Editor’s Note: The Last Redoubt has another post up, and it is a good one. Read it here or there, but read it. Then go check out his other posts.
One of the things that should be plain to see, yet isn’t, is the degree to which the left sets things up so that heads, they win, tails, you lose.
Take “Black Lives Matter.” Any pushback to the group for the fact that only black lives matter to them, and worse, that only the ones they can cynically blame on racism to beat whites over the head with moral superiority matter, is replied to with accusations that you don’t care about black people – an accusation that can lose you your job, and worse.
They won’t let you stay out of it either.
Floyd’s death is constantly spoken of, with no conviction to render it more than an opinion, as murder. It may very well be, and based on what information was available a week ago, I figured 3rd degree may actually be applied by a just court. After further digging, there are still reasons I don’t think the cops were entirely the good guys here, but it’s damn likely that simply trying to arrest George Floyd may have been what killed him as his body, overdosed, shut down. But by using the term murder, they prime any discussion to be about you excusing murderers.
Over at a recent Decline and Fall podcast, Brian Almon notes how a lot of right wingers joke about how they’ve got all the guns when the boogaloo comes. The issue, as he notes, is that it’s great to have ready access to lethal force, but we’re not fighting people who are using lethal force. They are instead carefully staying just inside the line – see the videos available from project Veritas, and documentation/guidebooks found by police precincts as noted by Peter Grant.
Ever seen the style of bullying in school where the bully targets a kid, carefully pushes him, nudges him, says things to him, all below the level of attention of the teachers, until the target lashes out? Then, of course, the teacher notices, and punishes the actual victim. This is the pattern being played out. Pay careful attention to clip after clip of protesters being assaulted by police because, hey, police brutality, and you’ll notice something. Not all are cut down to the moment the police react, and you can watch the supposed victims step out and deliberately place themselves in the way, before “peacefully” sitting down or standing with hands up, while others stand around photographing the “peaceful” and “non-resisting” protesters getting beat up. You can even find clips of leftist protesters striking police or other people, and then immediately, in a group, raising their hands so any retaliation has a photograph of a man getting hit with his hands up.
In short, they are in conflict, but pretending to be unarmed and innocent, and providing visuals of “innocent people being beaten up because police brutality.”
One example of such editing that looks bad at first is the old man in Buffalo that was pushed back and fell – where the cops were punished. If you saw the clip being passed around, all you saw was the last split second as the cop pushed the old man back, who then stumbled back and fell, bleeding after he fell.
I ran across a longer version of that clip in a news report, and immediately noticed something was off. This wasn’t a case where the cops approached and pushed back an old man for not getting out of there way. Instead, they were maintaining a cordon and he approached them. While directly in front of them and presumably distracting or hectoring them, he takes out his phone and begins to swipe it over their com gear. The game plan is this:
- The cops don’t act or push back because “old guy” and “optics”, and he gets valuable information for tracking the cops and even possibly listening in to their conversations.
- the cops push back and he gets to play act a fall, or even take a real one. Optics win.
- He may even get both.
There’s video of him discussing deliberately provoking the police. American Thinker has more details.
I don’t have a solution to these. We can look at what’s going on and know the truth, but rhetoric is not my strong suit, and I don’t have equally effective rhetoric to reply back, other than simply to say they are dishonest. And the CNN-devouring normies will look at you like you’re crazy. Nevertheless, it’s important to know that you’re being manipulated.
The youtube video I linked to above related to new information about Floyd’s state and the arrest are below. I take the studies of “no harm possible” with a grain of salt, but if Floyd was indeed high as a kite while preparing to drive off, and not simply “passing a bad bill” but passing one so fresh the ink was still wet, this is far from “cops arresting a black man for mistakenly passing a bad bill.”
[…] I started pointing out in my last post, we already know the Left doesn’t care about truth. As good little post-modernists, they only […]