Remember way back when terrorism was still a thing, how the #Enlightened liberals would brush it off as nothing to worry about? Their go-to rebuttal to any concerns over terrorism was usually to just call you a racist. But occasionally you’d find some who would say something like, “more people are killed by lawnmowers than terrorists every year,” or “more people fall out of bed and die every year.”
Here’s an example from 2017, Kim Kardashian, in an attempt to demonstrate the idiocy of President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” (which actually wasn’t a Muslim ban), tweeted this out:
Her tweet got almost 340,000 likes from smart, enlightened liberals who Just Knew Better than that idiot troglodyte President Trump.
But you know what? As much as we rightwingers didn’t want to admit it back then, they were ultimately right about us not having proper perspective on the true threat of terrorism. They were (and still are) wrong about Trump’s “Muslim Ban” (which wasn’t a Muslim Ban), but on the broader point of terrorism, they were right. Outside of 9-11, which was a one-off event, terrorism over the past 19 years has not been a serious danger for the average American.
We were the ones duped by the media, whipped into a hysteria over terrorism even though the statistical likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack here in the US is infinitesimal. This is not to dismiss the 14 confirmed terrorist attacks that have happened in this country since 9-11, notably San Bernadino, Pulse Nightclub and the Boston Marathon Bombing. There was a rash of terror attacks in the US from 2014-2016 which coincided with the rise of ISIS in the Middle East. Since 9-11, 97 Americans have been killed by Islamic Terrorism in total. That’s 97 people over an 18 year period.
Again, this is not to completely dismiss terrorism and trivialize those 97 people that died (and the additional people injured), but it is to say that media coverage of terrorist attacks has caused us to perceive terrorism as a far greater threat to ourselves than it truly is. And you could even go further and say that this media-fueled obsession with terrorism actually ended up causing more terrorist attacks due to military intervention in the Middle East enraging people and causing some to turn to terrorism as a way to get back at the US.
But if we’re going to put the true threat of terrorism in perspective by pointing out that you’re almost 35x more likely to be killed by a riding lawnmower than you are by a terrorist, we should also do the same thing with the current topic of media-fueled mass hysteri a: police brutality caused by racism.
Each year on average, 69 Americans are killed by riding lawnmowers. Yet according to the Washington Post, since January 1, 2015, 125 unarmed black Americans have been killed by police. That’s an average of 21 per year. If we do Americans of all races, the number is 356 over that same time span, or 59 per year on average.
There are more Americans killed in lawnmower accidents each year than there are unarmed Americans killed by police.
And this is including all incidents of police killing unarmed black people–meaning the justified killings as well as the unjustified ones. Meaning the number of unjustified police killings is way lower than even 21 per year.
How many of these infamous police killings of black people in recent years have actually been legitimate instances of officer wrongdoing? I know the media treats all of them as completely unjustified acts of racism by the cops, but really, how many of the major incidents since Trayvon Martin (who wasn’t even killed by a cop) have actually been unequivocal cases of unjustified police brutality? And even in that handful of incidents, how many were plausibly attributed to racism?
Face it: the media warps our realities and makes us believe things like terrorism and police brutality are far more prominent than they truly are. Simply by giving certain events more coverage, and other events less (or zero) coverage, the media has the ability to determine our priorities and fears.
From 2014-2019, there were an average of 73 shark attacks worldwide annually. That’s one every five days on average. If the media wanted to, it could give each and every one of these shark attacks massive and hysterical coverage and within a year or two, we’d all be terrified to go in the ocean.
The media has people fooled. Worse than that, it has people afraid. And it’s not just terrorism and police. If the media covered coronavirus honestly, we probably wouldn’t be under this six-month lockdown that has driven so many people crazy and caused so much economic destruction. The CDC, over the weekend, just updated its website and admitted that only 6% of the 187,000 Covid deaths were caused by Covid alone–the remaining 94% had an average of 2.6 additional comorbidities that were as much if not greater contributors to the remaining 178,000 “Covid” deaths.
It’s time for people to admit they were duped by the media. The country would be far better off if people just admitted they were duped, and learned their lesson: never trust the media again.