By Howard Portnoy
The frankly ridiculous story in LU’s Web Crawler of a Black Lives Matter protest march that was aborted when protesters learned that the police shooting victim was not black provides an abrupt reminder that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s future will be determined in part by a fallacy.
That fallacy — that all or most police are racist against blacks, including police who are themselves black — has come to be accepted as gospel by the Left. Chauvin, who faces charges of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter — was never charged with a hate crime. The race of the victim was never alluded to once in the prosecution’s closing argument or the defense’s closing argument, nor was the race of the suspect. About the closest the media have come to openly calling Chauvin a racist is an interview the Los Angeles Times conducted last year with a woman pulled over by Chauvin in a 2007 traffic stop who said, “I’m not a black person, but on a very minuscule level, I get that you can’t trust police.”
Yet, there was been an intense undercurrent of race throughout the trial.
As Beria said, verdict first, trial later.
Rep Watters has explained. Hang him high, or Minneapolis burns. Minneapolis will burn anyway. Chauvin is guilty.
Have a fair trial, take him outside, and kill him. Be done with it.
Yielding to a mob is the same as paying dane-geld. As Kipling put it, paying “dane-geld” is when a society gives into threats of violence by some group. I find the final 3 stanzas most illuminating.
Dane-geld
By Rudyard Kipling
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbor and say:–
“We invaded you last night – we’re quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation
To puff, and look important and say:–
“Though we know we should defeat you, we’ve not the time.to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld,
You never get rid of the Dane!
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You’ll find it better policy to say:–
“We never pay ANY-one Dane-geld
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!
$27 million sounds like a whole lot of “Dane-geld” to me.