Propaganda Watch - Ireland Edition

This past Thursday, a man stabbed and seriously injured five people, two women and three young children, at a school in Dublin, Ireland.

Anti-immigration protests broke out in response to the attack, which many believed to have been committed by an Algerian immigrant (a claim which has not been officially confirmed), and escalated into a riot, with police being assaulted, buildings and vehicles being burned, and stores looted.

The preceding two paragraphs are my simple attempt to describe in as journalistically neutral a way the calamitous events of November 24, 2023 in Dublin, Ireland. It could certainly use a few more drafts and an editor, but it is professional enough to be passable.

It wasn’t that hard to write those two paragraphs, and yet, perusing the coverage of the terrible events in Dublin on Thursday in the leading newspapers here in the U.S., one finds some egregious journalism, insipid bias, and blatant propaganda on display. When compared to these newspaper’s coverage of similar incidents, it reveals an ingrained bias and insidious level of propaganda that is alarming but not shocking.

Let’s start with the “paper of record” The New York Times.

The New York Times headline on its original article about the Dublin incident reads, “Rioters Clash With Police in Dublin After Children are Hurt in Knife Attack”.

At first glance this seems to be accurate, but when you read between the lines you realize the headline, and the story beneath, are a minefield of managed propaganda.

Let’s start with the phrase “children are hurt in knife attack”. This phraseology is intentionally meant to diminish the horror of the attack. Notice, the children are “hurt”, which is a passive descriptor, and the term “attack” is not a verb here, and is also passive.

Another way to write the headline would be to describe the incident as “children wounded in knife attack” or “children attacked by knife-wielding man”. Those descriptions create a much more visceral response regarding the attack, as opposed to the Times headline which tries to create the visceral reaction in regard to the riot which followed.

It's similar to how establishment media describe death in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Israelis are “killed” (viscerally charged language – killing is ugly and brutal and the people who kill – the Palestinians – are to be regarded as actively evil) while the Palestinians “die” (passive – as if it’s a quiet and sterile act of God). There’s also the phrasing of Hamas releasing Israeli “hostages” while Israel releases Palestinian “prisoners”. How the establishment media wants you to react to a story is signaled in the semantics of the story.

Speaking of semantics, the term “rioters” is also a very distinct choice that intentionally carries with it a stigma and negative connotation meant to convey judgement and condemnation, placing the reader in opposition to the “rioters” and their cause. But is the term “rioter” the accurate choice?

A riot certainly broke out in Dublin on Thursday, so describing the people doing the fighting with police and burning and looting as rioters would seem accurate…except it didn’t start as a riot, it started as a protest and then escalated/spiraled out of control into a riot. An accurate description would be to say that “protests devolved into riots”.

The New York Times was not alone in their use of the term “rioters” and “riot” as both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal did the same.

The Washington Post headline ignored the attack on women and children altogether and simply declared, “Far-Right Protestors Burn and Loot in Dublin in Worst Violence in Decades”. You’d be hard pressed to find a more biased headline than that to describe the events of November 24, 2023 in Dublin.

The Post article then goes on to describe how “…rioters, some wielding metal bars, smashed windows and looted shops in the city center.”

The Wall Street Journal opened with, “Ireland witnessed its worst civil disorder in decades after rioters marauded through Dublin city center looting shops and setting buses and police cars on fire in a spate of violence…”.

“Rioters marauding” is quite the creative flourish, and would make for a great band name or album title.

The picture painted by the Times, Post and Journal is pretty clear, that the “riot” and the “rioters” are much worse than the “incident” where five people were stabbed. Hell, The Washington Post ignored the attack in favor of the riots in their headline. These corporate media outlets make it even more clear of their intention by only quoting police and government authorities in their stories.

There are quotes from Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who deemed the “rioters” to be “thugs”. And from Irish Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, who stated, “a thuggish and manipulative element must not be allowed use an appalling tragedy to wreak havoc…”.

There are numerous quotes from police officials, who blamed the riots on a “lunatic, hooligan faction driven by a far-right ideology”.

What was missing from every single article I read, and not just in the big three newspapers mentioned above, was a quote from someone who was actually attending the “riot” and/or participating in it.

As someone interested in journalism, it seems to me that finding out why these people are crazed enough to riot would be a pivotal piece to the story…but apparently not.

That’s not to say that the “rioters” motivations are ignored, they aren’t, as every article claims, without evidence, that the “rioters” are “far-right”, “anti-immigrant” hooligans. The only source for those claims are police and government officials.

You may be thinking, what is wrong with any of the preceding examples of journalism I have presented? Well, when seen in context with the establishment media’s coverage of other similar incidents, it tells quite a story.

Back in May of 2020, George Floyd died while being forcefully detained on a street by multiple Minneapolis Police officers. Floyd’s desperate pleas for his life and subsequent death were captured on video and quickly spread through social media, igniting outrage and protests, which descended into a riot which involved violence, burning and looting.

The previous paragraph is a passable paragraph describing the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent civil unrest with a minimal amount of bias injected. The term “killing” could replace the word “death” in the second sentence, but at the time it was not entirely clear what killed him…and frankly it’s still pretty murky to this day. That said, it is relatively accurate.

The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, were all very clear in describing the “rioters” in Dublin the other day. Interestingly enough, they never used the term “riot” or “rioter” to describe what happened in the wake of George Floyd’s death (now deemed a murder).

The headline of the Times’ article on Dublin blared, “Rioters Clash with Police”, but the Times’ headline regarding the unrest following Floyd’s death reads, “Fiery Clashes Erupt Between Police and Protestors”.

Notice how the story in Dublin is framed? “Rioters Clash with Police” makes it clear who is instigating – the “rioters”…not to mention the term rioters makes clear they and their cause are to be perceived negatively and with disdain.

In contrast, the violence between police and “protestors” in Minneapolis appears to simply be an act of nature, like a volcano, as “fiery clashes erupt”.

And of course, the rioters in Minneapolis are described as “protestors” throughout the reporting and never as rioters, thus giving them and their cause nobility and not tainting it with criminality, like the term “rioters” implies.

The Washington Post did the same, with their headline stating, “Protests Continue to Rage”.

The Post article features this astonishing paragraph, “Protesters broke windows and charged over fences to breach a police precinct station in Minneapolis and set it on fire late Thursday as officers retreated from violent confrontations that boiled over days after George Floyd died in police custody.”

The actions described, breaking windows, charging over fences and setting a police station on fire, are all very clearly acts that occur in a riot, and not at a protest…and yet the Post, as well as the Times and the Journal, never, not once, refer to the people who commit these acts as “rioters”. The “rioters” in Dublin all broke windows and lit things on fire, and were called “rioters” for it.

The Post article also quotes one of the “protestors” inside in the police station who is actively lighting it on fire. The quote reads, ““We’re starting fires in here so be careful,” one man shouted as sprinklers doused protesters who had burst inside. Flames began to rise from the front of the building as hundreds of protesters looked on, and soon smoke was billowing from the roof.”

Quoting this man, and the particular quote they use, is an obvious attempt to humanize the man, the “protesters” and the “protest” movement. You see, this “protestor” is concerned for human life and wants to make sure everyone is safe as he burns the police station to the ground. (I actually believe that this quote is manufactured by the reporter as it is just too perfect…but I cannot prove that) Why did the reporter use only that quote and not another? Curious.

Of course, the Post didn’t get any quotes from the protestors/rioters in Dublin, because that would illuminate their motivations and maybe even humanize them, something which apparently is anathema since it is so dangerous to hear their point of view.

The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is right-wing, was no different in its coverage of the Floyd “protests”. The Journal’s original article says, “…protesters walked for 2½ miles to a Minneapolis police precinct. Some damaged windows, a squad car and sprayed graffiti. Police in riot gear formed into a line to confront the protesters and fired tear gas…”

The Journal never labels the “protestors” as “rioters”, despite the fact that the police were wearing “riot” gear….which is pretty funny. Why didn’t the police put on “protest” gear?

Another interesting comparison between the Dublin “riots” and the George Floyd “protests” is that these big three establishment media outlets all use police and government officials as sources and for quotes regarding Dublin, but not with regard to the Floyd “protests”.

These police and Irish government official’s claims are taken at face value and never questioned. When these officials call for “law and order” and declaring the “rioters” “thugs” and “hooligans”, it is seen as a positive and their actions noble in a fight against rampant hate and criminality.

In contrast, none of these three mainstream newspapers got quotes from police officials in their articles on the “protests” in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The only government official quoted was Trump who was painted as a tyrannical demagogue for calling the “protestors”, “thugs”.

Regardless of what you think or feel regarding the “riots” in Dublin or the “protests” about George Floyd’s death, the important thing to understand, and why I am writing this article, is that you are being relentlessly manipulated. How you think and feel is not a function of you rationally examining and weighing evidence. It is a result of you being emotionally manipulated through the use of subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, propaganda techniques.

The news you read or hear or watch, is manufactured and is a tool to manipulate you to into feeling how the ruling elite want you to feel.

In the case of Dublin, the globalists want you to decry anti-immigration sentiments and to see anyone who resists unfettered immigration as a “far-right”, racist villain, even though these Irish “rioters” may, in the case of Ireland (which has never been a colonizer – only colonized), be in an existential war to save the country and culture their ancestors fought for, and died for, for centuries.

The same manipulation is true regarding the George Floyd “protests”. The ruling elite want you to believe, and polls show an overwhelming majority of liberals do believe, that police are slaughtering unarmed blacks by the thousands every year. That is demonstrably false even though it “feels” correct according to media coverage.

Hyper-racialization and mass immigration are among the most valuable weapons used by the ruling elite to divide, conquer and pillage…and most of the people fall for it most of the time.

The bottom line is that, to quote the great George Orwell, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Unfortunately, with attention spans and I.Q. dropping like flies in our insatiably emotionalist, social media saturated culture, fewer and fewer have the ability, or the will, to see what is in front of their nose and to sniff out the insidious and insipid establishment propaganda that is hiding in plain sight.

So, if you open your eyes and engage in the struggle, you’ll clearly see the mountains of bullshit in which they are currently rubbing your nose.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Convergence: Courage in a Crisis - Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This documentary is devoid of insights and only serves up the same old insipid ideology of identity politics. The film ‘s manipulative thesis uses Covid as a cudgel to divide instead of unite and therefore reinforces the current power structure.

The Covid pandemic has been a difficult time for all of us, except of course for documentary filmmakers, who seem to be living through the most booming of boom times.

In recent months the much-hyped HBO documentaries Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenter: 9/11 – 2021 ½ and Nanfu Wang’s, In the Same Breath, have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to tackle the tantalizing topic of the Covid pandemic.

Now Netflix is getting into the Covid documentary game with Oscar winning director Orlando von Einsiedel’s Convergence: Courage in Crisis, which began streaming on Tuesday, October 12th.

The film’s thesis is clearly stated as “While Covid-19 exacerbates vulnerabilities across the world, unsung heroes in all levels of society help turn the tide toward a brighter future.”

If you want to truly understand the intellectual impotence and manufactured manipulation of Convergence: Courage in a Crisis, one need only watch the final few minutes as it concludes with a montage of ordinary folks from across the globe singing the song “Lean on Me” in unison.

This scene sparked my PTSD and I began having ferocious flashbacks to the cringe-fest that was the bevy of self-righteous Hollywood celebrities singing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem “Imagine” back in the Spring of 2020. Yikes.

What precedes that sanguine sing-along of “Lean on Me” is just as contrived and seems just as fake as the sing-along itself.

Convergence, like seemingly every other Covid documentary, is devoid of insight because it’s incapable of actually focusing on Covid, and instead uses Covid as a delivery system for its various political, social and cultural agendas.

For example, the film follows the stories of nine different people and couples as they navigate the peril of the pandemic and selflessly help others and fight the disease. These folks live across the globe in London, Miami, Delhi, Tehran, Sao Paolo, Lima, Oxford and Wuhan and do such varied things as treat the sick, clean hospital rooms, drive doctors to clinics and ambulances into poor neighborhoods.

Apparently though, according to Convergence anyway, the only people who were both deeply affected by Covid and also who fought most valiantly against it, were people of color, as they make up eight of the nine stories.

The lone white face featured in the film is Oxford Vaccinologist, Professor Sarah Gilbert, and she gets minimal screen time as she is treated as more an inconvenience to the film’s thesis than as a story worth watching.

A strange example of the film’s political bent is found in the story of Hassan Akkad, a Syrian refugee living in London. Akkad gets a job cleaning the Covid ward in a hospital and uses social media to protest the British government’s decision to not include immigrants like him working as porters and janitorial staff in hospitals in their “bereavement scheme” - which would grant “indefinite leave to remain” status for family members of any immigrant workers who died from Covid.

According to Akkad, the Assad regime tortured him and is currently bombing hospitals, a claim which should be taken with a grain of salt considering director von Einsiedel’s documentary The White Helmets is dubious in its veracity, but even though Akkad is living a good life in London, instead of being grateful he complains that he and his girlfriend deserve better immigration “status”.  

Another example of the film’s insipid ideology is that it declares that Covid isn’t the only pandemic around, that there’s also pandemics of inequality, racism, poverty and “misguided nationalism”. How original.

Of course, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter get a good bit of attention, mostly through the story of Dr. Armen Henderson, a black physician and activist in Miami.

When Henderson gets “racially profiled” by a cop in front of his own house during the pandemic, and his daughter witnesses the event through security cameras, Henderson claims the incident “robbed his child of her innocence”. I’m no fan of the law enforcement community but if you’re concerned about the loss of innocence of black children, blaming the police is about as obtuse as it gets when you consider black on black violence and the eroding morality and ethics of the wider culture.  

Dr. Henderson dreams of a sort of utopia of equity being born out of the dystopia of Covid, a notion also favored by World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Teydros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Dr. Teydros goes so far as to proudly espouse the eye-rolling slogan “Build Back Better” and claims that “opportunities are born from crisis.”

That same sort of sentiment is how we got the War on Terror and the atrocity of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and got billions in bailout money to Wall Street in the wake of the financial collapse of 2007/08. If past is prologue, the idea of using Covid as a catalyst for some great change that will usher in a glorious world of wonder is a chilling proposition that will only further empower the powerful and further enrich the wealthy.

Ultimately, I found Convergence to be an infuriating and emotionally manipulative exercise that decided to use Covid as a cudgel to divide people rather than unite them, thus deceptively reinforcing the status quo.

Covid doesn’t discriminate, it affects everyone and, contrary to the propaganda of this documentary, we’d be better off looking beyond identity when it comes to solving big problems because once something becomes about identity, it stops being about anything else, most especially the truth. The insidiously manipulative and meaningless Convergence is glaring proof of that.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Homeroom: Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manipulative and meandering documentary devoid of insight or originality.

New Hulu documentary ‘Homeroom’ isn’t an uplifting depiction of the next generation of activists, it’s a depressing celebration of misguided victimhood.

The film is a divisive piece of racial propaganda that will be lauded by mainstream critics for its politically correct and socially acceptable intolerance, racial resentment and prejudice.

Homeroom is the new critically-acclaimed documentary that follows a group of politically engaged, minority Oakland High School students as they navigate their tumultuous senior year as it’s interrupted by Covid and the George Floyd protests.

The documentary, which premiered on the streaming service Hulu on August 12th, is the final installment of director Peter Nicks’ “Oakland Trilogy” (The Waiting Room and The Force) and boasts Black Panther director Ryan Coogler as its executive producer.

The main protagonist of Homeroom is high school senior Denilson Garibo, an undocumented immigrant who’s an ambitious member of the All-City Council (ACC) which represents the 36,000 students of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

OUSD has its own police force and well before George Floyd’s murder Denilson and his fellow ACC member Mica, are pushing to have the school board abolish the school police in order to spare budget cuts in other student programs.

Denilson loves politics and certainly plays the part very well. Ever fluent in the emotionalist lingo of the moment, Denilson talks of students feeling “triggered” and “unsafe” around school police, of the “constant criminalization of black people”, and that he will stand up for “black and brown students”…apparently the white and Asian students are out of luck.

Denilson and his cohorts do seem like nice kids, but like most teenagers (and people) they also seem insufferably vapid as they’re constantly on their phones, even taking calls, in the middle of class. They aren’t so much concerned with education, something painfully obvious from their poor diction, vocabulary, and abysmal lack of logic, as they are with distracting themselves and reducing their attention span.

Their slavish addiction to social media isn’t harmless as it distorts their perception of reality by relentlessly inundating them with messages feeding their victimhood identities and fomenting anti-white sentiments.

For example, reports of Breonna Taylor’s slaying, videos of Ahmoud Arbery’s gruesome killing and George Floyd’s murder are passed around these kid’s social media echo chamber like confirmation bias baseball cards.

This focus on white violence against blacks is further reinforced when a black teacher gives a passionate lecture about a black female former student from the school who was stabbed to death in an Oakland park by a white man.

Director Nicks never challenges this distorted racial narrative but rather reinforces it as an objective truth.

The objective truth is that according to FBI crime statistics, the vast majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. The same is true of whites, of course, as murder tends to be an intra-racial act.

But Nicks has no interest in truth, only in propagating racial propaganda that perpetuates victimhood and resentment.

An interesting example of Nicks’ biased approach is the brief clip shown of Amy Cooper, the infamous Central Park ‘Karen’ who called the cops on Christian Cooper (no relation), a black birdwatcher who told her to leash her dog, as an example of the unbridled evil of white people.

What is interesting about the use of this clip is that Kmele Foster recently investigated the Central Park ‘Karen’ incident and came away with a much more nuanced view of the situation. Basically, Amy Cooper isn’t the entitled, one-dimensional racist villain the media portrayed her as and Christian Cooper isn’t the martyred saint they made him out to be.

But Homeroom, its protagonists and director Nicks have no interest in, or tolerance for, such nuance and complexity regarding race, only in branding scapegoats.

For example, Denilson shamelessly decries the white middle class people attending school board meetings, claiming they’re “hijacking” it, and then tells a white board member he expected her to vote against his initiative because she’s white. Other minority students in the film say that gentrification, an influx of white residents, has driven them out of their neighborhoods.

Of course, if whites didn’t attend the school board meeting, they’d be branded as aloof and not caring about the community. And demonizing white people for moving into a black neighborhood is the evil of “gentrification”, while whites moving away from a black neighborhood is racist “white flight”.

That same circular illogic will also apply to Oakland Unified School District’s police. When they are abolished, crime will undoubtedly go up in schools, and then these same activists will claim that no one is protecting minority children.

The bottom line is that Homeroom is the sort of biased racial propaganda that we need much less of in our culture. It’s rightfully unimaginable that a white teacher would ever be celebrated for lecturing his class on black on white crime, or that black school board members would be singled out for their skin color, or that “middle-class blacks” would be admonished for attending a school board meeting.

All of this racial resentment is cheered as “activism” by the filmmaker, whose sole focus is on multiple African-American, Latino and Asian students, but not a single white student, despite whites making-up the largest percentage of Oakland’s diverse population, 35%.

As someone who has worked in California schools I sympathize with the student-activists featured in Homeroom. I can also unfortunately attest that the school-to-prison pipeline is very real and that major educational reforms are desperately needed, but the hyper-racialization and intolerance showcased in Homeroom and the wave of activist indoctrination taking hold in schools across the state (and country), are not the answer and will not lead to a happy ending for anyone involved, especially minority students.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

What Killed Michael Brown? Documentary: A Review

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A must-see new documentary that eviscerates the mainstream narrative on race in America and insightfully reveals the manipulations and machinations that distort modern-day race relations.

What Killed Michael Brown? is the most important documentary of the year. The film, which is exquisitely directed by Eli Steele and gloriously written and narrated by famed conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele, takes a deep dive into the tangled web of race in America through the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014.

From the get go the movie jumps out at you, not with cinematic bombast but with a subtle brilliance. The opening title sequence uses the same distinct font as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and by so doing lets viewers know it is unabashedly challenging popular myth.

This film is a searing, scintillating and staggering examination of race in America, but make no mistake, it is not some emotionalist screed or partisan polemic, it is a thoughtful, reasoned and measured commentary.

Shelby Steele, the film’s narrator, is armed with an impressive background in civil rights, a towering intellect and a monumental mastery of language, which allows him to confidently march viewers through the maze and minefield of race without ever misplacing a step.

Steele frames the American conflict over race as a battle between “poetic truth” and “objective truth”. Poetic truth is a distorted and partisan version of truth and is used by race hustlers and charlatans like Reverend Al Sharpton and former Attorney General Eric Holder, to paint Michael Brown as an innocent victim and noble martyr for the cause.

This poetic truth conflates present with the past, which results in the tragedy of Michael Brown being transformed into a continuation of slavery’s violence and Jim Crow era lynching by depraved whites.

Through this paradigm, Michael Brown becomes all black people, and all black people become Michael Brown.George Floyd

The establishment media and racial activists embrace this poetic truth because their objective is coercion, not reason.

This version of truth does two critically destructive things, it gives blacks an identity through victimization, and it gives whites a way to assuage their racial guilt.

As Steele explains in the film, “white guilt became black power”. This dynamic set up a vicious cycle where blacks use victimhood to exploit white guilt, and whites steal agency from blacks in order to assuage said guilt. Therefore the learned helplessness of blacks feeds the self-centered, narcissistic paternalism of whites and vice versa.

As Steele insightfully declares, “humans never use race except as a means to power…never an end, always a means. “ This is contrasted by the vision of Steele’s working class, minimally educated father who grew up under Jim Crow and fervently “favored character over race as a means to power.”

As seen in Ferguson in 2014 and in recent months all across America, racial anger has become ritualized and choreographed. Grievance is claimed without evidence and protest encouraged with no good faith it will lead to anything.

Whether it be Michael Brown, George Floyd or Brianna Taylor, these deaths are seen less as tragedies and more as opportunities.

The film highlights Al Sharpton as one of the more aggressive opportunists and as the epitome of the race grievance peddler. Reverend Al’s mendacious model is now used by Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who are just as intellectually and morally dubious as their duplicitous mentor.

Unlike the extraordinarily successful and morally impeccable civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which exposed its opponents as devoid of moral authority, BLM and Sharpton are themselves morally bankrupt.

As the film points out, none of these opportunists are interested in the development of black people or communities, but in “justice”, and their definition of “justice” is amorphous, ever expanding and rooted entirely in emotionalism and greed.

Steele uses the immigrant owned convenience store in Ferguson where the Michael Brown tragedy began, as proof of the absurdity of the demand for alleged “justice”.

The mob demands the store owners shut down for three days on the anniversary of Brown’s death as well as a whole host of other demands. The owners acquiesce, but it is never enough. Once one demand is fulfilled, a new and more egregious one sprouts up…until finally the mob is clamoring for the store owners to literally give away their store to protestors.

Besides the movie’s robust intellectualism, it is also exceedingly well made, and like its soulful and melancholy jazz soundtrack, never loses its pace or rhythm.

In a bizarre twist, considering the high quality filmmaking on display, Amazon first refused to allow What Killed Michael Brown? to run on its streaming service, claiming it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”.

It’s ironic that major corporations like Amazon are now emphasizing black artists but when those artists don’t toe the establishment line on race, they are told to sit at the back of the bus.

Thankfully, after much public pressure, Amazon has now relented and is allowing the film to stream for purchase on their service. But this is not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last time that mainstream gatekeepers try to silence truth tellers.

In conclusion, What Killed Michael Brown? is mandatory viewing because it is an intellectually vibrant, finely crafted piece of work that brazenly and bravely reveals the uncomfortable reality of race in America today. SEE IT NOW!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

No Lives Matter

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes 46 seconds

As the not-so-civil war turns from cold to hot and the world around us burns, I find myself in the unenviable position of despising both sides in the battle.

BLUE LIVES DON’T MATTER

On one side is law enforcement, a community which I deem to be at best egregiously incompetent and at worst brutally malevolent and maliciously fascistic.

I have only ever had negative experiences with law enforcement. Every on-duty cop I’ve ever interacted with has been either lazy, entitled or a brutish and violent tyrant…and sometimes all three at once.

It is obvious to me that police in America are a government sanctioned gang, the largest organized crime apparatus in the nation.

One of the first things I ever wrote on this blog was about Ethan Saylor, a 26 year-old man with Down’s Syndrome who had three off-duty Maryland cops working as mall security kneel on his back in 2011 while trying to subdue him for breaking the rule of not promptly leaving a movie theatre after his screening of Zero Dark Thirty had ended.

Just like George Floyd seven years later, Ethan Saylor called out to his mom right before he died under the knee of those cops. While Floyd’s killer has been charged with murder, the cops who killed Ethan Saylor were never charged with any crime.

The killing of George Floyd also reminded me of the death of Kelly Thomas in Fullerton, California on 2011.

Thomas was a homeless, mentally-ill 36 year-old man who was beaten to death by six Fullerton, Ca. cops as, just like George Floyd would nine years later, he said he “couldn’t breath” while also crying out to his father, “dad, help me!”.

Thomas’s beating has been described as “one of the worst police beatings in US history”. He had brain injuries as well as rib and facial fractures so severe he choked on his own blood. Thomas’s breathing became permanently constricted because the six officers knelt on his chest as they beat him about his face and head.

All of the officers charged with beating and killing Kelly Thomas were acquitted.

While there are similarities in the Floyd and Saylor and Thomas cases, there are also differences. The biggest difference being that Floyd was black and Saylor and Thomas were white.

This difference in race translated into the media never really caring much when Ethan Saylor and Kelly Thomas were killed, and also no mobs rioting or looting in their honor either. Maybe this is why if you ask a hundred random people you run into on the street who Ethan Saylor or Kelly Thomas were, you’d get back 100 blank stares.

Which brings me to the other side of the shitshow…

BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER

On the other side is Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who I find to be at best useful idiots to the establishment and at worst insidiously deceptive and intentionally divisive tools of COINTELPRO used to provoke a race war and squelch a class war.

As the events of recent months have unfolded, I have come to believe that America is currently in the grip of a manufactured racial moral panic that is meant to trigger emotion, distort perception and destroy critical thinking capacity. This racial moral panic is a vicious cancer spreading across every sector of this country…and it is terminal.

An example of this racial moral panic is found in both the media and the public’s reaction to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

When I watched the video of Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis, I thought, “what the fuck is that cop doing?”

When I watched the video of the police incident in Kenosha with Jacob Blake I thought to myself, “what the fuck is Jacob Blake doing?”

When the cops arrived on the scene at the Blake incident, Blake scuffled with them - leading to cops twice attempting to tase him. Blake then defiantly walked away from officers, all of whom had their guns drawn, and tried to enter and/or reach into his vehicle with one of the cops literally pulling on his shirt to stop him. The cop pulling Blake’s shirt then shot him seven times in the back as he reached into his minivan.

The obvious point in watching the incident is that if Blake had complied with the cops demands than he wouldn’t have been shot. The counter argument heard over and over again from BLM people is that “not complying doesn’t mean you deserve to be shot!”. I wholeheartedly agree…but to quote Clint Eastwood in the film Unforgiven, “deserves got nothin to do with it.”

No one deserves to be shot and no one deserves to be killed. But…if you fight with cops, resist arrest, defy their commands and most importantly ignore their drawn guns and then reach into your vehicle thinking you are immune from consequences…you don’t deserve to be shot but you can sure as hell EXPECT to be shot, regardless of your race or ethnicity.

This recognition of reality is often refuted by BLM types with ridiculous comments about how cops should shoot people in the legs in these situations or some other Hollywood nonsense. Look, if a cop (or soldier) draws a gun they will aim for the chest or head in order to stop the target…which translates into shooting to kill. That is how people, law enforcement included, are trained to use guns, and to believe otherwise is willful ignorance.

This dovetails into another emotional trigger for BLM supporters and that is that Blake was shot seven times. I have heard over and over that this was excessive. If you watch the video of Blake being shot you notice something rather remarkable…during the shooting he continues to struggle. The cop kept shooting him because Blake didn’t immediately fall to the ground. Blake was shot seven times because the cop was shooting to drop him and he didn’t drop…that is what cops and soldiers are trained to do.

The other thing that BLM supporters like to do is emphasize that Blake was “shot in the back” in order to imply something nefarious. This is technically accurate, Blake was shot in the back…but he was also actively resisting a cop trying to stop him from reaching into or getting into a vehicle. There could be, and according to reports there was, a weapon (a knife) in the car, and of course the cop has no idea if Blake is reaching for a gun or not. Blake having his back turned is EXACTLY why he was a threat as the cop couldn’t see for what he was reaching.

Another important point is that even the car itself is considered a deadly weapon in this situation because if Blake got in that car he is then in control of a large movable weapon he can use to harm others, and there are three young children in the car…meaning shooting at Blake once he is inside the vehicle puts those children’s lives at much greater risk. Not to mention that at that time none of the cops knew if Blake was trying to enter the vehicle in order to hurt those children.

BLM supporters highlighting Blake being shot in the back without giving proper context are being extremely deceptive and disingenuous. This same tactic was used when Rayshard Brooks was shot in the back while fleeing cops in Atlanta in the wake of the Floyd killing in Minneapolis. The important piece of information in the Brooks case though is that as he ran he turned and fired a taser at the cop chasing him and was shot less than a second later. This taser was taken off of the officer by Brooks when they fought right before Brooks’ escape attempt. What the BLM crowd ignore is the fact that a taser is a deadly weapon when used against a cop because if a cop is rendered unconscious or immobile, then his gun is unsecure and that constitutes a grave danger to the officer and/or general public.

The Rayshard Brooks case was another one where BLMers were saying “the cops should’ve given him a ride home” instead of trying to arrest him because Brooks was literally so drunk he passed out at a drive thru. No doubt these same hypocritical fools would’ve been on the Mothers Against Drunk Driving bandwagon back in the day when drunk driving was turned from a mere nuisance into a public menace. Of course, cops aren’t going to give a drunk driver a ride home because then they would become liable for his behavior from that point forward. If Brooks hurts himself or someone else after cops drove him home then the police department would be sued beyond recognition…and rightfully so.

NBA DON’T MATTER

In the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting, L.A. Clippers coach Doc Rivers made an emotionally charged statement where he talked about how he, as a black man, has to give a “special talk” to his black children about how to interact with police. This is a common refrain heard from black people in regards to teaching their children how to interact properly with cops in order to avoid being shot. In watching both the Jacob Blake and Rayshard Brooks videos I thought to myself, well…either no one gave these guys “the talk”, or they weren’t paying attention when it was given.

And another point is, who doesn’t talk to their kids about how to safely interact with law enforcement? This is not just some special burden placed on black parents, it is a reality for all parents…all decent parents anyway.

Sadly, Doc Rivers speech was just another example of the racial moral panic in action. In his speech the weeping Rivers spoke of how black people are the ones “being hung” and “being shot” and that black people love this country but this country doesn’t love them.

What was remarkable to me about Rivers’ rant was that the media adored it so unquestionably, especially the nauseating ESPN, even though it is so absurdly inaccurate as to be laughable.

First off…no black people are being hung. None. A few have died by hanging this year but they committed suicide…they weren’t lynched no matter how badly the media wanted it to be true. There is not a plague of black people being hung in America and there hasn’t been since well before Doc Rivers was ever born. No one Doc Rivers knows or has ever known has ever been hung.

As for America not loving black people...that is so demonstrably untrue as to be absurd. Black people are so adored in American public life it is utterly astonishing. Everywhere you turn in American culture, be it music, movies, tv, sport or anywhere else, black people are vastly over-represented in relation to their population percentage.

Doc Rivers’ business, the NBA, is a perfect example. I could argue that Michael Jordan is the biggest star, sport or otherwise, to have dominated American culture in my lifetime. If it isn’t Michael Jordan, it may very well be Oprah Winfrey. At various times other black people have been the biggest stars in the country…Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Bill Cosby, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Muhammed Ali and on and on and on.

And of course, the most obvious rebuttal to Rivers’ refrain about American’s hatred of black people is that Barack Obama not only won two presidential elections in the last 12 years, but won them resoundingly. To put that into historical context…there have been as many black presidents in the 243 year history of the United States as there have been presidents who share my identity…Irish Catholic. In fact there has only ever been one Catholic president - Irish or otherwise, JFK…and if you’ll recall the Irish Catholic only served 2 years and 10 months in office while Obama served 8 years because it was the Irish Catholic president who was the victim of violence in office, not the black one.

The point being to all of this is that if America hates black people they sure as hell have a funny way of showing it.

NBA players were so shaken by the shooting of Jacob Blake they actually went on strike in protest. This protest strike was an emotionally driven piece of performative nonsense. The players weren’t so much protesting as having a tantrum. For players to be moved to such a drastic action over the Blake incident doesn’t make that incident egregious, it only makes their blind emotionalism readily apparent.

That said, I also have no time for people outraged by the NBA strike and respond to it by saying, “I’ll never watch a game again!” I obviously disagree with the NBA players regarding Jacob Blake and Black Lives Matter, but I also think that if you are going to protest then this is the way to do it. It would have been nice if the players had actually thought out their strike and the goals they actually wanted to achieve - and the fact that they don’t really have any achievable goals speaks to the vacuity of their cause. It also would have been beneficial if the players stood up for human rights in China earlier in the year - thus giving them some moral authority…but they didn’t and so they lack it. Regardless of all that…if you think players striking is an egregious form of protest there is no hope for you.

I always thought the same of Colin Kaepernick and his kneeling. I loathe the whole notion of flag fetishism and its accompanying militarism and think the anthem should not be played before any games, so I have never understood why Kaepernick’s kneeling was such a problem - it is simply a non-violent protest.

The WNBA also protested the Jacob Blake shooting by not playing their games, but no one noticed because no one gives a shit about that joke of a league and its dreadful product. What struck me about the WNBA protest was that all the players came out onto the court wearing a white t-shirt with seven painted on bloody bullet holes on the back in honor of Jacob Blake.

Think about that…WNBA players weren’t calling out police violence, they were actually honoring Jacob Blake, a guy who had an active warrant out for him for sexual assault against the woman whose call to police led to the shooting incident. So the WNBA think an alleged sexual assaulter is now a hero…good to know.

See this is the kind of thing that highlights the emotionalism, irrationality and utter madness of the entire Black Lives Matter movement and the racial moral panic gripping the nation.

Here is another example…Stephen A. Smith had a rant last week on ESPN where he called out the recent hiring of white Hall of Fame point guard Steve Nash, a two-time MVP, as the new head coach of the Brooklyn Nets as being a function of “white privilege”. Smith was incensed that Nash, who has no head coaching experience, would get hired over black coaches like Ty Lue who do have experience. Smith said that this (the hiring of an head coach with no experience) never happens for black people.

The uninformed may have been moved by Smith’s vacuous and emotionalist rant because it tells them what they want to hear, but what was most striking to me about the segment was that it was entirely factually incorrect.

I long ago stopped following the NBA very closely, and yet the second I heard Smith say that a black man has never been extended the opportunity that Nash had received, I immediately recalled that a black man HAD gotten that same opportunity FOR THAT SAME EXACT TEAM.

In 2014 the Brooklyn Nets hired Jason Kidd right after he retired from playing - in other words…Kidd had no coaching experience at all. While Kidd may “pass” for white as he is very light skinned, but just like Barrack Obama, he is black as his father was black. Let me add that it is horrifying to me that we as a society are now back in the truly ugly place of measuring a persons “blackness” to see if they qualify.

In addition, in 2014 Derek Fisher, a black man with no coaching experience who just retired from playing in the NBA, was hired by…the New York Knicks!

The fact that Stephen A. Smith, who considers himself a basketball expert and the ultimate New Yorker, either forgot or chose to forget, black players Jason Kidd and Derek Fisher having no coaching experience but getting hired as coaches in Brooklyn and New York, a fact that directly refutes his thesis of Nash’s white privilege, speaks volumes about the lack of integrity and dearth of emotionalism rampant in the media, especially around issues of race.

Which brings us back to Doc Rivers’ final point in his weepy post-game speech, which was about how “we are the ones being shot”. This sentiment fits nicely into something that LeBron James said recently in regard to the police. James said, “I know people get tired of hearing me say it, but we are scared as black people in America…black men, black women, black kids, we are terrified.”

LeBron should be scared, he should be absolutely terrified, but not of the police but of people who look like him, because Doc Rivers is right, black people are the ones being shot in America…but they are also the ones doing the shooting.

According to the CDC, homicide is the leading cause of death for black males aged 1 to 44. But of the 2,925 black people murdered in 2018, 2,600 of them, or 88%, were killed by other black people and 8% were killed by whites. Of the 3,499 whites murdered in 2018, 15.2% of them were killed by black people and 81% were killed by other whites.

In that same year, 228 black people were killed by cops…compared to 456 white people killed by cops. Cops kill more whites than blacks in raw numbers - whites are 72% of the population so that is not surprising, but when broken down not by population percentage but by percentage of police interaction, whites are still killed at a slightly higher rate than blacks.

The reason that there are so many police interactions with black people is revealed in the FBI crime statistics from 2018. The FBI stats show something else that is very disconcerting, and that is that black people commit an extraordinary amount of crimes, violent crimes in particular, especially considering that they make up a rather small percentage of the overall population.

For example, according to these 2018 FBI stats black people make up roughly 13% of the American population yet are arrested for 53.3% of homicides/non-negligent manslaughter, 28.6% of rapes, 54.2% of robberies, 33.7% of aggravated assaults, 29.4% of burglaries, 30% of larcenies, 37.4% of violent arsons and 32% of other assaults.

These statistics are extremely uncomfortable to discuss, in fact, these statistics are so uncomfortable both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have deemed referencing them to be “racist”. So, according to the ADL and SPLC, statistical reality is now racist.

When you look at the CDC and FBI statistics regarding black homicide rates and crime rates, the only logical conclusion to draw is that it would seem ‘black lives matter’ only on the rare occasion when white people or the police take them.

IDENTITY POLITICS DON’T MATTER

And this is why I abhor identity politics with a passion and believe it is killing this country. People are not representatives of some group, they are not their identities…they are individuals, each unique in their own right.

Identity politics believes that Dr. King’s dream of judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, is, in fact, racist. Seeing people as individuals and not as identities is anathema to our current moment, and that is both tragic and frightening because all it does is dehumanize and elevates the worst among us, and diminish the best.

For instance, the black people I know are not represented on those FBI crime statistics. The black people I know are are not murderous criminals living the thug life, they are thoughtful, sensitive, kind and compassionate human beings. (It should also be mentioned that the two cops I know (one of whom is black) are not skull cracking, trigger happy, authoritarian douchebags either, they are just normal guys living normal lives.)

But if you are going to demand that people be identified solely by their race or ethnicity, then that identification comes with the burden of that race or ethnicity’s shadow. In the case of black people, that means the FBI crime statistics showing an alarming amount of criminality in the black community.

Race hustlers peddling the vapid Critical Race Theory like Barbara DiAngelo (White Fragility) and Ibram X. Kendi (How to be Anti-Racist) are having great success doing the same thing to whites, teaching everyone that not only are all whites inherently racist, but that every institution in America is as well.

Of course, this hyper-racialization dehumanizes the individual and imposes a needless barrier between whites and blacks while removing all agency from blacks and cynically exploiting white guilt for profit.

This approach does not diminish “racism” at all but instead accentuates divisions and heightens hatred.

There’s a reason that corporate America has been so quick to jump on the BLM bandwagon, and it isn’t because they are excited for monumental change in America. Corporate America embracing BLM is a dead give away that the movement is a mirage. Corporate America is using Black Lives Matter as a form of cheap grace…where it can signal its empty virtue and then merrily go on about its dirty business.

What Black Lives Matter does is take the focus off of police brutality or economic issues and put the focus on race. Once something becomes about race it stops being about anything else. BLM makes enemies out of potential allies by making everything about race instead of focusing on commonalities that cross racial and ethnic boundaries and have more to do with class.

If BLM were serious, their protests would have a very clear objective. Right now, BLM protestors say “defund the police” but then say that isn’t what they really mean. Or they hold up signs saying “no hate” or “racism sucks” or some other vacuous bumper sticker slogan.

An actual serious proposal to address police brutality would be to demand an increase in funding to police rather than a demand to defund. Police need more money to hire more officers and to do more training, as former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink recently stated, police need to spend at least 25% of their time training.

Police need to have it drilled into them how to deescalate situations and also how to be much more effective and efficient with their hands, thus reducing the need to use a weapon. It would be a very good idea for all cops to be serious martial artists heavily schooled in Judo or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

Cops should also be better paid, better trained and more thoroughly vetted in order to weed out those with a nefarious personal agenda or psychological dysfunction.

If BLM proposed those things, then maybe that would be an indication that they were serious about actually addressing the issue of police brutality, but they don’t and they aren’t.

“Black Lives Matter”, just like its animating philosophy Critical Race Theory, is meant to be not only frustratingly amorphous but intentionally divisive, and that is why corporate America, the media and the establishment love it. As long as Black Lives Matter is front and center, the corruption of business as usual can continue unabated and the vast majority of Americans, who are working class and poor and who are a glorious melting pot of black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight and on and on and on, will continue to suffer at the hands of both the police and the corporate class.

What needs to happen for poor and working class people is to drop the Black Lives Matter nonsense and instead focus on things that could actually improve all of their lives…like universal health care. Universal health care would benefit poor and working class people of all races, and protests in favor of it would not be infused with the divisive and frantic emotion of the race based BLM movement, and thus be less likely to lead to rioting and looting, both of which are extraordinarily self-defeating.

The reality is that Black Lives Matter with its emotionalist, irrational hyper-racialization isn’t addressing the suffering of black Americans or any other type of Americans, it is guaranteeing it.

Until we start seriously addressing both the economic issues of poor and working class people and the inadequacies of law enforcement, then nothing of any substance will ever change.

NO LIVES MATTER

This is why I say, No Lives Matter.

No Lives Matter because the truth of our existence is that we are all completely disposable yet entirely irreplaceable. We are all flawed and fragile creatures stumbling through the dark hurtling toward our own demise.

Regardless of our race, gender, ethnicity or any other secondary characteristic, to quote JFK, “we all must inhabit this small planet, we all cherish our children’s future and we are all mortal”. The bottom line is that we all bleed when we are cut, and we all grieve when heartbroken, and we all want a better world for our children than the one we have had to endure. This is what we share…this is what brings us together…the fleetingness of the human experience and the enormous existential humility that imposes upon us.

If we can embrace that humility and recognize that all of us come from dust, and to the dust we will all inevitably return, then maybe we can stop with the incessant dehumanization in our culture that labels us black beings or white beings instead of human beings, each illuminated by the light of God or truth or love or peace that dwells deep within us all.

Until we recognize and celebrate the oceans of our commonalities as opposed to the raindrops of our differences, then no lives will ever matter…not black lives, not blue lives, not a single life.

©2020