What’s in a Photo?

2,238 words

What is News™? There is an infinite array of events in the United States happening throughout any given day, so what is reported? The events that are important to the people, a News™ Watcher might say. What is important and to whom? Is it what the writer and reader say is important? If only. Is what Anderson Cooper proposes to be important actually important? To the extent of his Credible Celebrity Status, yes. Although, he is not writing the stories that he reads off the teleprompter. So, what content makes the News™? At least crime, the News™ Watcher might say. Yet if that were true, every News™ segment would be a list of each crime and its details, spanning the whole day in metropolitan areas. Clearly, then, there is some sort of vetting process that decides which story makes the cut. Which committee resolves the infinite array with an hour of programming? And who put them in charge?

At the end of the day, News™ is stuff that the acronym companies (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) and their journalist tendrils (Washington Post, New York Times, WSJ, etc.) tell you to think about. It is that simple.

The obvious question, then: do News™ companies corral stories in such a way as to convey a specific narrative? Of course. Nobody who watches CNN thinks Fox accurately portrays the News™ and vice versa. Take it one step further and say it out loud; each News™ propagator is curating a set of stories to convey certain messages.

Fox has the greatest viewership of any single News™ channel because it is perceived to be the only one offering a narrative separate from the one proposed by NBC, ABC, CNN, and CBS. It’s the opinion of the writer, and probably the reader, that Fox differs from CNN mostly in degree, not kind. In other words, Fox arrives at mostly the same conclusions in the long run, but in a less explicit way. This can be argued, but basically everyone at Fox (save Tucker Carlson) is a shill for Conservative Inc. and Donald Trump, regardless of how far he strays from his campaign promises. Furthermore, the Republican agenda is just 5-15 years behind the Democratic one. Somebody once said conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit.

Of all these channels, CNN has come to represent the epitome of The Narrative™: the white man is the cause of all non-white suffering, Donald Trump is Cheeto Hitler, Barack Obama is Martin Luther King III, blacks shouldn’t have to die for being black, every person is a citizen of America should they desire it, kids in cages, police are murdering non-whites in cold blood, and so on. The specific instance of The Narrative™ in question is obviously the police vs. black issue.

Let’s play a simple game called Research. Whites are 60 percent of the population, blacks are 13 ^[1]. Now, we’ll search “people shot by police” on Google, the search engine normal people use. The first result is Mapping Police Violence ^[2], and it’s a series of infographics Vox-splaining the data. Nope, that’s a narrative. The second result is “Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to March 2020, by month” from Statista ^[3]. Great, much better — it’s just numbers. Scrolling down, we have “Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2020, by race” from Statista ^[4]. It takes 15-60 seconds to find data on murders by police.

From 2017-2019, 996 people were shot to death by police per year, which means 19 per week. How many of these did we hear about from the News™? Well, only the ones which involved black victims and white officers, obviously, but did we even hear about all of those? Of the people shot to death by police, 22 percent were black, which would be 4 or 5 per week, a seemingly gross overrepresentation of their status as 13 percent of the population. Yet, 42 percent of police murdered in 2018 ^[5] were killed by blacks and they committed 47.5 percent of all murders ^[6] from 2013 to 2018.

It appears, then, that blacks are more likely to be using firearms within big American cities, which is where police are, and that they are more likely to point the firearm at a police officer in order to kill said officer. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that blacks get shot by police more than whites.

Although, 40 percent of those shot by police are white, and they commit about 35 percent of the murder ^[6] (2013-2018). [1] ^[7] Is it possible that blacks are actually less likely to be shot by police than whites? Yes, of course it is. This is old hat in 2020 — we all know that crime statistics make blacks look bad. Yet the truth is true, regardless of how many people know it.

The Narrative™ perpetuates the myth of white oppression on a daily basis — we wake up and plot how to undermine, mutilate, and murder neighboring blacks every morning. The Narrative™ also suggests that whites cannot possibly be sorry enough, since this racism is engraved on our souls at birth. Indeed, just a couple of days after the death of George Floyd, the Minneapolis City Council Vice President, a black trans “woman” named Andrea Jenkins, said America must ^[8] “declare a state of emergency declaring racism as a public health issue.”

The CNN anchor Van Jones, who has a white wife, said the death of George Floyd was a lynching ^[9]. Don’t forget that he said Donald Trump’s election was a whitelash ^[10] against a changing country and a black president — ignore the assumption that it’s obviously evil to want one’s home to stay one’s home ^[11] and that many two-time Obama voters switched to Trump ^[12]. Additionally, the Minnesotan Trudeau, Jacob Frey, immediately called this a murder ^[13] and said being black should not be a death sentence.

So, how did Van Jones, Jacob Frey, Don Lemon, and the rest come to such a stark conclusion about the death of George Floyd before the autopsy results? Sure, the video is bad, but how can they take such a bold stance on the issue prior to any due process? Because Floyd’s cause of death is predetermined and the system is already on their side — everybody agrees racism is a deadly weapon whites are born wielding.

The News™, actors, athletes, politicians at nearly every level, academics, public intellectuals, and so on, are all telling us to be deeply unnerved at the terrible injustice that has been plaguing America since Columbus. How strange is it that all of these protestors believe they are fighting The System when nearly every aspect of The System is telling them to be angry at The System? Additionally, if a small chunk of the population can be ginned up to bring entire cities to a grinding halt, this allows pushers of The Narrative™ to control huge swaths of the American people and its economy.

Yesterday, the writer went to a grocery store with boarded-up windows and there were 50 people in a line waiting to get in line at any given register. The shelves were emptier than in the beginning stages of the WuFlu lockdown. Long strips of I-94 and I-35W, the two busiest highways in Minnesota, were closed to traffic (but somehow missed this semi-truck ^[14]). Stores that were beginning to re-open are closed again, many boarded-up or looted and destroyed. Newsweek published a list ^[15] of Protests Near Me, including dozens of cities across America. The National Guard has been activated in 15 states and D.C. to the tune of 5,000 mobilized soldiers. Last night, the writer was told he had to be home at 8 pm and was not allowed to come outside for any reason until 6 am this morning. [2] ^[16] This, we’re told, is collateral damage for blacks seeking justice for George Floyd, the former rapper, porn star, and violent felon ^[17].

Floyd is being celebrated as the best of the best, the man who dindu nuffin wrong. Of course, the handling of George Floyd seems to be egregious and is difficult to watch. However, the criminal report ^[18] for the arrest of officer Derek Chauvin (on 5/29) gives the medical examiner’s preliminary results:

The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.

If the reaction from the News™ was based on police brutality and racism, why didn’t they spend any time on Justine Damond? She was an Australian-American woman who called the police on 15 July 2017 to report what she thought to be a sexual assault happening near her home in Southwest Minneapolis, not far from where Floyd died. When the police were scanning the area, she approached the vehicle and Mohamed Noor pulled his firearm, aimed it through the driver’s window in front of his partner’s face, and fatally shot Damond in the chest. Noor is a Somali-American who was celebrated by Betsy Hodges in 2015 (then Mayor of Minneapolis) because of his Somali-ness. Shockingly, he had three formal complaints ^[19] in his two years as a police officer, and one of those was a pending lawsuit for his false imprisonment, assault, and battery of a woman who called the police to “report an unknown young male who was sitting on her retaining wall behind her house smoking marijuana.”

Judge Kathryn Quaintance said ^[20] “good people sometimes do bad things” before she sentenced Noor.

Of course, there was no rioting, looting, or protesting for Justine Damond. Whites did nothing but let the system sentence Noor for murdering a barefoot white woman in her pajamas trying to report a potential sexual assault. And what did whites do when a black man picked a random white child to throw off of a three-story balcony at the Mall of America in 2019? Nothing, just let the system sentence him to prison two months later. Were these stories national news on CNN? If they were, did the segments last longer than the two minutes it took to explain each crime?

We have the attempted murder of a white 5-year-old boy and the murder of an innocent white woman within two years and there is not a peep from Minnesotan whites. How are blacks celebrating the life of St. George Floyd? By destroying the city in which they live. They’re burning their own low-income housing ^[21], killing at least one ^[22] in Minneapolis so far, attacking journalists ^[23] who are on their side, starting fires all around the White House ^[24], killing a police officer in Oakland ^[25], yelling “shoot the white folks ^[26],” and destroying everything in sight ^[27] (including Chauvin’s precinct ^[28]), and there’s so much more.

The worst of it, in the writer’s unbiased opinion, is the shattering of Ingebretsen’s windows ^[29]. Charles Ingebretsen Sr. opened Model Meat Market in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis just a shade less than one century ago, and the market is an institution in the Twin Cities, known simply as Ingebretsen’s. It sits in what used to be a Scandinavian neighborhood, but is now predominantly non-white ^[30] and ravaged by crime ^[31]. Yet that doesn’t stop whites from forming a line that takes up a city block to get into the place during the Christmas season.

CNN has played a pivotal role in the current mayhem engulfing Minneapolis and much of the country. George Floyd is another martyr for their cause. It’s already a matter of public record that the impetus for Floyd’s murder was because he was audacious enough to be black in public. Floyd is cannon fodder for CNN to push The Narrative™ on the whites who already refuse to protest when a Somali immigrant murders one of their own and a white child is sacrificed at a mall because some black guy’s catcalls aren’t working ^[32] on (presumably white) women.

What does CNN get for their progressive ideology? [3] ^[33] Rioting in their front yard, the headquarters in Atlanta. One has to wonder if the anchors are so blinded by their absurd worldview that they cannot see the irony, but many have to be aware. They know exactly what they are doing. This picture is captivating, as it shows a Mexican and BLM flag next to each other on a graffiti-covered CNN logo, surrounded by angry, brainwashed blacks and a couple of whites. Of all that is captured in this photo, it conveys strongly that progressives will be the first to die, as they are the ones welcoming their murder with open arms.

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Notes

[1] ^[36] To keep all the stats fair, “whites” committed 31/55 (56 percent) police murders in 2018, but they don’t distinguish white and Hispanic for this metric, so it’s impossible to tell how many whites actually did murder cops. That’s why I didn’t include this statistic.

[2] ^[37] Naturally, he drove through the empty streets at midnight. There were police and fire vehicles driving down the empty streets with their spotlights on, combing yards and dark areas.

[3] ^[38] Picture from Orwell & Goode on Twitter ^[39].