Lying without Lying: Do Millions of Americans Really Believe Police Kill 10,000 Unarmed Black Men Each Year?

Countdown to America’s 250th birthday

Photo by Michael Muthee on Unsplash

You can teach people lies without actually lying to them.

If you do sprinkle in some lies, artfully told, that will expedite the process of deception. But lying itself isn’t necessary.

Consider how the monoculture operates.

The Eight Percenters who dominate our cultural institutions have long played an outsized role in shaping public opinion about America. Of course, our nation’s many faults are fair game, but the monoculture exhibits a half-hearted devotion to truth. When addressing America, journalists, professors, filmmakers, and others often focus far more on the negative than the positive.

Myopia reigns. They give short shrift to context and compare America to some theoretical ideal rather than to the many other flawed collections of humans who have and continue to inhabit planet Earth. Too often they render verdicts on America without grappling with that all-important question: Compared to what?

Now that Independence Day 2025 has passed, Americans’ view of their nation has entered an important stage. That’s because, as of July 5th, we’ve begun the countdown to America’s 250th birthday, and with it the race to define—or redefine—the United States.

Is she a liberator or an oppressor?

Does she protect the freedoms of the many or the few?

Does she deserve our gratitude or our scorn?

Brace yourself for the barrage. Because in the coming year, we’ll hear from countless scribes, pundits, politicians, artists, academics, influencers, and celebrities. Yes, the heterodox community will weigh in too, but you can bet the Eight Percenters’ takes will continue to enjoy the most attention. And they do get part of the story right. America’s saga does include many racist chapters.

But Eight Percenters don’t tell the whole story. They tell a story with holes. They present a Swiss-cheese version of America, one with lots of important information omitted or downplayed. They may pull it off without telling a single lie, yet they still communicate lies to readers, students, and viewers.

Last week I explored the issue of slavery. It doesn’t matter if no professor, journalist, or director has ever said that slavery originated in America. Decades of deceptive storytelling have led many college students to the historically illiterate conclusion that America invented slavery.

And Duke Pesta, the professor who administered the quizzes that revealed the depressing results, delivers more depressing revelations. The students also believe slavery was practiced almost exclusively in America. They don’t see it as the global institution it’s been for thousands of years. And what’s with my use of the past tense? Well, students apparently don’t realize that approximately 50 million people still suffer in slavery today, most often in nations such as India, China, and North Korea.

Pesta further notes that students are often as confident as they are ignorant:

They cannot tell you many historical facts or relate anything meaningful about historical biographies, but they are, however, stridently vocal about the corrupt nature of the Republic, about the wickedness of the founding fathers, and about the evils of free markets.

There you have it, the power of the monoculture. And slavery is just the beginning.

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The Whole Truth vs Holes in the Truth

If a Skeptic magazine survey is representative of our nation in general, we can assume that many millions of Americans believe police officers kill at least 10,000 unarmed black men each year.

What’s the actual figure? It’s not 10,000. It’s not 1,000. It’s not 100. The actual figure is 12.

That’s according to The Washington Post’s “Police Shooting Database,” and the figure is for the year 2019. Skeptic first conducted the survey in 2020, the year the George Floyd saga erupted, so 2019 was then the most recent reference point.

Of course, there are many ways our nation could improve policing, and we would hope officers kill zero unarmed Americans. But we must still grapple with the Skeptic survey. We must still grapple with the massive chasm between perception and reality.

The researchers at Skeptic report that their findings reveal “a shocking degree of inaccuracy” among respondents. But I’m not sure that’s quite right. Inaccurate yes, but given all the shows, movies, news reports, and classroom lectures Americans have consumed, are those findings really shocking?

We must also keep in mind that the respondents varied in the degree to which they were inaccurate. Which respondents were furthest from the truth? Those who self described as “very liberal.” Zero in on that category and you discover some unsettling revelations. Almost a quarter of very liberal respondents thought police killed 10,000 or more unarmed black men in a single year. Sit with that for a while.

Put it into context. The 9/11 terrorist attacks killed just under 3,000 people. That means these respondents believe police officers slaughter at least three times as many unarmed black men each year. What a terrible thing to communicate to Americans, especially black Americans.

The monoculture invites them to focus on a relatively small threat and overlook much larger ones. As data scientist Zac Kriegman points out, “10,000 black people are murdered annually by criminals in their own neighborhoods.”

But it’s unlikely that the very liberal respondents in the Skeptic survey have ever heard of Kriegman, who lost his job at Reuters after he tried to bring some sober thinking to one of our nation’s most esteemed news agencies. It’s also unlikely they’ve ever heard of Roland Fryer, the black Harvard economist who got drubbed by the monoculture after he challenged their policing dogma.

And what about the mental health toll of the deception?

In The Coddling movie, a young woman named Kimi explains how she fell into anxiety and depression after her professors, peers, and the media convinced her that America hated her because she’s black. She eventually arrived at a different conclusion about the U.S., but still laments the years she suffered in misery.

Source: Skeptic magazine

Careening Toward 250

It’s no wonder fewer and fewer Americans say they’re proud of their country. It’s no wonder so many young people, especially young lefties, say they’re embarrassed to be Americans. If so many people will so readily believe something so absurdly false about their country, what hope do we have?

It leaves me groping for silver linings.

A certain percentage of people are probably just checked out in general, and surveys often reveal that substantial chunks of Americans from across the political spectrum hold all kinds of crackpot ideas. That’s true, but it’s not exactly comforting.

Maybe we can find some comfort in the fact that inaccuracies decreased somewhat when Skeptic conducted a similar survey in 2023. Then again, we must weigh the modest improvement against the fact that so many remained so far removed from reality. And Skeptic’s investigation also reveals how susceptible all of us are to a barrage of myopic storytelling.

In the original survey, even a majority of “very conservative” respondents overestimated the number of killings by an order of magnitude or more. And about one in five of that most conservative subset thinks police kill at least 1,000 unarmed black men each year. How’s that for power? Even many Fox Newers got seduced by the monoculture’s tall tale.

Here’s another attempt to find a silver lining: Maybe those who believe that cops kill at least 10,000 unarmed black men each year keep that belief to themselves. Maybe they’re not actively trying to convert others to their worldview. Maybe they’re not especially influential.

Unfortunately, that’s just wishful thinking.

We can assume that those very liberal respondents roughly overlap with Eight Percenters, the people the research organization More in Common refers to as “Progressive Activists.” They’re fairly rare even among lefties.

Consider how More in Common describes them:

Progressive Activists have strong ideological views, high levels of engagement with political issues, and the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status. Their own circumstances are secure. They feel safer than any group, which perhaps frees them to devote more attention to larger issues of social justice in their society. They have an outsized role in public debates, even though they comprise a small portion of the total population, about one in 12 Americans. (emphasis mine)

In other words, the people who are most wrong about the ultra hot-button topic of police killings of unarmed black men are also the richest, most educated, and most influential.

Buckle up for the coming year, these are the very people whose stories about America will ring loudest in your ears.