BLM Diary
The Second Week

St. Louis Police Chief John Hayden

2,514 words

June 1-11, 2020

Introduction

Below are the first few entries in a “BLM diary” I started keeping a week after George Floyd died in May 2020, recording events connected with this event and my thoughts about them. The diary’s introduction is here.

June 1, 2020: Lewis Hamilton

“Lewis Hamilton slams ‘white-dominated’ F1 for silence over George Floyd death,” says a headline in the Telegraph.[1] According to the article, he criticized the biggest stars in Formula One for failing to speak out against racism. This is pathetic. Is it Formula One’s fault that it is white-dominated? What “racism” should it speak out against? Racism in general, whatever that might be, or the idea that it came into the death of George Floyd? The media are using vague and inflammatory language to make what supposedly happened in one case emblematic of what supposedly happens everywhere all the time.

Hamilton, seeming to see himself as motor racing’s moral watchdog, wrote on Instagram: “I know who you are and I see you” as he accused his fellow drivers of staying silent. What makes him think that his fellow drivers must talk when he wants them to and say what he wants them to say? He wrote, “I would have thought by now you would see why this happens and say something about it.” This happens? Defending him, the Telegraph tells us that the six-time world champion “said he supported only peaceful protesters, not those who had looted stores and set fire to buildings.” But Hamilton said, “There can be no peace until our so-called leaders make change.” Change must come. I wonder why.

June 2, 2020: St. Louis, Missouri

Last night four police officers were shot in St. Louis, Missouri while dealing with riots.[2] The Police Chief, John Hayden, obviously a good man, said: “I’m stunned. We need to pray for our city and pray for these officers.” He couldn’t understand what was going on. “How can this be? Can we make sense out of this?” Mr. Floyd’s death was tragic, “but can we make some sense out of these kids comin’ down here and destroying, like — it’s crazy! Jumpin’ up and down like they’re enthused by the jumpin’, high-fivin’ each other, flourishing pistols . . .” His officers were still trying to take control. They had support from the federal government, as well as St. Louis county, the air patrol, and the National Guard:

We have everybody trying to help us, and all this because some people just decided to steal and break windows. That’s all they doin’. So I don’t understand what that has to do with Mr. Floyd’s death. . . .  All that was goin’ on tonight was people throwing rocks, throwing explosives on officers. . . . I just don’t understand. I don’t think anyone understands why this mayhem is goin’ on.

June 3, 2020: David Dorn

The black commentator Anthony Brian Logan is “done trying to empathize with anyone.”[3] He says that the “protests,” which are really riots, have only created chaos and destruction. At first he had some sympathy for protestors who were peaceful, but no more. He now brackets them with the rioters. George Floyd was not a model citizen, he says. He was high on Fentanyl and methamphetamine when he died and once robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint. A black retired Police Captain named David Dorn, 77, was killed during a “protest” while responding to an alarm call. He was trying to help his community and was shot outright as the event was streamed live on social media. Nor was it an isolated case. So how much do black lives matter, Logan asks? Apparently not very much to black people. The so-called peaceful protestors are part of the problem, because they give the rioters cover and support, he thinks. “I’m getting tired of people trying to protect criminals.” He isn’t glad that George Floyd died, but if Floyd had acted differently, he would be alive today. And if black people put as much energy into fixing their community as they put into protesting and rioting, we’d have a better society, he says.

June 8, 2020: Defence Ministry concerned about racism

Stephen Lovegrove, Permanent Secretary to the [UK’s] Ministry of Defence, says that his department recently touched on the topic of racial discrimination and that he wants to “continue this vital conversation around race and inequality.”[4] Everyone, no matter how irrelevant to their job George Floyd’s death might be, must say that it concerns them and talk about discrimination. What discrimination? The inequality they refer to has nothing to do with how George Floyd or anyone was treated, but results from the races’ various behaviors. If black people are poorer than whites, it’s because they never applied for jobs that would one day pay more, which is largely because they weren’t qualified to do so, which is largely because they didn’t obtain the necessary qualifications when at school — or it could be because they never saved or had a job at all. Don’t we all know that? Yet, people like Stephen Lovegrove piously promise to talk about inequality.

June 8, 2020: Black Lives Matter in the recent past

I see that five years ago Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists disrupted a public meeting in Phoenix, Arizona by screaming, “Burn everything down! Shut this shit down! Rise the fuck up!”[5] According to Breitbart, the protest was directed by BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who could be seen “enthusiastically pumping her fist and shouting along with every incendiary statement.” So she has been waiting for something like Floyd’s death for some time now.

June 9, 2020: Tucker Carlson comments

Tucker Carlson says that America went insane over the weekend.[6] What happened was without precedent in the modern era:

A small group of highly aggressive, emotionally-charged activists took over a culture and got the entire country to obey their will. It all happened so fast and with such ferocity that virtually no one resisted it. People seemed bewildered, even stunned by what was happening. Statements of fact and opinion that were entirely within the bounds of reasonable conversation just last Sunday, suddenly . . . were enough to get you fired from your job.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

I wonder if the reason he fails to mention the activists’ race is that he assumes that we all know it, or whether it’s to downplay it. Also, if people are being fired like this only two weeks after George Floyd’s death, the firing mentality must have predated it and only taken this opportunity to show itself.

Carlson looks back on what has occurred since the riots started. Minneapolis’ Democrat leaders decided to “defund” the police. Few among the public supported them, but the activists pressed the Mayor, Jacob Fry, who at a demonstration, standing with the crowd in t-shirt, jeans, and facemask, was asked by a black woman shouting through a megaphone: “Will you commit to defunding the Minneapolis police?” He asked, “Abolition of it?” She said, “We don’t want no more police!” Fry: “I do not support full abolition of the Police Department.” She screamed at him to get the fuck out of there, and off he went. So this is the same black hatred of law and order seen in Watts in 1965, Brixton in 1981, and almost any other riot you care to name.

FOX News showed a clip of a CNN reporter asking Lisa Bender, President of the Minneapolis City Council, whether her community really wants to do without the police. What if someone broke into her house in the middle of the night, she asks? Says Bender: Those for whom the system is already working need to imagine what it would feel like to live in that reality, where calling the police may mean more harm done. The strategic vagueness of this barely comprehensible remark and its reference to feelings are typical of political correctness. What she meant was that white people are not in danger because their homes wouldn’t be broken into, or that if they were, they should feel sorry for the intruders rather than adding to their troubles by taking any action. I remember it being argued in the 1990s that the police should give a break to “vulnerable” young black men, which turned out to mean young black men who were vulnerable to being arrested. One has to see through the language of these people.

It’s hard to overstate how vicious the crackdown on free speech and free thought has been in the last few days, said Carlson, the rule now being that one mustn’t question Black Lives Matter. It reminds me of how one couldn’t question the #MeToo movement not long ago. Today’s new rule was being enforced without mercy, Carlson said. In Vancouver, a basketball coach was fired for “liking” a tweet skeptical of BLM’s aims. A player with the LA Galaxy soccer team lost his job because his wife had said something critical of the movement. The New York Times had run an op-ed demanding that people disown their families if they failed to support Black Lives Matter enthusiastically enough. They should tell their relatives that they won’t visit them or answer their phone calls until they take  significant action in support of black lives by either joining the protests or making financial contributions.

Referring to the drug-addled criminal, who had been in and out of prison eight times by the age of 33,[7] Nancy Pelosi told a gathering: “We are here to honor George Floyd. . . . For those who wish to, we will now kneel for our moment of silence.” “What is going on?” asked Carlson. “What is this about?” Perhaps it’s about white people’s folly and self-hatred, as shown in their decades-long affirmation of innate racial equality, and which is now coming out as the idea that white people are positively inferior to blacks. Why, though, should a habitual criminal be especially revered? Because this latest thrust of the movement has been launched in his name, which requires him to be pure.

June 9, 2020: David Dorn again

David Dorn’s alleged killer was sentenced to seven years in 2014 for armed robbery, which the judge reduced to probation.[8] He twice violated its terms, got two more breaks, and never did go to prison — where he should have been when David Dorn was killed.

David Dorn and his alleged killer.

June 9, 2020: Ditching statues

Good Morning Britain shows footage of BLM supporters, most of them white, pulling down Edward Colston’s statue and dumping it in Bristol harbor.[9] I get the feeling that they think they’re doing something good, whereas black people doing this would, I suspect, not be thinking anything. They’d just be reveling in the destruction.

Reading up on Colston (1636-1721), I see that he was a merchant, Member of Parliament, and philanthropist who was involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and who also dealt in wine, fruit, and textiles. In 1680 he became a member of the Royal African Company, of which he was Deputy Governor for a year. He donated vast amounts of money to charity and was a great benefactor, specifically of Bristol, his native city, where he is commemorated in several landmarks and the names of streets and schools. Few in his day would have seen anything to complain about in him, but to BLM this is irrelevant.

What did Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, Good Morning Britain’s go-to commentator on all matters black, think? She saw the toppling of Colston’s statue as an act of resistance. It represented the breaking of chains and was a long time coming, because the United Kingdom is institutionally racist. No statue immortalizing British imperialism was more important than a single black life, she stated, and no desecration of a monument as devastating as the desecration of black lives. Moronity rules. An act of resistance to what? What chains? What did she mean by “institutionally racist”? Isn’t it mainly black people who “desecrate” black lives and benefit from our institutional racism? Presumably Dr. Mos-Shogbamimu does not indulge in thinking, but just lets the words come out.

I wonder if the idea of removing works of art or monuments for political reasons was pioneered by followers of #MeToo, who in 2018 got Manchester Art Gallery to take down a much-loved pre-Raphaelite painting depicting a femme fatale.[10]

June 9, 2020: George Floyd’s final funeral

You can buy James O’Meara’s The Homo and the Negro here.

George Floyd’s third and final funeral has taken place in Houston, Texas, where he spent most of his life. “Religious leaders, gospel singers, and other celebrants shared their condolences with Floyd’s kin through prayers, poems, and songs,” according to ABC News.[11]

George Floyd’s gold coffin in a horse-drawn carriage at the last of his three funerals.

June 11, 2020: Robert Peel and Robert Baden-Powell

The authorities in Leeds think that those who want the city’s statue of Robert Peel taken down might be confusing him with his father.[12] Leeds’ Robert Peel was the Prime Minister who founded the modern police; his father, also Robert Peel, opposed the abolition of slavery. The campaigners accept that they made a mistake, but still want the Leeds statue removed, because “We should not celebrate colonizers.” Well, I’m as opposed to colonizing as anyone. I wish Africa had been left as it was, when its children would have given us little trouble, although I can’t deny that colonialism benefited the colonized, who were given things like roads, railways, literacy, and medicine.

Robert Baden-Powell’s statue is being removed from its place in Poole because it’s thought to be on a target list for attack — and why shouldn’t it be?[13] This was the man who founded the Scouts movement, which promoted such despised values as discipline, loyalty, and competition. Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole Council said it was acting to protect the statue for future generations and would return it as soon as the threat subsided. It would, however, only do so after discussing the statue’s future with all relevant groups, which include groups wanting it never put back, namely the groups that accuse Baden-Powell of racism, homophobia, and supporting Adolf Hitler. One local resident said she thought that controversial statues should have information attached explaining both the positive and negative aspects of those they depicted. Small chance of anything so balanced being acceptable to the iconoclasts.

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Notes

[1] Telegraph, June 1, 2020, “Lewis Hamilton slams ‘white-dominated’ F1 for silence over George Floyd death.”

[2] KSDK News, June 2, 2020, “Raw: St. Louis police chief gets emotional talking about 4 officers shot during riots.”

[3] Anthony Brian Logan. June 3, 2020, “After David Dorn, I Am Done Trying To Empathize With Anyone.”

[4] UK Column, June 8, 2020, “UK Column News — 8th June 2020.”

[5] American Renaissance, July 28, 2015, “Black Lives Matter Founder Rants at Netroots: ‘Burn Everything Down’.”

[6] FOX News, June 9, 2020, “Tucker: Black Lives Matter is now a political party.”

[7] American Renaissance, June 4, 2021, “GEORGE FLOYD ONE YEAR LATER.”

[8] Anthony Brian Logan, June 9, 2020, “The Man Arrested For Killing David Dorn Should Have Been In Prison.”

[9] Good Morning Britain, June 9, 2020, “The debate gets heated over whether controversial statues should be removed.”

[10] Justine Brown’s Bookshelf, April 22, 2018, “On Iconoclasm.”

[11] ABC News, June 9, 2020, “Family members, dignitaries honor George Floyd at funeral service in Houston.”

[12] BBC, June 11, 2020, “Sir Robert Peel statue removal calls ‘targeting wrong man’.”

[13] BBC, June 11, 2020. “Robert Baden-Powell statue to be removed in Poole.”