Article by Mike Z in RedState
Who Has the Right to Self-Defense?
Here’s a fun game to play. Read through the Bill of Rights and ask yourself which of these today’s left would give you. Speech? Hilarious. Press? Peacable assembly? Religion? Still kidding right? Unreasonable search and seizure? Ask Carter Page. How about a right so basic it didn’t even make the ten? Self-defense.
The media has taken the furor over the killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, intensified by an economic depression and enforced social isolation, and twisted an injustice into a justification for the rise of a new cabal of badgeless, media-approved, uber-Chauvins, effectively deputized by Democratic mayors, and often calling themselves “security.”
The way our rulers see it, the new security apparatus — call it BLM or Antifa, there will be other names — is against injustice, therefore it cannot be unjust. That wouldn’t make sense right? They say they are protesting injustice. They can’t possibly commit an injustice. Bad people do that. If good people assault or kill somebody for wearing the wrong hat or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that person must accept the justice inherent in their violent subjection. In those circumstances, to assert our inalienable personhood would be to subvert social justice.
The new rules are being established systematically and in a hurry, with new precedent-setting test cases playing out in the streets almost daily. Some might think: “The McCloskeys will get off.” Maybe they will. The McCloskeys are lawyers and they have money, but the cases will keep on coming, and the corporate and state media will be there every time, with the richest people in the world behind them, demanding that powerless peons who have asserted their right to live pay a dearer price then death. In the case of public media, they even get to charge you for your un-personing.
A beloved pinnacle of the un-personing project is the new security apparatus prerogative to harass, assault or murder random motorists. I mean, it’s one thing to kill a guy in a MAGA hat but to single out a family with kids in the car and start breaking windows, screeching, pointing guns, like what are you going to do about it? That’s power!
In June, NPR published “Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters.” If you were only to read this article on the subject, you’d have no idea that threatening random passersby, banging on their vehicles, even pointing weapons at them, has become a tactic at NPR-approved “peaceful protests.” There are dozens of videos of such scenes available online. No matter. In NPR-world, the only interaction that has ever occurred between people in cars and “peaceful protesters” is car-wielding extremists deliberately motoring into daisy-holding hippies.
The photo that NPR originally paired with the article showed a peaceful protester being struck by a car, no doubt driven by a crazed white supremacist. Except, video from the scene clearly demonstrated that the driver was a black woman, and that she was escaping a mob who reached into her window to attack her, and pointed a gun at her.
The arrest report for one of her attackers stated that the peacefully assembled, “began to reach into her car… and assaulting her, pulling her hair (pulling out a dreadlock) causing pain to victim.”
NPR chose this photo — of an innocent black woman trying to escape with her life — to demonstrate their point that only white supremacists attempt to escape mobs that attack them in their vehicles, several days after video of what actually happened went public.
NPR did post a non-apology, in which they admitted that they chose the wrong photo, but stood by their thesis that vehicular escape from the right kind of angry mob is always white supremacist, except maybe that once. They chose not to examine any of the other video evidence of mob assaults on hapless drivers, or address what non-white-supremacist people who find themselves in those situations should do.
A couple weeks after the “Vehicle Attacks” piece, 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, her mother and a friend found themselves in just that situation. The driver attempted to maneuver around a barricade manned by men with guns. And, here, at the site of a former Wendy’s, is where the media-approved tactic in which armed peaceful protesters set up makeshift, illegal roadblocks culminated in the inevitable. The vehicle was peacefully shot at least eight times. Secoriea Turner was killed.
The media did briefly acknowledge that maybe Secoriea Turner should have been allowed to live. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms denounced the killing, then appeared on CNN to blame President Trump. The media moved on.
The murder of Secoriea Turner should have been a moment, like the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where the nation stood up and said: WTF? How did this happen? How did “protests” supposedly against racially motivated police violence end up killing an innocent little African-American girl?
The media could have gone on openly cheerleading BLM and Antifa, while at the same time taking a moment to reflect on whether armed roadblocks and harassing random motorists are ethical tactics. Many people who have causes that they care about — that effect them personally, even effect their safety — do not use their cause as a moral rationale for imprisoning random motorists or sticking AK-47s in their faces.
Those people don’t work in mainstream media. Since the CHAZ/CHOP occupation in Seattle, the media have learned to love illegal roadblocks, again as long as the cause is correct.
During the CHAZ summer of love, NPR published a glowing fluff piece denying claims of businesses being extorted as so much white noise from “conservative news oulets.” About a month after Seattle police cleared the encampments (in response to four shootings), the far-right New York Times reported that extortion had taken place.
“Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.”
“’They barricaded us all in here,’ Mr. Khan said. ‘And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.’”
Even without guns, even in the total absence of white supremacists, blocking rights of way can lead to tragic results. In Seattle, a woman was killed and a young black man’s life will be destroyed because he apparently accessed a freeway without knowing that protesters had wielded their white privilege to declare their sole ownership of public property. In their report on the incident, NPR — perhaps in an attempt to influence potential jurors — again repeated the claim that many collisions between drivers and protesters were “suspected attacks by right-wing extremists.”
After the murders within the CHAZ barricades, after Secoriea Turner was killed in a car evading an illegal road block, after the tragic death of Summer Taylor, and destruction of Dawit Kelete’s future on the I-5, maybe it would have been worth asking how much collateral damage is too much to accept as the result of an illegal “protest” tactic.
The corporate/state media can’t do it. To even ask is to question the prerogatives of the new security apparatus. To even ask is to imply that ordinary people have the right to travel unimpeded by the demands of righteous political actors.
One suspect has been charged in the murder of Secoriea Turner, though police are still investigating. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Julian Conley’s attorney, Jackie Patterson, claims that, “Conley told him a man driving [Charmaine Turner’s] SUV went through the barricade and hit a man who was armed with a rifle.”
“And when that person fell to the ground, the person got up and started firing at that vehicle.” Maybe the shooters had heard the NPR report and were terrified that their otherwise peaceful, illegal armed roadblock was under attack by right-wing extremists. And perhaps it was, according to corporate media logic. Because sometimes surviving an encounter with the new security apparatus is an intrinsically white supremacist act.
The only evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse — the 17-year-old charged with murder for defending himself from several attackers in Kenosha — is a white supremacist, is not that he made a Blue Lives Matter post on Facebook, or that he showed up at the site of the riots with a gun. The people who were shooting at Rittenhouse also had guns, and even Facebook accounts. Apparently, what makes Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist is that he liked cops and he was armed for the wrong reason: self-defense. If he did not like cops, and he brought a gun so that he could shoot at whoever he whimsically thought deserved to to die, he would not be labeled a white supremacist.
If Rittenhouse had been a white convicted child molester who decides on the spot which minors in his general vicinity should never reach voting age — like his first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum — he would, again, not be labeled a white supremacist. Rittenhouse is a white supremacist because the child molester that selected him for termination was part of the new security apparatus. He had every right to kill Rittenhouse, cause social justice! So when JoJo determined to burn down the Rittenhouse, ‘House had a duty to meekly submit. He did not. What more evidence of latent white supremacy do you need? Ayanna Pressley, Joe Biden and pretty much the entire establishment media don’t need any at all.
NPR took care to label the volunteer group defending Kenosha homes and businesses from looters as a “militia,” a loaded word which screams “white supremacist!” to their audience. Though two of his attackers were armed, they were not referred to as militia members. The term “militia” does not necessarily apply to armed groups, silly(!), only to people who deserve to die! Especially those who repugnantly refuse their attackers’ righteous attempt to give them their due.
You don’t have to join a “militia” or even leave the vicinity of your own personal home or business for your continued existence to suddenly become a white supremacist act. Marine veteran and Omaha bar owner Jake Gardner stepped into the street to defend his business after the windows were peacefully smashed. He and his father were peacefully attacked. He fired off two warning shots, and was peacefully attacked again before asserting his white supremacist wish to keep breathing by shooting his second attacker.
Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine recognized that Gardner acted in self-defense, but impaneled a grand jury under pressure from local activists. Special prosecutor Frederick D. Franklin has since revealed the shocking truth that Gardner reputedly told people, before his survival crime, that he would defend his business and person, despite the fact that he had no right to defend either, should the mob require them! The grand jury indicted Gardner on manslaughter and other charges, but he committed suicide rather than turn himself in — a shocking double denial of new security apparatus demands. First, he refused to take his lumps when the new police were rioting against the old police. So the new police turned to the old police that should not exist to arrest him for his crime of not surrendering his existence. Then he foiled them again, arranging nonexistence on his own terms rather than accepting his rightful punishment for his initial intransigence!
NPR remembered Gardner as a “white Omaha, Neb., bar owner who was recently indicted for his role in the fatal shooting of a young Black man.” The same story did not mention that his business was under siege or that his father was attacked. “At one point,” the story says, “the white [in case you forgot] bar owner fired what the county attorney later described as two ‘warning shots.'” No mention that the “one point” was the first of the two points at which he was physically attacked, on video, by members of a group that outnumbered him, outside his business, which was under attack.
Who, we have no right to ask, outside the new security apparatus has the right to self-defense? The media did feel compelled to condemn (then quickly forget about) the murder of an innocent black child whose guardians tried to evade the NSA’s, but no compulsion to question their own continued cheerleading for armed illegal roadblocks and attacks on random motorists. The killers will probably skate.
A seventeen-year-old might spend his life in jail because he tried to survive a child molester and assorted other NSA’s who tried to kill him. A combat veteran dared to defend his business and his life, and was consequently hounded into taking his own life.
People have a self-preservation instinct. Americans have crazy ideas about inalienable rights. The new security apparatus has a raging desire to override our stupid instincts and our stupid rights, and all of the power of the corporate/state media, Big Tech, and the majority of state and federal government behind them. Who in America has the right to self-defense? We’re finding out aren’t we? Just watch the news.
https://www.redstate.com/diary/mike-z/2020/10/02/who-has-the-right-to-self-defense/
