We have plenty of cliches about Texas.
The youth football. The food. The dialect. The lifestyle. But, no Texas cliché is as big as the notion that “everything is bigger in Texas.”
While I have never been in a position to verify the veracity of that cliché, it certainly appears that the lies are bigger in Texas.
Well, at least for Scott Lattin. He is the Texas man who told the world that his Dodge pickup truck was vandalized, spray-painted, and keyed by activists of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement.
You see, Lattin has been, by his own reports, an ardent supporter of police and the “Police Lives Matter” crowd. His house, his yard, and his Dodge pickup truck are adorned with signs and ribbons that visibly support police. Lattin not-so-subtly blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for violating his truck.
“F**k your flag, your feelings, your faith,” were spray-painted across Lattin’s truck.
“Engage me in a dialogue. Don’t just destroy my stuff; it’s the only truck we have and because of this, it’s totaled now,” Lattin said.
And the conservative blogosphere was quick to pick Lattin’s story up as proof positive that blacks and the Black Lives Matter movement hate police and are systemically depraved.
Conservative blogs and their faithful readers commented on how “those people” or those “animals” or those “thugs” are always violent and anti-social, and doing “what comes natural” to them.
There was even the obligatory Gofundme account set up to buy Lattin a brand new pickup truck.
But, we are now finding out that Lattin was likely lying about the entire incident.
Lattin was recently arrested on a charge of making a false police report. He was arrested after police discovered multiple discrepancies in his report of the incident.
Lattin himself is perhaps harmless enough, but his contrived story is part of a larger narrative against blacks.
Since blacks arrived in North America in the 1600s, there has been a small group of people who have been successful at characterizing blacks as violent, lazy, unintelligent, and inhuman.
At the turn of the century, it was “The Birth of a Nation.” After that, it was “Reefer Madness,” Jim Crow, and Blaxploitation. In the 1940s and 1950s, black people still had tails.
Later, blacks were convicts with a proclivity toward violence. And today, blacks are comprised of angry black women and angry black men who feel self-entitled and receive government handouts.
A false and damaging narrative that some in this culture have repeated so many times, it is simply accepted as truth.
“Well, you know the high school drop out rates are…,”. Or “Black fathers need to take more responsibility for…” Or “Black women need to be more like…”
However, what’s most chilling about Lattin’s story is he invoked God and called on God to endorse his actions.
“…f**k your faith.”
That’s powerful and powerfully disturbing. Lying to further this narrative against black people is one thing, but invoking faith and God to fuel some war against a legitimate, God-blessed civil rights movement, is simply repugnant.
God wasn’t anywhere in Lattin’s story. I asked God.
