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Sunday, April 28, 2024

Links - 28th April 2024 (2 - George Floyd Unrest)

Eric Kaufmann: Media, Dems Ignore Facts And Logic As They Push Racial Division - "I asked the question in my survey to both black and white respondents, what is more, which is the more likely cause of death for a young black man in America? Is it a car accident or is it to be shot by the police? It is a clear fact that it is about 10-1 with car accidents over a police bullet, and yet eight-in-ten African-American Biden voters and seven-in-ten whites who believe... white Republicans are racist actually said it was police that were more likely to be the cause of death for young black men. So this is leading people to have a distorted picture of reality. And that feeds into a whole series of political attitudes... if you look at what Biden says, he could have brought the nation together by talking about Tony Timpe, the white man whose life was pressed out of him in 2016 by Dallas police officers. You could talk about the fact that as many white people are killed as black people.  But no, instead, choosing to turn this into a conversation about systemic racism and racialize what is not clearly a racist issue. This is an issue of police brutality, perhaps, but it is not obviously a racist issue and racializing that fuels this diversion of perception away from statistical reality... in a way there are two problems. One, it introduces divisiveness, when you have sweeping generalizations about whole categories of people, like Americans and police officers and white people and so on.  But secondly, in terms of helping African-Americans themselves. One of the questions I put to black survey respondents -- I had half of them read some Ta-Nahesi Coates, a critical race theory-inspired author, and half of them read nothing. Those who read Coates, their belief that they can make their life plans work out dropped 15 points.  And you see those cities that had BLM marches and protests, there was a 20% increase in the murder rate between 2014-2019. Some awareness of the downstream cost of this on the black community and on the United States as a whole surely is necessary to inject a bit of context and a bit more rationality into what has kind of become, what John McWhorter said, almost as a religion of anti-racism, as a symbolic crusade rather than one grounded in facts and logic."

Kids Get Schooled on Radical Politics - "Children at a Brooklyn public elementary school are being taught revolutionary politics and communist terms from a Black Lives Matter coloring book... teachers at PS 321—the kindergarten through fifth grade school in Park Slope—supplied students with the coloring book, What We Believe, as part of a lesson for Black History Month. The book uses drawings and worksheets to promote the 13 tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, under titles like “Queer Affirming,” “Transgender Affirming,” and “Restorative Justice.” Principle number 2, “Empathy,” is described as “engaging comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.”  The coloring book also lists Black Lives Matter’s “national demands,” including “mandate black history & ethnic studies,” “hire more black teachers,” and “fund counselors not cops.” One parent of a PS 321 fourth grader, whose grandparents fled Communist China before moving to the U.S., said she and her husband were “shocked” that the book used the word comrade—and that it appeared to promote political propaganda.  “Using the word comrades comes from Communist times,” said the parent, whose 10-year-old daughter attends the school, also known as William Penn. “They are using words that I don’t think are appropriate for elementary school.” She said she first discovered the coloring book on Tuesday, February 13, when a snow day forced her daughter to learn from home.  “This is classwork, not homework,” the parent said. “If it weren’t for the snow, we wouldn’t have known.”   Lessons in the coloring book tell children to reflect on Black Lives Matter’s 13 principles. Some of the exercises, parents said, appear innocuous; a page about “Restorative Justice,” for example, asks students: “Why is it important to offer to forgive someone?” But another, entitled “Transgender Affirming,” instructs students to read the book When Aidan Became a Brother about a girl who transitions to a boy, and then answer questions on a worksheet like, “How do you feel when someone tells you what you can or can’t do based on your gender?”Another principle, “Black Villages,” is described as “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” Another, called “Intergenerational,” encourages a “communal network free from ageism.” Another public school parent whose family left the Soviet Union when she was a teenager said the language in the book reminds her “of the songs we were made to sing as elementary school children. ‘Dismantling’ and ‘comrade’ and everything—it really reminds me of the word salad that was a part of those songs.”  She compared the Black Lives Matter movement to communism, saying: “same salad, different dressing.” Brandy Shufutinksy, the director of education at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, who is black and holds a doctorate in international multicultural education, said she was “offended” that the curriculum “demonizes the nuclear family.”  “They frame it as some form of white supremacy,” Shufutinksy said. “There are a number of people beside myself who are deeply offended by the idea that black Americans should not strive for something that was denied to our ancestors for so long.”  The educational materials used by PS 321 are created by Black Lives Matter at School, an organization founded in 2016 by a group of Seattle teachers to educate students from pre-K to 12th grade about BLM’s ideology. In 2018, Black Lives Matter at School launched a national Week of Action in February to teach “lessons on structural racism, Black history, intersectional Black identities, and anti-racist movements.” According to the group’s website, the curriculum is now taught at a total of 50 schools across 21 states and six countries... Several parents who spoke to The Free Press said they were upset that the coloring book failed to teach their children about black history... The fourth-grade mother said her daughter’s teacher told her the coloring book was the only lesson planned for Black History Month, other than a schoolwide project to make a quilt honoring famous black figures. She added that, after the Week of Action, her daughter still had never heard of civil rights hero Rosa Parks and didn’t know what Martin Luther King Jr. had achieved to make him famous.   Furthermore, she said, the coloring book presents controversial ideas “as fact.” But, “it’s not necessarily true. It’s not like every black person believes in these principles.”   Shufutinsky agrees: “There is nothing in these principles that talks about honoring greats in black American history. There is nothing in here that is actual scholarship. It doesn’t speak to education. It speaks to ideology.”"

Meme - Lelee Anne: "Mixed children are some of the most beautiful children *brown hand in a white woman's hand in a black man's hand*"
Lelee Anne: "This is what I am hungry for!! *Snickers Bars: 'Arrest Myles COsgrove The Cops Who Killed Brett Hankison Breonna Jonathan Mattingly Taylor'*
"Pregnant woman, 22, is decapitated as her family planned baby shower: Horror as head is found in a dumpster outside house as police charge her 'savage monster' ex-boyfriend, 22, with murdering her and unborn child"
*Black man and white woman*

Meme - "Black progressives crying over white men who were trying to set fires in a black neighborhood:"

Antifa militant who shot first at Kyle Rittenhouse sentenced to 3 years over Kenosha robbery - "This week a court sentenced Joshua and Kelly Ziminski to 20 months in prison for burglary and robbery with threat of force charges that they pleaded guilty to in May. Other charges were dropped in exchange for a plea deal...   In the heat of the 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Joshua Ziminski fired a "warning shot" just before Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defense. Ziminski was out of bail for his involvement in the riots when he and his wife went on the crime spree that earned them 7 felony charges...   During the riots, Joshua Ziminski was captured on video firing his gun into the air just before Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum in what was ultimately ruled as self-defense. All charges in connection to the 2020 riots against Ziminski were eventually dropped."
Too bad Rittenhouse got away with murder!

Meme - ">I never chased Kyle Rittenhouse
>okay, I mean I chased after people about to harm Kyle Rittenhouse
>okay, I did chase Kyle Rittenhouse
>but I didn't have a gun
>but I didn't mention the gun
>okay, I had a gun but it fell out
>okay, I had a gun but it fell out into my hand
>okay, I had a gun but it fell out into my hand but I didn't do anything with it
>okay, I had a gun but I pulled it out on purpose and chased Kyle Ritten house and pointed it at him
>okay, I had a gun that I pulled out and chased Kyle Rittenhouse with and pointed at him and it was illegal for me to have
ALL OF THIS HAPPENED IN 30 MINUTES"

Meme - "ACTUALLY, THE LEFT SUPPORTS WORKERS' RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS."
"PHEW... SO, YOU'D UNDERSTAND"
"UNDERSTAND WHAT?"
*Kyle Rittenhouse shoots Gaige Grosskreutz, who was about to shoot him*

Some Protests Against Police Brutality Take a More Confrontational Approach - The New York Times - "Terrance Moses was watching protesters against police brutality march down his quiet residential street one recent evening when some in the group of a few hundred suddenly stopped and started yelling.  Mr. Moses was initially not sure what the protesters were upset about, but as he got closer, he saw it: His neighbors had an American flag on display.  “It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, ‘How dare you fly the American flag?’” said Mr. Moses, who is Black and runs a nonprofit group in the Portland, Ore., area. “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”... The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come “out of your house and into the street” and demonstrate their support. These more aggressive protests target ordinary people going about their lives, especially those who decline to demonstrate allegiance to the cause. That includes a diner in Washington who refused to raise her fist to show support for Black Lives Matter, or, in several cities, confused drivers who happened upon the protests... [Some] frustrated that little has changed since Mr. Floyd was killed, say that sitting idly and watching a protest without participating nowadays is to show tacit support for racism.  “We don’t need allies anymore,” said Stephen Green, an investor and entrepreneur in Portland who is Black. “We need accomplices.” In Rochester, N.Y., protesters have confronted people at outdoor restaurants, shaking dinner tables. Marchers in Washington also accosted people eating outside, urging everyone to raise their fists to show their allegiance to the movement.  The more personal tactics echo those being used against elected officials, with activists showing up not only outside mayor’s offices but their homes as well. The apartment building where the mayor of Portland lives has been vandalized. Protesters lit fires outside, ignited fireworks and broke into one of the businesses in the building on his birthday. In San Jose, Calif., demonstrators graffitied and egged the mayor’s house and lit an American flag in front of it, according to the police. In Rochester, people have recently posted police officers’ home addresses and information about their families, according to a police spokeswoman... Mr. Green argued that the tactics were working, even as they inconvenienced him and his family. He described the smell of tear gas and wail of sirens as the marches came to his neighborhood, which he said kept his 7-year-old daughter awake.  “It’s one thing if you can see something on TV, but if you can hear it and you can smell it in your house, that brings it home,” said Mr. Green, who grew up in Portland. “We need people willing to say, ‘I’m down to lose this friend because stuff needs to change. I’m down to make my neighbor uncomfortable.’ Being nice wasn’t changing anything.”... “The crowd was — I won’t even say mostly white — I’ll say it was an almost exclusively white crowd marching through the whitest neighborhood in Portland shouting ‘Black lives matter’ and ‘Black lives are magic,’” said Ms. Murphy, who is Black and hosts an educational children’s YouTube series. “What I was witnessing was a lamenting prayer, a cry of remorse and shame among the white people. That’s what I saw. It was healing.”... The same night the protesters came to the couple’s door last month, they marched into Kenton’s commercial district and used restaurant picnic tables as fuel for fires. They collected the colorful wooden dividers the neighbors had recently built for outdoor dining and set those ablaze as well. Mr. Moses and others in the community ran into the protests with fire extinguishers.  Protesters that night broke into the Portland Police Association building and set it on fire. A man was later seen scrubbing the sidewalk graffiti — a popular message was “PPB = KKK,” meaning that the Portland Police Bureau is the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Green said that he opposed the destruction of property, but that he also understood it. And he believes, generally, that the more direct protest tactics in residential areas are working because they make the movement more personal, and reveal who truly supports change. If someone is against the movement, they keep their lights off or refuse to raise their fist, he said, adding that taking the debate into homes and to families is essential. Some residents in Portland say the tactics are escalating as the protests become increasingly dominated by white people, including anarchists and supporters of antifa, the diffuse collection of militant left-wing activists that has a strong presence in the region.  The movement is splintered in Portland between more mainstream Black Lives Matter marches and the more aggressive, sometimes chaotic antifa or black bloc protests, where demonstrators dress in black and wear motorcycle helmets or ski masks to make it difficult to identify — or later prosecute — them... A small free literature selection was set up on the grass and overseen by three people in ski masks. It was a popular offering, and people crowded around, craning to see the pamphlets.  Titles included “Why Break Windows”; “I Want To Kill Cops Until I’m Dead”; “Piece Now, Peace Later: An Anarchist Introduction to Firearms”; “In Defense of Smashing Cameras”; and “Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Anti-Fascism and Armed Self Defense.”... One white man stepped onto his patio clapping and hollering in support of the passing march. The group called for him to join. He smiled and waved them on, still clapping. They began to chant that he was spineless. He looked worried. But the march moved along, and he went back into his house.  “You’ll never sleep tight, we do this every night,” the protesters chanted."
From 2020's Cultural Revolution. We're still that told left wingers don't hate their countries
As usual, what starts as a gesture of solidarity quickly becomes compulsory

Meme - The Other 98%: "Many of you think this is praying... You pray in private-this is marketing. *Democrats taking a knee while wearing Kente cloth with links to slavery*"
This is mocking The Other 98% for using this text with a Christian praying in public

Meme - "TRUMP NEEDS TO STOP STAGING RIDICULOUS PHOTO OPS TO PANDER TO HIS BASE *Democrats wearing Kente cloth with links to slavery*""

Meme - The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole84: "After George Floyd:
- White offenders were mentioned more.
- Black offenders were mentioned less.
In other words: White-on-Black homicides get more focus than Black- on-White homicides. In 2020, there were:
- 876 White-on-Black homicides
- 1,877 Black-on-White homicides
Clear bias in which types of interracial homicides Legacy Media likes to cover."

Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 on X - "“Get him! Get him!” In scenes reminiscent of Kenosha, BLM militants at @uofmemphis chase and pursue attendees of the Kyle Rittenhouse @ThisIsKyleR student event. Video by @Julio_Rosas11:"

Chicago police shooting: 96 shots fired in a fatal traffic stop. Here’s what the bodycam footage shows - "While a preliminary investigation suggests the driver opened fire on officers first, his family and attorneys question why plain-clothed officers swarmed Dexter Reed’s car with guns drawn and fired dozens of shots at him."
Clashes break out after release of Dexter Reed shooting video - Chicago Sun-Times - "One person was hospitalized when a clash erupted at a protest Tuesday evening where community activists and family members of Dexter Reed demanded the firing of officers who fatally shot the 26-year-old during a traffic stop."
The police are not allowed to defend themselves when black men attack them, even if the black men shoot at them

Jesse Singal on X - "This is very strange reporting from the AP. I only dip into these issues sporadically, but even I know that once police open fire, they keep shooting until they are sure the "threat is neutralized." The number of shots fired doesn't really mean much -- it's the decision to open fire in the first place that matters most."

Jesse Singal on X - "This article is written in a truly astonishing manner given that the available evidence, including on the video, suggests the young man in question opened fire at police before any of them shot at him (you can see cops fleeing in the video). You have to read the article with a fine-tooth comb to even come away with that absolutely crucial fact. The headline is "Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop," with no mention of how the shooting started. Journalism is in such serious trouble right now."
Dexter Reed shot, killed by Chicago police after traffic stop - The Washington Post (aka "Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop")

wanye on X - "There is no other word for running the graduation picture of a criminal killed in a violent altercation with police than “propaganda” I mean, this is just the laziest, most obvious kind of cheap propaganda and it’s embarrassing that it works"
AT on X - "Despite all this, persisting on the internet of course is the belief that mainstream news will go out of its way to find the least flattering photo of a black subject."
Sprat on X - "Remembering when all the networks used George Zimmerman's haggard mugshot next to a beaming school photo of a 12 year-old Trayvon Martin"
BRAD 🇺🇲🇮🇱🇻🇪 on X - "Any Black person shot by the police is made into a kind of religious figure. It's so weird."

wanye on X - "There is no other word for running the graduation picture of a criminal killed in a violent altercation with police than “propaganda”"
Thread by @DanFriedman81 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The reason they use graduation photos is forgotten internet lore. When Mike Brown was shot in 2014, media went to his Facebook to get pictures of him. In every photo, he was smoking blunts, fanning money or throwing gang signs. So they used photos of him looking like a thug. Black Twitter reacted angrily. They said that the media was using images of Brown that stereotyped him. There was a trending hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown of college students or professionals posting pictures of themselves looking like thugs in solidarity with Brown. Media outlets, thoroughly shamed, went to Brown’s family to get a picture that did not make him look like a stereotypical thug. They provided a photo of him in graduation regalia. From then on, media started using graduation photos of men who died while being arrested. Here is a contemporaneous article about the hashtag."
If you use photos of himself that a black man has uploaded for public view, you're racist

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Virtually every BLM martyr was a scumbag criminal. I used to put this more politely, but enough. The George Floyd case was at least a very real one in legal terms, whoever the man was - but just run your mind back through Jacob Blake, Rayshard Brooks, Michael Brown in reality, Alton Sterling, Joseph Rosenbaum, etc etc.  These are the Civil Rights heroes of today because there aren't any genuine race wars still going on - certainly not in a W-on-B direction, and in reality not in any direction. No better symbols exist."
scott moore on X - "It is almost like a 1984 thing.  I know there must, sometimes, be legitimate victims of police misconduct out there.  But it seems like BLM ignores those cases and intentionally goes for bad actors to make into heroes/martyrs.  It is like a power play or something.  An act of dominance.   Must give them a feeling of god-like power to make a hundred million people believe an obvious lie."
Just Kansas Things on X - "I still think this is in fact that reason the martyrs get popular. It can't be someone that everybody finds sympathetic. It has to be someone who is flawed enough for the conservatives to say "eh more where that came from," which then causes the left to double-down and spiral."
Or, BLM loves and glorifies criminals. There's a reason "fuck the police" sentiment is rife

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Looking through actual murder patterns in the areas where the last two twitter-trending fights/killings (Wisconsin, Wyoming) and most recent viral cop shooting (Chicago) took place, I realize something deeply depressing.   There must be actual human people looking through literally tens of thousands of murders involving Black or poor white men with same-race killers, ignoring them all, picking out the tiny bloc of incidents that could polarize citizens and make the cash register ring, and publicizing every single one of them. Number of unarmed Black men with white police killers last year? Ten. Number of cookies-off Google results for "unarmed Black man shot by cops 2023?" 1,140,000.   There are better ways to make money, gang."
JL on X - "Cop I knew who left Seattle early said there was a group that went through old case files trying to find officer involved shootings to do this exact thing. And this was about 5-7yrs"
Dbag Detector on X - "I've been telling my 17 yo son that you should not fuck around with cops they have guns, since he was about 13 yo"
Randy Tinfow on X - "I got pulled over for speeding yesterday. As has been my practice for 40+ years, put my hands on the steering wheel and asked for permission to open the glove compartment. Everyone stays calm."
AV8R on X - "I owe my Dad. He said “make it to the precinct alive and we’ll straighten it out together.”"

Swann Marcus on X - "The all-time funniest fake outrage over a police shooting was when Tyree Moorehead - a local activist in Baltimore - was literally on top of a woman while holding a knife to her throat when a police officer shot him and they still tried to turn him into a BLM cause celebre"

Will Ireland survive the Woke Wave? - "Talk to an educated Irish person in a global city today, and you will quickly discover that they hold the twin ideologies of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: a vague sentimental remnant of the Irish ethno-nationalism of the revolutionary period and the internationalist and multicultural open society values of Google.  Point out that these are contradictory in any way, like mentioning Ireland’s role as an international tax haven or asking why there are so many Irish nationalists living in London, Berlin and San Francisco and so few living in Dublin, and you will be met with defensive anger.  As a former colony, historically unsullied by the sins of slavery and imperialism, Ireland’s national identity has been largely free of the culture of pathological self-hatred found across most of the liberal West today. An uncomplicated sense of national pride has remained the default, even and sometimes especially on the political Left. But all of that is about to change. “Toppling statues is just the beginning”, ran a recent Irish Times headline, if the goal is “How to make Irish culture less racist.” As self-flagellating stories about the Irish public’s racism are set to now become a daily part of life, Ireland’s elites can breathe a sigh of relief. Any populist pressure they sensed brewing while overseeing a deeply economically unequal society with skyrocketing homelessness, rents and outward youth migration can now be replaced with an imported moral narrative that turns the spotlight around on the reactionary masses who must, in the name of equality, learn to think of themselves as privileged.   While educated Irish young people in Dublin copied the Black Lives Matter protests from America, our culturally progressive and economically Thatcherite Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, recently singled out the statue of Irish Republican Sean Russell as a problematic target. Russell fought in the War of Independence and died trying to secure arms from Germany in 1940. Wrongly thinking that historical facts could ever stand a chance against the wrecking ball of the current international woke cultural revolution, some Republicans correctly pointed out that he was not doing so out of any allegiance to Nazism, having tried to secure arms from any nations that might give them. Protesters still vandalised the statue anyway, painting it with the gay pride rainbow flag with added black and brown to mark their support for Black Lives Matter. Having uncritically adopted the fashions of American academia, Ireland’s new young educated elite have started parroting the imported language of “white privilege” versus “people of colour”, and the dangers of nationalism versus the superior multinational capitalism-friendly values of openness.  There is little reason to think the cultural revolution sweeping across Europe from America will stop and listen to the “but we’re on your side!” pleas offered by Irish Republicans about how they supported the anti-apartheid movement in the Eighties or how our nationalist heroes were anti-imperialists or that our Republicans today are economically left-leaning and pro-immigration. Anyone who thinks these details will matter, and that any remnant of Irish cultural nationhood will be immune, is simply not paying attention to the unstoppable internal logic of the current cultural revolution underway. This new generation of elite aspirants are already showing that they make no such distinction and simply recast the native Irish as “white people” whose privilege needs to be checked and ultimately dismantled.   It is worth asking why the woke cultural revolution sweeping Irish society would spare a single one of our national statues, monuments or heroes. One could go through the entire list of signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and find cancellable and problematic thoughts uttered by each of them in different contexts... Why wouldn’t our literary heroes also be wiped from the canon and from the public space?... What about the special place given to the Irish language in state institutions, which it could be easily argued excludes and discriminates against foreigners? What about the explicitly ethnocentric Irish right of return policy, which grants people with Irish grandparents the right to citizenship? Irish liberal media used to love showcasing the young children of immigrants playing hurling or speaking Irish, which offered a vision of the future in which anyone could be Irish through adoption of the national culture, but what happens when those young people are filled with poison in the indoctrination camps of university and taught to fear and resent the native population as white racists? Surely they’ll let us keep the Marxist James Connolly, one might think, who could be spared due to some often cited quotes that liberals love about the limitations of nationalism without economic equality or against the oppression of women. In fact, the Connolly statue was defaced by anarchists years ago. On May Day 2005, the statue of James Connolly in Dublin was graffitied, and a black bloc hood and mask — the kind associated with antifa today — placed on its head, supposedly in the name of “appropriating” and “reclaiming” the figure; and that was back when the anarchist cultural project was not yet indistinguishable from every elite institution, from academia to the NGO sector to the international capitalist class... Unlike the republics that can claim to be founded on abstract and universalist principles, sooner or later there is simply no getting around the brick wall of truth that the Irish nationhood envisioned by our revolutionary founders was fundamentally ethno-nationalist... Nationalists will no longer be dealing with a few scattered genteel revisionist intellectuals like Conor Cruise O’Brien, but the full tidal ideological force of the American Empire, with its sophisticated cold war psychological warfare tactics, its world dominating oligarchy and every elite institution at home and abroad on its side.   Ireland is uniquely vulnerable to all of this as a nation without a national economic base, wholly reliant on the whim and will of aggressively ideological multinationals temporarily parked there for tax purposes... It is a tragic irony of Irish history that, having fought a globe-spanning empire to build an independent Irish nation, and having fought the imperial landlords through agrarian peasant movements before that, giving the world the very word boycott, it stands today as a tax colony of American tech in which the native young leave because of its unchecked speculative landlordism.   While its subservient relationship to the British Empire brought famine and hardship, Ireland’s subservient relationship to an American progressive tech oligarchy brought about the Celtic Tiger and as a consequence we were happy to ignore the truth of the arrangement: that we were simply passing from one form of colony to another."
From 2020. Prescient

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