In Defense of Banning The DiDi Delgado from Medium for Advocating Violence Against Cops
Dear Medium/Medium Staff:
In the extremely unlikely event that you actually care about the broader Medium community and the kinds of loony and dangerous ideas some writers are using Medium to propagate, this story, the story I’m responding to here, is an actual bona fide call for citizens to engage in acts of violence against cops. Do you think that, maybe, that’s ever-so-slightly inappropriate? Probably not, because, judging from experience, if it’s any form of anti-white identity politics, you guys love it and might even give it a Medium Staff recommendation. But just in case there’s still anyone out there with any sense of communal responsibility, you might want to read The DiDi Delgado’s piece … and consider indefinitely suspending its author’s account.
To begin with, Medium’s rules on this subject are crystal clear:
The DiDi Delgado’s piece is in plain violation of these rules. I read the title of the piece, “In Defense of Punching Cops,” and thought, surely, there has to be a tongue-in-cheek element to this, right? Surely, radicalized nutjob The DiDi Delgado, possessed of some 3.1 thousand followers on Medium, isn’t going to be inciting people to actual violence against cops, right? So I started reading this story about how a friend of hers (whom she calls the “Pigslayer”) punched a white cop and got away with it, and how it might be a great idea for all of us to follow his example because of how cops are killing black people … and I kept reading … and I read all the way to the end, waiting for that inevitable place where she finally lets up and says, no, just kidding; just my joke in very poor taste. Well … I never got there. The closest she came is her last paragraph. She wrote these two sentences:
“Punching cops would be the perfect plan, if it weren’t for one glaring reality: You’ll probably end up getting murdered. Which sounds terrible, until you come to grips with the fact that cops are already murdering us.”
Let’s see here; let me paraphrase: punching cops would be a perfect plan … but the problem is that you might get killed … but really, that’s not as terrible as it sounds because cops are already murdering black people anyway. So then, her bottom-line conclusion, we have to infer, is that maybe punching cops isn’t an absolutely perfect plan, but you might as well do it.
Now, first of all, cops are not killing black people, or at least they’re not killing black people at a rate higher than the rate at which they’re killing anyone else. The myth of an epidemic of cops killing blacks is based on a bunch of repeatedly discredited lies. I won’t go through all the data again now, but in case you still haven’t heard the news that #BlackLivesMatter is largely a case of the race-baiting, sensation-peddling media gaslighting some of the more ignorant and vulnerable segments of the population into fits of rage and indignation, you can start delving into the damning data and details here.
But let’s assume you’re one of those who still believes cops are out there wantonly killing black people. So what’s the solution to that problem? Well, as we’ve seen, one admittedly not-quite-perfect but still pretty great solution, The DiDi Delgado says, is punching cops.
So which cops are you supposed to punch? Surely, the bad seeds, the cops who kill people and get away with it, right? Nope. Her article doesn’t say that. Just punch cops. Which cops? Any cops, I guess, but following the example of her friend, punching a white cop is particularly satisfying because then, like her friend, you can have the rare pleasure of going around bragging about how you “two-pieced his white ass and laid him out on the street.”
Does this make any sense? Does it make sense to go around punching people whose job consists of risking their lives to protect us from criminals (and, of course, risking their lives to protect black people, who are much more likely to be the victims of crime, from criminals, who are also much more likely to be black)? Is punching cops likely to lead to fewer adversarial interactions between cops and the black community? (That was meant as a rhetorical question.) Does it make any sense to blithely incite people to violence against police officers? Does it make any sense for Medium to tolerate its platform being used this way? Does anything about the culture we’re living in make any sense any more?
Somewhere, sometime, somehow, this madness has to stop. I have a feeling it’ll get worse before its gets better. But I always hold out hope. So, Medium just in case you want to take one small step that might bring on a little bit of much-needed communal reflection, you might want to consider — to paraphrase The DiDi Delgado’s friend’s words—“banning her black ass and laying her Medium account out in the street.”
