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Quote of the Day: BLM on Peaceful Protests
From Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter, speaking on Fox Nation:
I think that it is a tool of white supremacy to say if you want freedom, then you get it by protesting peacefully. For a country that drops bombs on people, for a country that incarcerates people, for a country that enslaves people — to criticize us for vandalism is preposterous, Why is it a tool of white supremacy? Because the white supremacists who built this country never earned anything peacefully. They did it through bullets and blood. And that’s the American way.
I wonder why gun sales are up as cities defund their police to meet this man’s demands. Like Austin, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Hartford, Norman (OK), and Salt Lake City, to name a few.
I wonder why Apple and Amazon and Google are pouring millions of dollars into this guy to support his ideas.
The Minneapolis City Council is locked in a legal battle to disband the Minneapolis police department.
VP Biden, do you have a response? Senator Harris? Hello?
Published in Group Writing
They just need to remember that the law is protecting them. Once they tear the barriers down, they’ll be the first to go down afterwards.
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Or, if you’re looking to write something a bit more creative, you might try our Group Writing Project this month: It was a dark and stormy night…
Another quote I just found, from this morning’s NY Post:
To emphasize, this time the shooter was arrested and charged. Would that other jurisdictions would be as prudent.
Syllogisms based on bumper stickers and pseudological history. This guy wouldn’t know a major premise if it bit him. But. He isn’t stupid. He has been purposely mis-educated. I suspect he has lots of company.
Can we go ahead and get to that stage so we can finally fight back?
The difference between people who can and can’t afford to live in gated communities and/or in locales far enough away from where they think any major protests would be held that they can virtue-signal to the far left, while being protected from the worst of the blowback.
Newsome’s comments are pretty much the same tone as the Black Panthers of half a century ago, and the liberal elites’ actions go hand-in-hand with the attitude Tom Wolfe exposed in “Radical Chic” when he was in on the Park Avenue party for the Panthers given by Leonard Bernstein. Unless you lived north of 96th Street, the nasty consequences of the Panthers and their ideology wasn’t going to have a chance at affecting you for a long time — simply move that attitude 3,000 miles west to Silicon Valley, and note that none of the owners of the tech giants like Apple or Google have their main homes in Oakland.
And the Panthers were funded by the Communists just as the BL groups are. The goals are the same – totalitarian rule by them over us.
Gated communities are good for limiting individual incursions, not mobs of a hundred plus. I finally read “Radical Chic” a few years ago and was immediately sorry I had not done so when it came out. I had misconstrued what Wolfe was about. Wonderful essay.
Yes, there is nothing new under the Sun. First Things had a wonderful piece detailing how the Russian Revolution had these same elements, with the wealthy and the gentry and the professors and the students all boosting the Revolution until it achieved critical mass and devoured them all.
Lets see if the local DA actually goes ahead and prosecutes, or he dismisses the charges in a week.
It was interesting that when the BLM and Antifa people took their protest to Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s house, that’s when CHAZ/CHOP got shut down — the deaths of the two teens inside the zone weren’t going to stop it, but invading the mayor’s territory was the big tactical error. Since then, the BLM and Antifa types have tried in some cities like Seattle or Portland to take their protests to the outlying areas … but they’ve made sure those areas are where the middle class, and not the virtue-signaling wealthy live (and in the case of Seattle had to back off, when they discovered the middle class homeowners were also middle class gun owners).
They invaded upper end neighborhoods in LA one night but I don’t think they repeated themselves. My favorite was when Chicago’s mayor stripped all of the police from two precincts to keep her home safe. A couple of days later she got Trump involved to try and cool things down. It’s the stories we don’t hear because the media doesn’t want to spoil the whole gaslighting effort. The weasels need culling.
Becoming a “trained Marxist” is an even dumber way of achieving freedom than peaceful protest.
As many of us write about what is going on, the plans for rioting and violence and disruption, how are we supposed to be taken seriously? I’m amazed that some posts are not being held back because they sound like conspiracy theories! And yet we must pay attention to what is going on and assume that people are sincere in the threats they are making. It’s a real dilemma: we sound extreme because we are describing events that are extreme! It’s crazy.
Clearly this BLM leader does not understand history – he picks and chooses what he wants and leaves out the rest to support a violent narrative. He is condoning destruction of minority owned businesses and hurting minority law enforcement, he is doing nothing to decrease violence in black communities across the country – due to drugs, gangs, weapons and not supporting black women and children whose partners or spouses are not supporting them – those issues never seem to get resolved and its always someone else’s fault.
He needs to spend time in a communist or totalitarian country, then come back to the US and kiss the ground he walks on.
My suspicion is that white liberal prosecutors will go doubly hard on middle-class shooters, especially white ones, who defend themselves or homes.
Recall the 1984 Bernie Goetz subway shooter case. A bullied nebbishy white guy who had been robbed before illegally carried a handgun and when four teens surrounded him in a clearly threatening manner and demanded money, he started shooting. (The lads only demanded five dollars and were most likely going to give that money to charity and only carried sharpened screw-drivers in case an elderly lady needed quick repairs on her wheelchair as some wag suggested at the time.)
It was not legal to have that gun in NYC and a context of self-defense was not well-established. So charging Goetz was not remarkable. What was remarkable was that the DA himself, Robert Morgenthau personally handled the case. He even convened a second grand jury because the first one would not charge Goetz with anything other than the gun charges.
The political establishment was more afraid of resentment among whites leading to vigilante justice than they were about the fact that the city had 30 to 50 murders per week in those years. The wounding of four teens by a white guy took priority over all other crimes.
The priority was to keep the population of NYC as anesthetized as possible to the horrific crime rate and to deflect attention from the politicians and policies that only made the situation worse. There was a narrative to protect. And that is still true today.
The concept of “systemic racism” (or “systemic sexism,” or “systemic” fill-in-the-blank) is simply a way of blaming everything for anything. It’s a way of transferring guilt from any one party to another, irrespective of whether either party bears actual responsibility for the perceived injustice.
Basically, Newsome’s argument amounts to saying, “Something bad happened within ‘the system.’ Therefore, I can do whatever the heck I want . . . because, the system, man.” It’s the equivalent of me arguing that “American Protestants in the nineteenth century were hostile to Catholics. So, I should be able steal my neighbor’s car. For a country that passed Blaine amendments, to criticize me for theft is preposterous!”
The Goetz case did sew the seeds for Giuliani’s election nine years later, but it still took the election of Dinkins over Rudy in 1989 and the outcome of that to flip the result four years later, because New York had enough virtue-signaling guilt white liberals who believed the election of the city’s first Black mayor would finally be the answer to New York’s racial and crime problems. Six murders per day opened just enough eyes for voters to save the city in ’93.
After some of the riots earlier this year we saw millions in corporate donations to BLM, June 19 become a paid day off, and “systemic” become one of the more overused words in America. None of that happened as a result of peaceful protests.
People saw the fires and the looting and CEO’s went into “what do I have to do to get you to leave me alone” mode. Violence works. If donors reward it and governments refuse to stop it then you will get more of it.
And then the whole country did it in 2008 and 2012.
Imagine a world … in which democrats aren’t hypocrites….
And they acknowledged the fact that Hawk Newsome and BLM is anti-American and a terrorist mob that is so much more responsible for our nation’s unrest and hatred than some anonymous clown(s) called QAnon.
A lot of that blood was spilled to give people such as BLM the right to protest. But not the right to vandalize and loot. There are things worth fighting for, but the ability to take someone else’s property without penalty is not one of them. It doesn’t make society more stable and lead to less bloodshed, it makes it worse and leads to more bloodshed. And who are always the ones that lose in this scenario? It isn’t the rich and powerful.
The movie, “Death Wish,” had been popular since 1978 and sequels were probably running. The Establishment might have been aware of applause at the end of that movie.
Does BLM have any idea how ‘white’ Silicon Valley is?
BLM and Antifa are the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party. That’s why Democrats will not criticize them.
That makes sense but Bernie Goetz was no Charles Bronson.
The theme of weak politicians letting criminals run wild was the backdrop of Dirty Harry (1971) and then there is Escape from New York (1981) a futuristic look at the result of all the decay and of course, the real-life Bronx being set on fire not far from Yankee Stadium during the 1977 World Series was itself iconic.
Reagan & Bush successfully facing down the Soviets was not as surprising as Giuliani cutting crime in NYC. People my age grew up thinking there was no hope for the inner cities and that they would forever be a war zone and gradually spread rot to entire cities as everybody who could would flee to the outer suburbs.
I really thought in ’12 you’d see the same result nationally you saw in New York in ’93, where four years of Obama would be enough for most voters. The attack machine against Romney by Democrats in the presidential election may have been a little more intense than the attacks on Guliani in the mayoral rematch, but the Times was firing tons of race cards at Guilani and his supporters (the main difference may simply have been that Rudy connected with NYC voters better than Mitt Romney was able to connect to voters nationally, in that Rudy, like Trump, was seen as a outer borough guy fighting against the Manhattan elites, while Mitt was seen by swing voters as just another elite trying to win the White House).
You forgot to ask Bueller.
I don’t always go for the joke. People are being thrown out of work, beaten, robbed, even killed and raped by these thugs. Police are dealing with it night after night, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, while their sadistic political masters deny them the right to defend themselves against even mortal attacks. I thought their victims deserved what reserve of earnestness I could muster.
Leave it for Xi to laugh, it’s his kind of funny.
Sow.
I don’t see it as going for the joke. “Bueller? Bueller?” also serves to emphasize the deafening silence.