Protests break out calling for justice for George Floyd. The
perpetrator is in custody. The other officers, who didn’t step in to prevent
the officer’s actions, are also charged as accessories. All were immediately
fired, not suspended, no waiting to see.
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| Terrence Floyd, brother of George Floyd, calls for peace. "That's not going to bring my brother back at all," he says of riots. Image from here. |
The arrest wasn’t instantaneous. In such a high-profile case
(because of the media), the prosecutors need to be careful not to charge more
than they can prove. It doesn’t appear to be premeditated, for example, so if
they charged first-degree murder and couldn’t prove it, the officer would be
found not guilty. And, because of double jeopardy protection, he couldn’t be charged
again for the same incident. So the charges are what they can prove for certain.
If evidence later appears to prove a higher level crime, the charges can be raised.
There were things to take into account. I suggest this op-ed,
which explains those legal details.
But do you know anyone or have you heard anyone say that the
brutality was justified and the police officer should be let off? In regular
media? On social media? Anywhere?
This is one of those
times that civil society is in agreement. A serious crime was committed, and
there must be justice.
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| found on Ben Shapiro's Facebook page today |
So what is being protested?
If justice is underway, what is the message of the protest?
I think it’s something like, “Until America can guarantee
that this will never happen to another black person, America is evil.”
But that’s an impossible ask.
America was founded on the principle that all people are
created equal—no one is entitled to more consideration under the law than
another. Society isn’t stratified by birth, as it has historically been in most
countries on earth throughout history.
Unfortunately, slavery of blacks was instituted on this
continent by the Mother Country, and it needed to be rooted out. The
Constitution was written with that expectation. It took too long, and it took a
bloody Civil War to accomplish. But that’s what America sacrificed to make it
happen.
Even then, people who had been taught their whole lives that
people of a certain bloodline were inferior didn’t automatically unlearn that false
teaching. It took another century for people to get fed up and actually grant
equal rights.
We’re still divided. But let’s define things a little more
carefully.
The Republican Party was created to fight slavery. All
slaveholders were Democrats. Even in the northern non-slave states before the
Civil War, the pro-slavery people were only Democrats. Coincidentally, it is
Democrats who run the cities with most of the racial issues. This is true in
Minneapolis—local on up to the governor.
The Republican Party pushed for the Civil Rights laws in the
60s. It was Democrats, mainly from former slave states, that resisted letting
go of the Jim Crow laws they had perpetuated.
Then, somehow, the lie got told that it was the Republicans
all along who had been racist. The lie became that what conservatives wanted to
conserve were the old, pre-Civil Rights, ways. That conservatives wanted to
conserve the Democrat way of thinking and living. That was never even close to
reality.
So, here we are, decades later, and the lie is bigger. Now,
at a time when most Americans don’t even understand the mindset of a racist,
and have never felt that way in their lives, have never treated different races
with disdain—those people are being told they’re guilty of systemic racism.
What are the protests saying, then? That we should stop
being white, or Hispanic, or Asian, because blacks need to be knelt down to? If
that isn’t it, what is the message of the protest?
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| Houston Chronicle May 31, 2020 |
I’ve seen a number of people reference other protests—implying
that this is just an escalation, because we didn’t listen before. Such a message
covers the full front page of yesterday’s Houston Chronicle Sports
section. Colin Kaepernick protested by refusing to stand for the National
Anthem, and that offended us. “If only we had heard his message!” people say.
We did hear him. It wasn’t his method of protest that offended
us. It was the lie of his message—that America is an evil, systemically racist
country—this from a millionaire black man playing a ball game for a living, and
not playing it spectacularly well enough to merit his hiring amid the bad media
he brought on.
Black Live Matter protested. And when people of goodwill
answered, “Yes, your lives do matter to us. All lives matter,”
those people got shouted down with, “No! You’re not hearing us. Black
lives matter!”
What is that supposed to mean? That our lives don’t matter
because we don’t have the right skin color?
Their protests were related to the Ferguson incident, which
wasn’t a case of racist police brutality; it was a case of a black thug
attacking a police officer who defended himself; even black eyewitnesses
testified of that. Still the protesters shouted the lie that the perpetrator
had held his hands up and called don’t shoot and was just gunned down. When it
was proven that didn’t happen, the protesters insisted, “It’s still symbolic of
the systemic problem.” Then where is your real evidence?
I assert that there isn’t a systemic racist problem going on
in America, particularly toward blacks. Black radio host Larry Elder has the
stats. Such as today, when he pointed out that police are 18.5 times more
likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around. That studies that
set out to prove racist police brutality found instead that, surprisingly,
blacks are less likely to be harmed, because every officer is hyper-aware of
the media ramifications of an error.
Elder recites the evidence often. So does black commentator
Candace Owens. When they provide data, they’re called traitors. Sometimes they’re
even called white supremacists, which is more than a little ironic. They get
called these things because their experience and the data they provide does not
coincide with the going narrative that there’s systemic racism in America. But
those calling them those names don’t provide data; they only cite isolated
incidents—which we all agree, when they actually happen, are injustices, and we
all agree that justice should be done.
So, where is the evidence of this systemic, widespread
problem that is making them so angry?
I’m not saying they don’t really feel what they’re feeling.
I believe they do.
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| Steve Locke, who tells his story of being detained because black image from here |
I read a story over the weekend, from an incident several
years ago, that tells what they’re feeling better than most. It’s the experience of a black man, a college teacher in Massachusetts, who was heading to get a burrito for lunch
before going to teach a class. Police pulled him over and questioned him, and then
detained him. He fit the description, they said, of a black man, his approximate
size, wearing a knit cap and a puffy coat, who had just robbed a nearby
business. His jacket (a designer brand, and not a parka) didn’t look very
puffy. He was wearing a lanyard showing his ID at the university. Everything he
said checked out. He remained calm and respectful. Nevertheless, the police
kept him, didn’t believe him, and were considering taking him to be identified
by the victim. Fortunately, a detective arrived, saw that his story checked
out. The new officer on the scene ran through the details and let him go.
This teacher had felt endangered. He believed it was because
he was black. Literally, it was, because the actual perpetrator had been
black. That is an unfortunate reality for blacks; they have a particular
attribute that looks like the people who are doing an outsized proportion of
the criminal activity. That’s a problem caused by those criminals, not
generally by the police. But you can see how an officer—even a black officer—could
come to be suspicious of people who, in their experience, so often turn out to
be the bad guys.
I have sympathy for that teacher. It’s an upsetting thing to
happen to a decent person. What could he have done to prevent it? Nothing. He
even knew to handle the situation in a way that prevented escalation.
What could the police have done? Detected truth more
accurately. Seriously. The detective who arrived later on the scene could tell
almost instantly that this wasn’t the bad guy; this was a college professor,
and his story rang true. Why didn’t the first officers see that? I don’t know.
Maybe they need better training. Maybe they need more experience—combining more
seasoned officers with newer ones until they learn? Maybe there’s something
else.
But what I see is not racism, but police officers checking
out someone who partly matched a not very detailed description of a criminal, a
man who had the bad luck of being at the wrong place at that moment. That’s a
very different thing from, “He’s black, so we’ve got it in for him. Let’s get
him.”
No one’s arguing that racism never happens. Unfortunately,
it does. The vast majority of Americans are not only not racist; they’re
disgusted by actual racism.
We hear the peaceful protests. The message is, “We’re
upset because of racism.” Yes. We understand.
It is similar to people who are afraid of the coronavirus. This
fear is intensified for someone whose experience is that it has killed or severely
affected someone close to them. So they insist on things that do not help fight
coronavirus: economic collapse, wearing of facemasks alone outdoors, contact tracing
at a point when prevalence is so widespread that such practices guarantee
practically permanent loss of freedom. Yes, we understand you’re scared. The
best solution is not to end society as we know it until every case of the virus
in the world is gone; the best solution is for you to get a better
understanding of the situation so you get over the fear. Then we can all
cautiously get on with our lives with that new awareness.
We stopped being racist so long ago that most of us Americans
have lived our entire lives without a racist heart. What more can we do? The
best solution is not for all races to bow down to blacks in abject humiliation
and repentance; that would be a lie coming from people who did not do anything
wrong.
Protesters are saying this should never have happened. The people
they’re protesting to? They agree. The message has been heard. The wheels of
justice are underway. If you value civilization, it’s time to go home and watch
the process play out.
Ah, but there’s the issue. People who do not value
civilization are using this moment for their own nefarious purposes.
Protests are acceptable—even when their message is wrong, a
lie, or misguided. Wrongness in a protest message has more to do with emotion overriding
reason than it has to do with moral wrongness. So we value their right to
express their views in peaceful protest.
Riots are not protests. Riots are evil acts of violence.
They are literally anti-civilization; they are savage. They destroy property.
They harm people—usually innocent people, sometimes even the demographic of
people the protests were stated to support. And sometimes they take lives.
Rioters are criminals. Sometimes they get away with their crimes
by overwhelming the law enforcement resources. That is intentional.
Some riots grow naturally out of crowd emotion. Mob
mentality. Those are always bad.
The riots we’re seeing now are even worse; they are
unnatural. They are instigated. They are planned. They are funded.
We don’t know all the details yet. And who knows whether the
stories we’re seeing will turn out to be true.
Antifa is involved. US Attorney General Barr has identified them as the organizers of looting and mob violence across the
country. And President Trump is right to label them a domestic terrorist organization.
There’s a collection of photos from various cities, where
people have noticed pallets of bricks showing up, mysteriously overnight, where
there is no construction going on. They have cones placed around them. They’re
staged strategically to be available—for throwing by rioting thugs. One instruction included a suburban neighborhood, miles from
downtown, with the intention of making the previously safe feel unsafe.
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| Bricks pre-staged for rioting, image found here |
Minneapolis, where the incident took place, and possibly Houston, where George Floyd was from, were not surprising locations. But these things are happening in cities all over the country. What is the message when thugs deface
the Lincoln Memorial, where MLK gave his historic speech in the fight for Civil
Rights? There is no connection between the damage caused by the evil rioters
and the anti-racist message of peaceful protesters.
Anarchist rebels tend to make a common mistake—that once
they set things in motion, people will rise up and join them.
What we need to have happen is the arrest and prosecution of
each and every perpetrator of the crimes involved in rioting—violence, property
damage, theft, assault, murder. Cleanse our free society of those who are
actively working to oppress destroy our way of life so that they can get us
vulnerable enough to easily oppress.
I believe the numbers of actual believers in the anarchist
Antifa worldview are small. People of goodwill do not join such savages.
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| A community near Minneapolis held a food drive to help victims of the riots. Image from here. |
One good sign is that people showing up in the mornings—to
clean up the damage. Pick up debris. Wash off graffiti. Repair what they can.
That is what good people do: the exact opposite of the evildoers.
Here are eight examples of good things that have happened.
Here’s a story of people in Minneapolis bringing groceries to the aid of
victims of the riots.
Here is George Floyd’s brother calling for peace.
What we need is overwhelming civilization to wash away the
savagery. Let’s pray we can do it.
