#BlackLivesMatter Has Officially Jumped the Shark
The Big Lie of #BlackLivesMatter Is Spawning an Epidemic of Little Lies
by Alexander Zubatov
Has anyone else noticed that the last few installments in the #BlackLivesMatter narrative have been either much ado about very little or else total and utter lies?
- In an incident on April 4th that I previously discussed here, cops in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, N.Y. shot and killed unarmed black man Saheed Vassell. His death quickly became a cause celebre for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, with protests rising up in Brooklyn as a consequence. The problem is that cops were responding to multiple 911 calls about Mr. Vassell threatening passersby with what looked like a gun, which he then brandished and pointed at the cops before they shot him. Although the gun turned out to be a pipe, there is no way the cops, in the heat of the moment, threatened with the prospect of deadly force, could’ve been expected to know that. As you can see from this surveillance video of the guy threatening others, the pipe sure looks like a gun:
- As reported here, on May 13th, a black man was held down and beaten by Century 21 security guards. The situation was reported as though it were yet another installment in white supremacist America’s war on black men. Now, the reality: the “victim,” Victor Roberson, had stolen Prada slippers from the store (for which he was subsequently arrested), this being the 19-year-old’s 12th arrest, and most of the Century 21 employees involved were black, with the one accused of using excessive force being Hispanic. The video of the incident mostly shows big-mouthed, in-your-face, black passersby behaving badly, getting profane and aggressive, unnecessarily inflaming the situation and screaming about an assault on a “black man” at every step:
- As explained here, on April 27th, a black woman, Dawn Hilton-Williams, was pulled over for going 70 in a 55 mph zone in South Carolina. After the incident, she posted a Facebook video that went viral, complaining she feared for her life and that she had been “threatened by this police officer…all of my African-American and people of color out there are going to know exactly what I’m talking about.” She makes the obligatory reference to Sandra Bland, a mentally unstable black woman who had gotten overly aggressive with police during what should have been a routine traffic stop and then committed suicide while in jail after the incident. Entirely belying Ms. Hilton-Williams description of her incident, however, bodycam footage shows a cop behaving appropriately in the face of Ms. Williams’ defensive and belligerent responses:
- As described here, in a Facebook post on April 13th, NAACP President the Rev. Jerrod Moultrie claimed he was racially profiled by a cop in Timmonsville, South Carolina for driving a Mercedes in a nice neighborhood and asked inappropriate questions about whether he had drugs in the car, with the officer telling him he was doing him a favor for not taking him to jail. And if bodycam footage of the incident did not exist, he surely would’ve been believed as readily as a college woman accusing a fratboy of rape. Fortunately for the rest of us, bodycam footage did exist. Released by the Timmonsville police department, the footage showed the narrative to have been a pure fabrication and evidenced an officer whose behavior was the height of courtesy and propriety:
To be clear, the entire narrative behind #BlackLivesMatter was, from the very outset, a lie. The media-saturated, mass-protest-spawning, headlining “hands-up-don’t-shoot” story of the criminal thug Michael Brown in Ferguson was a total lie, and more importantly, the very notion that blacks are being disproportionately killed by cops was an empirically discredited lie perpetuated by sensationalizing media sources profiting off of irresponsibly rousing passions about non-existent racism:
But as the quote sometimes attributed to Nazi master propagandist Joseph Goebbels goes, “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.” What is striking in several of these recent incidents is how the master narrative of #BlackLivesMatter is informing and inflaming black reactions — both in the moment and, later, on social media and in the streets — to ordinary incidents that have nothing to do with race or racism. What is also striking is that the Big Lie of #BlackLivesMatter is now birthing an accumulating series of little lies that keep the false narrative going. By the time the bodycam footage emerges or cooler heads attempt to prevail, the initial video has already gone viral, and people already committed to their initial reactions of anger and protest face the barrier of cognitive dissonance in later admitting they were wrong.
And so the derailed train of #BlackLivesMatter keeps careening forward, while influential black “intellectuals” like Ta-Nehisi Coates and his many imitators continue spreading their hateful tales of pandemic “white supremacy” to keep the train speeding towards its inevitable destination. In the meantime, while propping up one fake “victim” after another, the train keeps running heedlessly over its real victims: our collective morale, our American patriotism, our national unity, our unvarnished truth.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, Republic Standard, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
