.  He went on to point out that, were it not for the cops, “we’d be living in the wild, wild west of our neighborhoods.”

Compare Barkley with the “Rev.” Al Sharpton—and I use quotes for reverend because of the mind-warping exaggeration of the word when applied to this hustler and criminal: a man who falsely accused an innocent man of rape and profited in the ensuing publicity; one who led months of protest against a shop owner in Harlem, calling him a white interloper, rhetoric that encouraged a black thug to shoot several customers and set fire to the place; and one who, after seven innocent people died, refused to apologize but went ahead to cheat on his taxes and stiff the IRS for millions in back taxes.  This is the man—not Charles Barkley—who dines with and advises President Obama on race.  With leaders like Sharpton, is it any wonder that black America is in trouble?

Race hustlers aside, the media, along with our cowardly political elites, have been the real enablers, hoodwinking the African-American community.  Portraying Michael Brown, the Ferguson career criminal, as a passive and innocent victim of a white trigger-happy cop is as slimy as journalism can get—slimiest of all, of course, being the New York Times, in its pompous, holier-than-thou approach to anyone wearing a uniform, especially where white cops are concerned.  Leading the antiwhite charge was a jerk by the name of Kristof, who banged on in five interminable rants about how whites don’t get it, and why a 13-year-old thug who shot a white mother three times in the face should now be let out because the victim has forgiven him and because he’s apologized to her.  Right.

This is not journalism; it’s malpractice à la Rolling Stone, purposely misleading while trying to justify the agenda, whatever that may be.  (I know what it is, but let’s not go there.)  And it gets far worse.  I live part-time in New York, and looking at the NYPD daily crime blotter I fail to see a single white face among those caught on tape committing crimes against hard-working people.  Needless to say, Times executives who live in expensive buildings with guards and doormen galore do not get held up while getting into their chauffeured limos on their way to work.  Racist cops and a racist system suit the racial mischief-makers while they’re busy misleading African-Americans.  And there’s money in it for them.  Hucksters and victimhoodmongers are doing untold harm to the American fabric, but when a group like The Bronx Defenders is paid $107 million by the city over the last seven years to represent poor defendants, it is not surprising that they put out a video showing a black man holding a gun to a cop’s head, while lyrics demand “that a cop got to get killed.”  Very nice.

But even worse than Sharpton and the rest of the hustlers is the mayor of Noo Yawk, Bill de Blasio.  This SOB went as far as to remark publicly after a riot that he had to teach his son, who is of mixed race, about the dangers he faced from the police.  Instead of calming people down, this ass stirred up trouble, all in order to please those who got him elected—blacks, Hispanics, and, I suppose, poor whites on welfare.  The governor of New York has not done any better.  He had a photo op while shaking hands with an ex-crack-dealer billionaire whose lyrics vulgarly denounce women and cops and whose name is Jay Z.  Bravo!  Crime pays, in fact, because it’s the necessary initial step toward advancing the American Dream.

Hollywood ain’t much better.  The moment the execrable Amy Pascal, a top Sony executive, got caught making fun of Obama’s taste in movies, she rang up Sharpton and begged for a meeting of “healing,” which means she will give Al money, and he will reluctantly say that he accepts her mea culpa.  What a sick society we live in.  In reality and away from the bullshit, 93 percent of black victims are killed by other blacks.  No one’s paying attention to this.  Fewer than seven percent are killed by whites.  As Rudy Giuliani said, “white police officers would not be there if you weren’t killing each other.”  Well said, Rudy.  His only mistake was to try to deport this writer for saying something that was true but not popular with the elite.