Tag: Black Lives Matter

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

The Racial Land Mine of First Grade

BLM, Black Lives Matter, all lives matter, education, schools

You can’t let kids get away with anything.

Schools must apply some discipline. Otherwise, chaos would ensue. Talking out of turn, pulling pigtails, passing notes … and, not least, an epidemic of expressing benign thoughts inconsistent with the poisonous race-​conscious ideology that some schools seek to inculcate.

In March 2021, a little girl known as “B.B.” in court documents got into trouble for drawing a group of classmates of different races. She added the words “Black Lives Matter” and, below that, “any life.” She gave the drawing to a black classmate to try to comfort him, as she later explained.

Had B.B. been more attuned to the racial controversies of the day — does she not follow The New York Times and CNN? — she might have realized what treacherous waters she had dived into. 

As it was, she was surprised when the school forced her to apologize to her classmate and forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school and from attending recess for two weeks.

The parents sued. A district court ruled in favor of the school, but the parents, helped by Pacific Legal Foundation, are appealing.

The district judge says that whether First Amendment protections of free speech apply here depends on whether such speech, however innocent, would “significantly interfere with the discipline needed for the school to function.”

The drawing could hardly have thus interfered unless part of the school’s “function” is to impose race-​conscious orthodoxy. 

And suppress even the slightest peep of unwary dissent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

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crime and punishment media and media people

With Our Own Eyes

Police body-​cam video cannot bring back the dead. Nor end racism or prevent tragedy. 

What point-​of-​policing video can capture is solid and critical evidence. After a deadly police encounter, body-​cam footage gives the public confidence that the truth will soon come out. 

But only if police consistently and promptly release relevant video to the public.

Consider last week’s tragedy in Columbus, Ohio, where a policeman shot and killed 16-​year-​old Ma’Khia Bryant as she was preparing to stab another young women. Many politicians and those in the media were ready to herald it as “the latest in a string of deadly videos documenting the final moments of a person of color killed by law enforcement.” 

The cop-​cam video, however, clearly showed a policeman firing his gun to prevent one person of color from stabbing another. Just what we want police of any color to do.

NBC Nightly News still managed to mangle its reporting, editing out the image of the knife. In the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, you may remember, NBC News broadcast Zimmerman’s 911 call but dishonestly edited part of the conversation to inject a racial element where none had been.*

And, sure, even staring at incontrovertible videotape evidence of good police behavior, some took to defending knife-​fighting as a youthful rite of passage.

But everyone can see the footage for themselves.

In another fatal shooting last week, police attempted to serve an arrest warrant in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. But under state law police are not required, short of a court order, to release police body-​cam video. 

Citizens are going to court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The local Jacksonville, Florida, NBC affiliate fired three employees over the incident.

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Photo by Lance

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ideological culture

Hairdo, Don’t

BLM, Black Lives Matter, Trader Joes, protest, riots,

The name was dropped again the other day, Karen.

Not a proper name, though — it is a put-​down, idiomatic and not inoffensive. 

Over at PJMedia, Bryan Preston used the term “Karen” good-​naturedly (and with an *) in reporting on the “trained Marxists” at Black Lives Matter taking over a Trader Joe’s grocery store in Seattle to protest the, ahem, “lack of access to grocery stores” … because “capitalism exploits the working class.” 

Somehow I got stuck on Karen. 

“Karen is a pejorative term used in the United States and other English-​speaking countries for a woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is appropriate or necessary,” Wikipedia informs. “A common stereotype is that of a white woman who uses her privilege to demand her own way at the expense of others. Depictions also include demanding to ‘speak to the manager,’ anti-​vaccination beliefs, being racist, or sporting a particular bob cut hairstyle.”**

Is it just me, or does “being racist” seem a lot worse than sporting an uncool haircut? When racism’s at issue, why not use the label “racist,” instead?

And isn’t there already another five-​letter word for a female exhibiting the less extreme negative features? 

“Karens are most definitely white,” Helen Lewis assures in The Atlantic. “Let that ease your conscience if you were beginning to wonder whether the meme was, perhaps, a little bit sexist in identifying various universal negative behaviors and attributing them exclusively to women.”

Apparently it is not okay to mock women … but thank goodness we can still mock women who have white skin! 

And a specific hairdo!

Land of the Free, Home of the Trash-Talkers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Preston’s footnote read: “with all due respect to the Karens I’ve known, all of whom are nothing like the stereotype of Karens as busybodies who leap to complain and always end up running authoritarian regimes such as HOAs.” 

** The Urban Dictionary also does not fail to mention that “crown bowl haircut.”

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Down Among the Non Sequiturs

BLM, Black Lives Matter, protests, riots, property, Antifa

There is a rule in respectable writing, particularly academic: don’t quote “down.”

This means that academics don’t cite newsletter writers as authorities, scientists don’t consult table-​rappers as purveyors of relevant data, politicians don’t quote tweets.

But of course that’s all changed now, thanks to Trump.

Which perhaps excuses me to deal with a simple Facebook “meme” that I’ve seen shared around among progressives. It’s a deceptively simple question; the point in criticizing it is not to castigate the person who first posed it.

Here it is: “Why is murder an appropriate response to property damage, but property damage isn’t an appropriate response to murder?”

I confess: this really startled me. Not because it is hard to answer, but because what it says about discourse in our time. 

Note what is obviously wrong with it:

1. Murder is not an apt response to anything, for murder is unlawful and/​or immoral killing. The premise is absurd.

2. Some people do indeed kill rioters and others who are attacking them or their property. This can be justified because self-​defense is the basis of all our rights, and a violent attack doesn’t just fit into neat little “I’m only destroying your property” box. 

3. The proper response to murder, after the fact of some violent moment, is lawful arrest and trial, not killing. Self-​defense is for moments of conflict. Some time after an illegal act? Then we proceed by the rule of law.

Of course, this little thought experiment was designed to justify riots.

It does not.

It justifies, really, only this episode of

Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Protest Hits the Pavement

Black Lives Matter, Washington D.C.

Social justice activists and Washington D.C. city officials have collaborated to paint the slogan “Black Lives Matter” on 16th Street near the White House. 

The city has also allowed the words “Defund the Police” to be painted on the street.

Does this mean that the roadways of our nation’s capital city are now a public forum accessible to anyone who files the proper forms?

So far, doesn’t look like it. 

So Judicial Watch (JW) is suing for the right to paint its own motto, “Because No One is Above the Law,” on a DC street. JW went to court because its applications to perform a similar paint job have fallen on deaf ears.

It contends that its First Amendment right of freedom of speech is being violated.

“We have been patient,” Judicial Watch says. “We also have been flexible. We have stated our willingness to paint our motto at a different location if street closure is necessary and the city is unwilling to close our chosen location. All we ask is that we be afforded the same opportunity to paint our message on a DC street that has been afforded the painters on 16th Street.”

I can’t wait until all this gets cleared up. I suppose it’ll be one or two paint jobs per applicant. 

“ThisisCommonSense​.org” has a nice ring to it, eh? 

Something about “unalienable rights [to] Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” would also be a great message, assuming it’s still legal to quote the Founders whose legacy we celebrated over the weekend.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Victimhood Conspiracy

riots, protest, BLM, antifa,

When a purported Antifa group tweeted an “alert” on Sunday, instructing “Comrades” to “move into residential areas … the white hoods … and we take what’s ours,” tagging it “#BlacklivesMaters #F**kAmerica,” Twitter closed the account. 

Few would object. 

That was criminal incitement to riot, and worse.

But when Twitter, Facebook and YouTube remove client content for arguing things about the coronavirus that does not fit with government bodies’ officially approved information, something else is going on. 

Last week, President Donald Trump warned of the dangers to election integrity of switching to mail-​in ballots. So Twitter flagged his tweet, implying it as non-factual.*

I am not going to defend the wisdom or legality of Trump’s threats — on Twitter or by executive order. But one characterization of the whole affair by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason seems a … bit … off.

“The order relies heavily on conservatives’ victimhood conspiracy du jour: that social media companies are colluding to suppress conservative voices,” Ms. Brown wrote last Thursday. “It’s an objectively untrue viewpoint, as countless booted and suspended liberal, libertarian, and apolitical accounts can tell you.”

The fact that non-​conservatives have been de-​platformed does not actually work against the supposition that the social media outfits are colluding against conservatives. It remains a problem if conservative thought is suppressed along with libertarian and anything else heterodox. These companies do conspire to suppress opinions they do not like, and influencers they regard as dangerous.

To center-​left establishment opinion.

These social media behemoths aim to defend their approved news and opinion against what they regard as “fake news.” Thereby suppressing free debate and inquiry.

Opposing Trump’s reaction does not require pretending that these companies’ policies are not deeply problematic.

Concern about open and robust debate is not a mere “victimhood conspiracy du jour.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* How a prediction can be a factual matter is a bit odd. But let that slide, I guess.

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