My main problem in writing these blogs is that the Left is so relentlessly biased, so relentlessly dishonest, that it is impossible to keep up with its lies.
In highlighting the details of Ma’Khia Bryant’s death, NBC Nightly News conveniently ended their version of the incriminating video a second before the knife in her right hand became visible 6 inches from the throat of her victim. In replaying the audio of the frantic 911 call to police, it failed to include the caller’s insistence that Bryant was “trying to fight us, trying to stab us.” Clearly NBC was doing everything in its power to support the narrative that she need not have died, that her death was just another example of systemic racism among White cops.
Meanwhile on MSNBC, the truly simple-minded Joy Reid sought the opinion of one Brittney Cooper, an associate professor of gender and Africana studies at Rutgers U., who argued that of course Black people aren’t perfect but there was no need for Bryant to have died, that the struggle which led to her death was just a “regular old every day community conflict.”
I grew up in what was deemed the ugliest part Hamilton, Ont. in the Fifties, a mostly Italian neighborhood considered dangerous by that very fact. Yet while there was the odd fight on my elementary school playground, not once did I see any sign of a blunt instrument, knife or gun in any of those conflicts. But according to the educated Cooper, knives are business as usual in Black urban America and the White cop who shot Bryant was simply trigger happy. One wonders what would have happened to the girl in pink had officer Reardon waited three more seconds before opening fire. One wonders if Ms. Cooper, clearly an academic idiot of the first order, actually cares.
Gender studies, as a number of other Leftist narratives, were not taught in my university days. The notion that such “studies” are scientific, are devoid of bias, is absurd. While Warren Farrell has exposed the grossly simplistic reading of history behind the radical Feminist narrative, one wonders if works such as his are mentioned or treated with any degree of objectivity in Cooper’s classes. Given her absurd attempt to impugn White cops by suggesting knife fights are nothing unusual in Black neighborhoods, one assumes her course to be no more than a parody of what used to be considered academic integrity. She is, by the way, as is Joy Reid, a Black lady.
The brazen lie repeated ad nauseam by the Left, indeed cited by Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki in discussing Bryant’s death, is that police violence “disproportionately” affects Blacks. Ex-cop Brandon Tatum, himself a person of color, points out that while Blacks make up only 13% of the U.S. population, they are responsible for more than 50% of all violent crimes.Yet a Washington Post study found that unarmed Whites are in fact more likely to die in confrontations with the police, 26 of them in 2019 as opposed to only 12 Blacks, and 24 in 2020 as opposed to only 18! A recent Harvard University study also revealed no evidence of “systemic racism” among U.S. cops!
Mayor Lori Lightfoot has suggested that in future Chicago police may be obligated to call in for official permission to act in cases such as Bryant’s. It is a proposal that has been described by those who actually have experience in law enforcement, as stupidity verging on sheer comedy!
But why shoot to kill, critics of the cops repeatedly ask! Michael Woods, the Interim Police Chief of Columbus, explains that aiming for the legs or arms of one in the midst of a violent act does not guarantee that he will be instantly incapacitated while significantly increasing the chances of injuring if not killing an innocent bystander. Cops shoot for the “center mass” because doing so is most likely to produce the intended result in confrontations that frequently take place in no more than a second or two. For Chief Woods, criticisms of the officer who shot Ma’Khia Bryant are rooted in sheer ignorance of the realities of what is an incomparably stressful job.
Perhaps nothing better explains the lack of integrity evident in the newscasts of networks such as NBC, than Lester Holt’s speech in accepting the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award from Washington State U. on Mar. 30 of this year. On the subject of truth and impartiality in reporting, Holt glibly commented: “I think its become clear that fairness is overrated.”
Such a statement entails the arrogant belief that certainty of one’s rectitude precludes the need to actually consider the Truth! I know I’m right, so fuck the facts! It’s most likely the principle that informs Brittney Cooper’s Gender Studies course. It’s clearly a product of the moral/intellectual relativism our “intellectuals” have been pushing for decades now. And it is absolutely an integral element in the decline of civilized discourse here in the West.