Black lives matter

Preventing crime and punishing offenders is primarily the responsibility of local authorities. They have no greater obligation to the citizens who elected them and who fund the government. It is up to local police, supervised by political leaders and subject to the law themselves, to provide a safe environment for citizens to go about their lives, pursuing their own goals in peace and security. It is up to local politicians to ensure that police are adequately funded and properly trained. It is up to local prosecutors to follow up all justified arrests and prosecute offenders when the evidence is adequate. When police overstep their limits, prosecutors should pursue them too. The goal is a safe environment, subject to the rule of law.

The idea that what happened at the Capitol of January 6 was an “insurrection” was always a ridiculous and malevolent exaggeration. The passage of time has exposed that politically motivated lie and sent the rats scurrying for alternative explanations. Right on cue, we find a hobbyhorse leftist taking to the pages of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’s onshore publicity organ for the Democratic Party — to warn us against calling the protest at the Capitol an “insurrection.” The memo to Scribes and Pharisees has gone out. It’s no longer an “insurrection.” It’s been rebaptized a “sinister” act of “vigilantism.

This past weekend, twenty CEOs from big box retailers sent a letter to Congress, asking for help in combatting the rampant theft that is plaguing their stores. While it's refreshing to finally see these companies speaking up, it's hard to ignore the irony of their circumstances. After all, a little over a year ago many of these retailers were sending out emails to their customers that echoed the far-left rallying cries of progressives. No one asked for Best Buy or Ulta to weigh in on social issues, but they were more than happy to virtue-signal anyway. Plenty of the stores that signed on to this letter have openly supported the Black Lives Matter movement. To understand what that means, you have to understand the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

The college campus-born elite ideology that has swept through American institutions in recent years has gone by many names, from “identity politics” and “multiculturalism” to “intersectionality” and “cultural Marxism.” The essayist Wesley Yang coined the phrase “successor ideology,” referring to the doctrine’s replacement of traditional left-liberalism as the hegemonic ideology of the American ruling class. “Critical Race Theory” has become a household name alongside a surge in grassroots resistance to cultural radicalism in public schools across the country. But no term of art has taken hold quite like “wokeness.

The Olympic Games in Tokyo are doomed. Before the opening ceremony, before even the torch is lit, it’s not going to be OK. The games, I’m afraid, just aren’t woke enough. Apologies to Tokyo and Japan — and #StopAsianHate and so on. But for the international left, sport no longer matters unless it can be used to win on Twitter and advance the War for Progress. Professional football can no longer be about the game. It must be a staging ground for raising awareness for racism and police brutality. Classrooms can no longer be about math and reading. They must be a nursery for implanting and implementing critical race theory. Now, the Olympics must be about anthems, swimming caps — and weed.

Cockburn is going to get ahead of things and announce it right now: ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is doomed. Accept it, and the pain will be lessened. Over the weekend, conservatives were piqued (as they almost always are) when the track and field athlete Gwen Berry turned her back on the American flag as the national anthem played. How could she dare sully the integrity of the women’s hammer throw in this manner? Dan Crenshaw says Berry should be booted off the Tokyo Olympic team. Ted Cruz asked why the left ‘hates America’. They should have just let it lie. Instead, the GOP has let Berry’s stunt become a multi-day controversy. And in doing so, they have sealed the anthem’s fate.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison by Judge Peter Cahill on Friday for the murder of George Floyd. Prosecutors had asked the imposing punishment be closer to 30 years. State guidelines recommend a 12-and-a-half-year sentence for a first-time offender. Cahill went beyond the guidelines, citing Chauvin’s ‘abuse of a position of trust and authority and also the particular cruelty’ to Floyd. A 22-year sentence tends to be associated with more grizzly offenders. Last year, 17-year-old Jered Ohsman was sentenced as an adult by a Hennepin County District Court — the same court that sentenced Chauvin — for killing 39-year-old Steven Markey during a botched robbery.

A cellphone video surfaced in Chicago last week showing three African American women twerking on top of a slowly moving Chicago Police Department SUV, as a crowd of night-time revelers urged them on. The clip quickly went viral. Although important details have yet to emerge, CPD officials have acknowledged the incident and stated that an investigation is 'ongoing’. To a fossil like me, twerking anywhere is distasteful, even disgusting — and to do so out in public is at once incivil and degrading. To do so on top of a moving police vehicle strikes me as borderline degenerate, but such paracoital gyrations will doubtless be read by some as ritualistic community expressions of both disrespect for and indignation over the po-po.

A government watchdog confirmed US Park Police did not disperse Black Lives Matter protesters from a park outside the White House in order to let then-president Donald Trump pose for a photo op during last summer's racial unrest. In a report released Wednesday, the Interior Department's inspector general concluded that park police removed protesters at Lafayette Park so contractors could build anti-scale fencing. Police scheduled 'the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential presidential visit to the park.' After law enforcement cleared protesters from the area, Trump walked from the White House to the outside of St John's Episcopal Church, where he posed for photos with a Bible.

Patrisse Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter on faux victimhood. In her Thursday announcement that she would be resigning from the organization, she once again demonstrated what she does best. For those unfamiliar, Cullors has been the subject of negative headlines for the past few months. Her Marxist street cred first came under fire when reports surfaced in April that she had gone on a luxury home-buying spree totaling $3.2 million. Further investigations into Cullors's finances revealed stunning extravagance and corruption. In 2019, Cullors was earning close to $20,000 a month as the chairwoman of a Los Angeles jail reform group, while dropping the organization's money on $26,000 on 'meetings' at a Malibu beach resort.

Spare a thought for the joyless malcontents over at the Intercept, a website that once proudly defended journalists and fought government interference in the everyday lives of American citizens. Now the Intercept gleefully smears reporters who have dared to cover the protests-cum-riots of the past few years. The site's senior writer Robert Mackey and video producer Travis Mannion bothered to make a 25-minute-long video scrutinizing the coverage of 'the Riot Squad', a group of young journalists and videographers who film the violent aftermath of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests — among other riots. Some of these young reporters are, gasp, conservatives. Cockburn couldn't be bothered to watch the whole mini-documentary (seriously, must everything be a video these days?

The trial of Derek Chauvin continues to generate headlines — weeks after the former Minneapolis police officer’s April 20 conviction of the murder of George Floyd. This week the story is about juror number 52, who appears to have added considerable weight to Chauvin’s argument that his trial was not fair. Among Chauvin’s current motions is one asking the trial judge Peter Cahill to recall the entire jury for interrogation over possible juror misconduct. He may have a case. Brandon Mitchell — juror number 52 — stepped forward to identify himself and make the media rounds. He is a 31-year-old black Minneapolis high school basketball coach.

For years, activists have demanded stricter gun control in America, on the cogent (though perhaps unconstitutional) grounds that fewer guns will save the lives of young people in American cities. Cockburn has an alternative proposal: instead of gun control, America needs celebrity control. Lacking any skin in the game and let loose on Twitter, famous people are saying extremely insane things that are going to get people killed. The chief honor this time goes to alleged ‘comedian’ Chelsea Handler, after the shooting death of Minneapolis’s Daunte Wright. Wright tragically learned the hard way that resisting arrest puts you at risk of being shot by a birdbrained police officer who confuses her taser with a pistol.

So far in the 2020s, American citizens have been hectored endlessly about wearing masks, staying safe indoors and standing apart out. Yet the people who smash up neighborhoods are encouraged to keep expressing their pain. The concept of law and order is therefore becoming a twisted joke. Yes, Minneapolis is rioting again — another police violence video circulated on the internet, another round of anarchy, another bonfire of American values. This time it’s Daunte Wright, a young man shot dead as he tried to escape the police in Brooklyn Center, a northern suburb of the Twin Cities. The officer responsible, a woman called Kim Potter, seems to have believed she was using a Taser to stop Wright. But she got him with a gun instead.

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.

It’s all so infantile isn’t it? Antifa jackals harass Donald Trump fans during their ‘Million MAGA March’ on the streets of DC. The ‘protesters’ steal Trump caps and set them on fire. They throw fireworks at people. Skirmishes break out, some people get hurt. There’s a stabbing. Underpaid online reporters stalk the scenes with their iPhones, trying to record the violence and make it go viral. Social media users dutifully share scraps of aggro-porn. President Trump, sounding not unlike a teenager reporting on fisticuffs in high school, tweets: ‘ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.’ Which hills?