Trigger Warning: This Post Contains Insensitive Truth Telling. Proceed at your own risk.
Hey, remember all the way back to the first week of June 2020? It seems like it was 7 years ago, but it was only 7 weeks ago. Oh my, how much has transpired.
That week, as riots, arson, and looting spread in major cities after the death of George Floyd, crowds chanted “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”
I pointed out that that slogan, foundational to the Black Lives Matter movement, was not a real thing, Reminder: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case.
The Black Lives Matter movement was born of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. While the BLM founders started their organizing after the prior Trayvon Martin case, it was Brown and Ferguson which launched the BLM movement into the public spotlight through the protests and riots in Ferguson.Nothing was more associated with the BLM movement than the chant “hands up, don’t shoot,” based on the narrative that Brown had his hands raised and said ‘don’t shoot’ when shot. That same chant drives protesters and rioters ripping up cities after the George Floyd killing.I know the history of BLM and how it shot to national fame after the Brown shooting. I followed it closely and wrote about it at the time in 2014. I documented the violent instigators, many of them cross-over anti-Israel activists. See my October 25, 2014 post, Intifada Missouri – Anti-Israel activists may push Ferguson over the edge.More than anything, BLM seized on the claim that Brown had his hands raised in surrender, saying “don’t shoot,” at the time he was shot by officer Darren Wilson. “Hands up, don’t shoot” became the signature slogan of BLM.But it was all a lie. Brown wasn’t surrendering and didn’t say don’t shoot. And he wasn’t a victim of police misconduct. Rather than the “Gentle Giant” he was portrayed at in the media, he sucker punched Wilson while Wilson sat in his police car, tried to grab Wilson’s service pistol, and was shot when he charged Wilson a second time.
I linked to the Obama-Holder Justice Department report confirming the above.
For me to state and document the fact that Michael Brown was not shot with his hands up and didn’t say ‘don’t shoot’ was considered an act of heresy. It was considered “deeply upsetting” by some students. You know some of the rest of the story.
To quote Ben Shapiro, facts don’t care about your feelings. To quote another saying, wrongly attributed to George Orwell, “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth in a revolutionary act.” [I warned you about possible triggering, so don’t blame me it you can’t sleep tonight.]
In the past seven weeks, many others also have pointed out that “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” never happened. Yet, BLM and other protesters still are chanting that slogan.
Just a few days ago in Portland, a large crowd of Antifa “Moms” and others, who definitely were not socially distancing, chanted “hands up, please don’t shoot” with their phone lights on.
Andrew Sullivan correctly observed:
“Michael Brown never said these words. But in a cult, none of that matters. Narrative not truth, remember?”
Hah, just wait until they try to cancel Sullivan. Oh wait, they already did that, even before his latest comment:
What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged….
See, if I made up a false but catchy slogan, tied it to a ‘social justice’ movement, and got enough people to believe and chant it, I too could be popular on campus.
Welcome to the post-truth world.
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