Boycott and 'cancel' Black Lives Matter
We are unlikely to find more than one person out of a hundred, and this includes law enforcement professionals, who is O.K. with what Derek Chauvin (allegedly until proven guilty) did to George Floyd. President Trump just issued an executive order to address the abuses highlighted by Floyd's death, and rightly so. The House and Senate are both meanwhile considering legislation that goes beyond the executive order. We do not, however, need to associate with a group like Black Lives Matter to achieve reforms with which everybody, including police, agree.
BLM is right to denounce the tiny minority of police officers who abuse their authority in what's a righteous opposition to police misconduct. They're the marquee group on this and everyone knows it. The problem though, is not what's at the top of the rock, but rather with what we find crawling around underneath it when we turn it over.
BLM has blood libeled Israel as an apartheid state that practices genocide. If the Electronic Intifada is for BLM, that's another good reason to be against it, and "#BlackLivesMatter stands up for Palestine" is yet another. BLM's current statement of principles says, "We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world." Caucasian racists view themselves similarly as part of a global White family, as opposed to the American family whose members come in all colors. "Make this Christmas a Black Xmas" BLM argues that people should not buy from white-owned businesses between Thanksgiving and New Years' Day. If that's not racist, I don't know what is. BLM and/or people acting in its name have promoted hatred and contempt for all law enforcement professionals with slogans like "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon."
Nancy Pelosi tried to virtue signal to them by giving George Floyd's brother a folded flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol as if George Floyd had been an emergency responder or Armed Forces member instead of a convicted violent felon. Floyd's rap sheet doesn't justify what happened to him, but what happened to him doesn't make him a hero or a "gentle giant" either. We should keep in mind that BLM is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization which is not allowed to try to influence elections. The instant the Democrats try to turn BLM events into campaign rallies, this can and should be used to defeat them in November.
The Right Way to Boycott and Cancel BLM
The problem with Colin Kaepernick wasn't that he protested unlawful use of force by police—but that he did it on his employer's time and during the national anthem. I and probably 99% of the country agree with him about this. If you put a BLM sticker on your car or support BLM in social media as an individual, I might not agree with it but I am not going to treat you as an enemy either, especially because we agree on BLM's non-controversial goal of addressing police misconduct.
But it works both ways. An employer or organization that fires or publicly shames somebody for criticizing BLM on his or her own time is failing to respect free speech of all people, and should be called out, shunned, and boycotted. Somebody who takes his support of BLM to his own workplace, or somebody else's, to try to get somebody fired or "canceled" should have his own career placed at risk by whatever lawful means are at hand, and probably using what he is doing to the other person as a model. Sir Charles Napier's "You follow your customs and we will follow ours" is a word to the wise, as is the adage about glass houses and stones. Facebook deserves credit for firing an employee who criticized another employee, in a work-related context, for NOT supporting Black Lives Matter.
Cornell University alumni and others should withdraw their support for Cornell's law school, and perhaps redirect prospective students to the far less expensive SUNY (State University of New York) system, because the law school's dean publicly criticized a professor for criticizing Black Lives Matter. The university's "woke" leftists and social justice warriors (SJW) were apparently unhappy that the professor pointed out, and accurately, that Michael Brown did not have his hands up, and also that BLM's agenda (as pointed out earlier) seems to go far beyond advocacy for equal justice under the law to include some very unsavory and repulsive items.
If Cornell University is going to publicly shame its own faculty members for refusing to toe the party line, much as mainland China's "social credit" system denies good career opportunities to those who go against the party, then qualified faculty should consider careers at other institutions. Students should question whether Cornell Law School is worth roughly twice SUNY Buffalo's tuition. You can by the way show proper respect for the law school's public denunciation of the professor in question by making a donation to Legal Insurrection, which I just did.
Starbucks, LEGO, and Washington DC
Starbucks should stick to serving coffee, and tell its baristas to express their political views on their own time and not Starbucks' time, if it values the good will of all its customers as opposed to just the "woke" left. It has lost mine until such time as it bans its employees from wearing BLM apparel when on the job, but I would not expect or advise Starbucks to allow employees to wear MAGA hats or display Trump 2020 signs either because these would alienate the "woke" leftists and SJWs.
LEGO has suspended marketing of police and firefighter figures (although not the figures themselves). If LEGO's executives are somehow embarrassed by our emergency responders, then if they ever find themselves in 100-story buildings that have been set on fire by al-Qaida terrorists, they should not call the police and firefighters who went into those buildings on Sept. 11 2001, 412 of whom never got out. They should instead call Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the people running the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, and wait for them to show up. I suspect that they will wait a very long time.
Washington D.C. should be boycotted for naming a street for Black Lives Matter. The city is expensive anyway, and this is yet another reason to not schedule conferences, trade shows, and similar events there. Don't boycott our national treasures that can be visited there, assuming the "woke" Left doesn't vandalize them first, but boycott the rest of the city.
Civis Americanus is the pen name of an American Thinker contributor who remembers the lessons of history, and wants to ensure that our country never needs to learn those lessons again the hard way.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / public domain, with modification
Is life more difficult for a black man? Well, yes, it is. Much of this is cultural, however, and not racial. It follows from the fact that 40% of violent crimes are committed by 6% of the population, i.e., black males.
Every Drop of Blood
Barack Obama’s race hustling criminal coddling set the more recent tone where state and local law-enforcement officers were routinely attacked, accused of serial hate-inspired killings of suspects; where civilized norms were declared the illicit fruit of white privilege; where the epidemic of black-on-black homicides was either ignored or blamed on unresolved racial grievances. GEOFFREY P. HUNT
She never said it was the police, by the way (she casually refused, in an article about police killings, to place the blame anywhere), and we know it wasn't, because the police killed about 19 unarmed black males in 2017, and black people killed about 2,627 — a difference of over a hundred times. In fact, in 2018, black people killed about 2,600 black people, and whites in general — all of us, despite being 60% of the populace — killed only 234, more than ten times fewer. The greatest danger to black people in America today is always other black people. Black lives matter to Black Lives Matter only when it gives them an excuse to attack white people. JEREMY EGERER
33% of all crimes in America are committed by 3% of the population; blacks between the ages of 16 and 36
8% of America’s population are black men, yet they account for 40% of America’s total prison population.
The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is
accidents, like car accidents and drownings. The No. 1
reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black
men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another
young black man. In 2018, there were approximately 7,400
black homicide victims, more than half of the nation's total
number of homicides, out of a black population of 13%. Of
that number, the police killed a little over 200 blacks, and
nearly all of them had a weapon or violently resisted arrest.
Why Don’t These #BlackLivesMatter?
Is life more difficult for a black man? Well, yes, it is. Much of this is cultural, however, and not racial. It follows from the fact that 40% of violent crimes are committed by 6% of the population, i.e., black males.
Every Drop of Blood
By Dan Truitt
America’s sin debt for slavery was paid for long ago.
“Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865
Delivered a scant forty-one days before Lincoln gave, as he himself put it in his address at Gettysburg, the “last full measure of devotion,” our sixteenth president’s language sings, it soars; it is high poetry. Somebody called Lincoln “that sad poet of a president,” words which capture pretty completely what in essence this great man was. The only other American public figure who has even arguably come close to wielding the English language so profoundly and effectively is Martin Luther King. And it is no coincidence that both men were animated by the same cause, in different iterations.
It was in his Second Inaugural that Lincoln spoke, not just as a skilled political actor, or a poet, but, in a sense, as a prophet. He seemed to have had a unique insight into the heart of the tragedy that was the American Civil War.
I’d been thinking about his ‘wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil’ observation, and wondering how close to the truth Lincoln had struck. It turns out, in fact, that he had struck very close to the truth.
The common accepted death toll for the American Civil war is 618,000. That figure was recently reliably revised upward to 750,000 . At any rate, I decided to compare that number with the total number of Africans imported as slaves to the continental US throughout her colonial and national history. I was wondering, frankly, whether the life of at least one American taken during the Civil War, of which its proximate cause was the existence and spread of slavery, was balanced out for every African brought here.
American historian Henry Louis Gates says the following:
“Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7l milion Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.”
So, given the death rate of 14.4% of those who did not survive the Middle Passage, that raises the number of slaves destined for American ports to 443,000.
Now I have a rather grim question for you -- is the death of 750,000 Americans, and the maiming of thousands more, as a direct consequence to the presence of slavery in this country, an approximately fair price to pay for the forced importation of 443,000 Africans to America, for two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil, plus another ninety or so years of Jim Crow laws?
Well, this is an issue only God can fairly adjudicate. But it puts things in an entirely new and interesting perspective- for me, at least.
You may be surprised, given recent events, that the condition of black Americans has actually been improving over the last decades. Here’s Kyle Smith writing recently in the New York Post:
"The Economic Policy Institute found that the difference in high school graduation rates between whites and blacks fell from 27 percent in 1962 to 5 percent in 2004. Last fall, the rate of black and Hispanic unemployment hit an all-time low. Since 1980, the percentage of black adults with college degrees has tripled. Life expectancy of white Americans exceeded that of black Americans by more than seven years as of 1970; that gap has been cut in half, to three and a half years. The percentage of black Americans earning more than $75,000 more than doubled (adjusting for inflation) between 1970 and 2014, according to Harvard professor William Julius Wilson, who studies upward mobility among black Americans."
So what’s the problem, one might ask? With all this wonderful progress, why all this recent brouhaha? The answer can be distilled to a couple major factors: 1) the creation of a permanent black underclass thanks to the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s which have given economic incentives for fatherless households in the black community, and 2) the steadily advancing agenda of cultural Marxism, which has led to the tsunami of political correctness and the instant shaming and expulsion of liberals and conservatives of principle from positions of power and influence. Throw in the convulsive collective deliverance from three months of, as it turned out, mostly unnecessary lockdown, and you have a perfect blueprint for bad behavior.
Not all of this is bad, of course. Police tactics can always stand scrutiny, since they’re the only ones in a civilization entrusted with the threat of and the use of force to apply local laws effectively. Individuals who have an irrational distaste for people having a different paint job than they do need to do some serious self-reflection.
Is life more difficult for a black man? Well, yes, it is. Much of this is cultural, however, and not racial. It follows from the fact that 40% of violent crimes are committed by 6% of the population, i.e., black males. If that’s “institutional racism” in the view of a lot of rather shallow thinkers, then march until your shoes wear out; it won’t change until crime stats change. And crime stats won’t change until a revolution takes place in the black underclass.
The first rumblings of that revolution are happening even as we speak; there is very slow tectonic shift taking place in the African-American community as black Americans, by ones and twos, by dozens and hundreds, are slowly waking up to the fact that they’ve been had by the Democrats. That they’ve always been had by the Democrats, who were the fiercest opponents to emancipation, the staunchest supporters of Jim Crow, and the steely backbone of the KKK.
Democrats are scared stiff that they’ll lose their African-American constituents. They should be. If they don’t take their party back from the extreme Left and get their act together vis a vis their historic mistreatment of their most loyal demographic, they’ll be shunted off to the sidelines as a semi-permanent minority party. And that’s bad for the republic. One-party rule always is.
“Black Christians should protest the Democrat party's anti-Christian agenda which has led to the moral decay of the black community; fatherless households, gangs, crime, generational poverty, incarceration, and record-high black on black homicides.” LLOYD MARCUS
Blacks are only 13% of the population. White America gifted its first black president two terms. And yet, far too many blacks absurdly believe Democrats' and fake news media’s lie that white America did not want a black man in the White House. If America is such a hellhole of racism, how did Oprah Winfrey, a dark-complexioned stout black woman, become one of the wealthiest and most influential persons on the planet? The myth of America's racism is evil, destructive, and must end. LLOYD MARCUS
Barack Obama’s race hustling criminal coddling set the more recent tone where state and local law-enforcement officers were routinely attacked, accused of serial hate-inspired killings of suspects; where civilized norms were declared the illicit fruit of white privilege; where the epidemic of black-on-black homicides was either ignored or blamed on unresolved racial grievances. GEOFFREY P. HUNT
She never said it was the police, by the way (she casually refused, in an article about police killings, to place the blame anywhere), and we know it wasn't, because the police killed about 19 unarmed black males in 2017, and black people killed about 2,627 — a difference of over a hundred times. In fact, in 2018, black people killed about 2,600 black people, and whites in general — all of us, despite being 60% of the populace — killed only 234, more than ten times fewer. The greatest danger to black people in America today is always other black people. Black lives matter to Black Lives Matter only when it gives them an excuse to attack white people. JEREMY EGERER
13% of the population in the USA is black BUT THEY COMMIT 85% of all violent interracial crimes, 80% of all shootings, 79% of all robberies, 59% of all murders, 52% of all violent juvenile crimes, 45% of all drug offenses..
49% of all murder victims are black. 42% of all cop killers are black.
99% of all major riots involving property damage, looting and civil disobedience are committed by blacks as opposed to ANY OTHER minority in America.
49% of all murder victims are black. 42% of all cop killers are black.
99% of all major riots involving property damage, looting and civil disobedience are committed by blacks as opposed to ANY OTHER minority in America.
93% of all black murder victims are murdered by another black.
33% of all crimes in America are committed by 3% of the population; blacks between the ages of 16 and 36
8% of America’s population are black men, yet they account for 40% of America’s total prison population.
40% of blacks are on welfare
Only 59% blacks graduate high school (Detroit, only 20%)Over 60% of black households have no fathers present
72% of black mothers are unwed!
72% of black mothers are unwed!
Blacks account for 38% of abortions (only 13%
of population and contraceptives are FREE)
(STATISTICS FROM Dept. of Justice, Dept. of
Commerce, FBI and USA Census (ALL and sect.5
Law Enforcement))
The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is
accidents, like car accidents and drownings. The No. 1
reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black
men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another
young black man. In 2018, there were approximately 7,400
black homicide victims, more than half of the nation's total
number of homicides, out of a black population of 13%. Of
that number, the police killed a little over 200 blacks, and
nearly all of them had a weapon or violently resisted arrest.
The Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald writes: "Regarding threats to blacks from the police: A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer."
Why Don’t These #BlackLivesMatter?
Black Lives Matter is a political advocacy group, “[f]ounded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer,” according to the group’s website. Never mind that the George Zimmerman trial was a complete fraud, as Joel Gilbert brilliantly explained in his recent book and movie, “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America.”
BLM is a self-described global network, which explains why protests and riots sprang up seemingly spontaneously all over the world after George Floyd’s death. Starting in Minneapolis, protests quickly spread to far off locales including New Zealand, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
A white teenager cowers in a corner, his hands bound with orange cords and his mouth covered with tape. Four African Americans kick and hit him and slash at his scalp. As a cellphone camera captures their blurry images and broadcasts the ordeal on Facebook, the attackers hurl racial insults and denounce President-elect Donald J. Trump.
As reported by the New York Times: “A hashtag linking the assault to the Black Lives Matter movement exploded on social media.” Were the four attackers card-carrying members of BLM? Does it matter? After all, every police officer is a white supremacist and racist based on the actions of four cops in Minneapolis. Generalizing can work both ways.
BLM claims these noble goals: “We embody and practice justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.” They are, “huided by the fact that all Black lives matter.” Do they walk the walk, or just talk the talk?
Do the lives of Gregory Lewis, Teyonna Lofton, or Angelo Bronson matter? These are not and never will be household names like George Floyd. The Obama Foundation website won’t feature their faces. Michelle Obama won’t show pictures of any of them on her Instagram page. The justice brothers, Jesse and Al, won’t be hustling their deaths. Benjamin Crump won’t be representing any of their families. Dr. Michael Baden won’t be reviewing their autopsies. Members of Congress won’t take a knee for any of them. And there certainly won’t be widespread protests and riots over their deaths.
Why not? All three are black. Don’t their lives matter, too?
These poor souls were victims of another weekend in the killing fields of Chicago. As the Chicago Sun Times reported: “18 murders in 24 hours: Inside the most violent day in 60 years in Chicago.” This was last weekend while millions were proclaiming around the world that black lives matter.
“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” said Max Kapustin, the senior research director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
Yet I don’t hear Democrats, the DNC media, woke celebrities and athletes, or any race hustlers showing the least bit of concern. Where are the Obamas? This carnage occurred in their home city. Will any cable news networks be live streaming the funerals? Will Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot ban funeral gatherings of more than ten for these individuals while encouraging gatherings of thousands of looters on Michigan Avenue?
Why don’t these black lives matter? These aren’t simply statistics but real people leaving lives, dreams and families behind.
A hardworking father killed just before 1 a.m.
A West Side high school student murdered two hours later.
A man killed amid South Side looting at a cellphone store at 12:30 p.m.
A college freshman who hoped to become a correctional officer, gunned down at 4:25 p.m. after getting into an argument in Englewood.
Chicago was home to 653 murders in 2016, more than the total in New York City and Los Angeles combined. Who was president in 2016? Who had eight years to “fundamentally transform America” when he wasn’t busy lowering the sea levels?
Interestingly CNN reported, “Chicago's homicide rate decreases for the third straight year.” Who has been president the past 3 years? Obviously, CNN won’t notice that association because Orange Man Bad. In their reporting, President Trump is a racist and white supremacist. The declining murder rate must be due to Obama, despite it being much higher when he was in office. CNN made the same claims crediting Trump’s economy to Obama.
It’s not just Chicago where black lives don’t seem to matter. Look at the last hundred homicides in Baltimore. One only has to go back to mid-February of this year to hit the 100 mark. The race of most victims was listed as “unknown” yet 29 of the 100 were blacks.
Antwan Phillips, Jared Hill, and Tyrone Henderson were among the victims, but no one will be wearing a T-shirt showing their names or faces. Jesse and Al won’t be at their funerals. Nancy Pelosi won’t take a knee on their behalf. Why don’t their lives matter?
Last January, 14 were killed by a roadside bomb in Burkina Faso, including seven children. A week earlier, 35 people, mostly women were killed in a terrorist attack. Did any of these black lives matter? Where were the protests? Or kneeling? Where was Michelle Obama’s #BringBackOurGirls hashtag she used as first lady, long before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate?
The woke kneeling liberals sing the praises of Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger whose goal was “to exterminate the Negro population.” Their abortion clinics are disproportionately “located in ZIP codes with higher percentages of blacks and/or Hispanics than the state’s overall percentage.”
In New York City, home to some of the worst rioting, while blacks make up 25 percent of the NYC population, 46 percent of abortions were black babies. Shockingly more black babies were killed by abortion in NYC than were born alive. By contrast, Whites make up 44 percent of the NYC population but only account for 12 percent of abortions. Why don’t the lives of aborted black babies matter?
Will these protests cause a surge in Chinese coronavirus cases? Where are the protests occurring and who will be most affected? According to CNN,
Black Americans represent 13.4% of the American population, according to the US Census Bureau, but counties with higher black populations account for more than half of all Covid-19 cases and almost 60% of deaths, the study found.
Social justice warriors are happy to congregate in urban areas, ignoring the social distancing and mask mandates that the rest of us have been clubbed with for the past three months, potentially spreading the Wuhan virus to blacks, many of whom live in the protest zones. It is almost as bad as protesting in a nursing home. Don’t those black lives matter?
Liberal do-gooders are hijacking George Floyd’s death for their personal quest for power, money, and furthering their Marxist agenda. From defunding police departments to saying, “Some white people may have to die”, as a University of Georgia graduate student recommended.
If black lives truly mattered, there would be calls for more school choice and fewer abortions, more emphasis on intact nuclear families and less on reparations for events hundreds of years ago. But those are not part of the BLM political platform, contradicting their supposed message.
From a true advocate for social justice, Martin Luther King, Jr, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” If black lives truly mattered, that would be the emphasis of BLM and their liberal sycophants. Otherwise America will become a balkanized country, populated by fools who let our once shining city on a hill crumble into the ash heap of ruin.
Brian C. Joondeph, M.D., is a Denver-based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, Rasmussen Reports, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and QuodVerum.
No comments:
Post a Comment