In Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, a 20 year old Black man, Daunte Wright, has just been killed by a veteran White female police officer, Kim Potter, who, while intending to taser him, mistakenly grabbed her gun and shot him. The Left is of course exploding with outrage. I have watched the video of the event which transpired in about 5 chaotic seconds as Wright suddenly, unpredictably, lunged for the front seat of his car in an attempt to escape the custody of a Black male and White female. The latter, audibly declaring her intent to taser him, shoots him instead in what would appear to be an utterly unintended homicide. Indeed she can be heard shouting: “I’ll taser you! I’ll taser you! Taser! Taser! Taser!” And then, something like: “Oh shit, I shot him!”
It is a tragic situation for all involved. Wright did not deserve to die. At the same time it would seem grossly unfair that Potter should spend any significant time behind bars. In a sane world not corrupted by the racist, hate-filled narrative of B.L.M., she might even be allowed to keep her job.
The aforementioned Amala Ekpunobi, a young, Black convert to rationalism [i.e.,”conservatism”], insists that in the vast majority of cases where Black men end up dead after confrontations with the police, it is because they choose to resist arrest, because they have utter disdain for the Rule of Law. Daunte Wright, it turns out, having robbed a woman at gunpoint in Dec., 2019, was granted his freedom on the conditions both that he keep in touch with his probation officer and not possess a firearm of any sort. Inasmuch as he violated each of those stipulations, there was an open warrant out for his arrest as he got stopped a few days ago for driving with an expired license. Hence his frenzied attempt to leap back into his car and escape police custody. While it is sad that he is dead, he alone initiated the chain of events that led to his death. That I have far more sympathy for Ms. Potter whose life appears to be in shambles has nothing to do with the color of Wright’s skin, but rather with the demonstrable fact that while he was a belligerent thug concerned with only himself, she was attempting to serve the public in the job she had been doing for almost two decades.
In the demented world of the contemporary Left, criminals such as George Floyd and Daunte Wright are excused their transgressions because of the Color of their Skin, while Kim Potter would appear about to be denied her basic Constitutional Rights for the very same reason!
Mayor Mike Elliot, with the approval of city council, has taken over the police department of Brooklyn Center. But he has also fired City Manager Curt Boganey for having declared that Kim Potter, as were all employees of his city, was entitled to “due process.” Imagine suggesting she is innocent ’til proven guilty!
The fundamental principles of Western Democracy are being violated day after day. In a case fraught with moral ambiguity, Potter is apparently guilty because Elliot says she is. It’s the same level of arrogance that informs the Me Too movement which is quite comfortable in destroying the lives of various Men with utterly unverified accusations of crimes committed decades ago!
This is Not an exaggeration! The Left has No Respect for the Rule of Law. “Progressives” invoke it when it suits their purpose and ignore it when it does not. The Rationalists of the Enlightenment saw the Law as an antidote to the very sort of mindless fanaticism which has sadly come to pervade our Culture, a regime which sees itself as “progressive” while in fact being little more than a Fascist Dystopia.
Among the hundreds of newspaper articles I have collected since that day eight or nine years ago when I realized our Civilization had gone insane, is one by a Canadian Indigenous Rights activist Corey Shefman entitled: “Rule of law is a convenient weapon.” In the spring of 2020 when Indigenous activists, incited by environmental radicals, were disrupting not only the construction of various pipelines to which millions of dollars had been committed, but the daily lives of thousands of Canadians, Shefman denounced the Rule of Law as a mere tool of oppression. His concern was not that the protesters were violating the Rights of so many others but that the Law was denying them the “right” to have their way. Ironically, among those victimized by their antics were several Indigenous tribes who were in favor of the energy projects in question, indeed who saw them as key to a more prosperous future.
I am not suggesting our laws need not be subject to constant scrutiny. But simple inarguable fact: the inevitable implication of articles such as Shefman’s is that if you disagree with any legally mandated edict, you are perfectly entitled to ignore it, indeed are perfectly entitled to do whatever the fuck you want. It is a recipe for chaos, a recipe for self-indulgence, indeed a recipe for the very lack of rational discourse which would seem to be the defining characteristic of our contemporary culture.
Disdain for the Rule of Law in essence represents a disdain for Reason. And a disdain for Reason is one of the defining characteristics of the political Left.