The trouble is, the people who read this already get it, while the people who won't, don't
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Instead of admitting error in jumping to conclusions — that this incident was somehow linked to Derek Chauvin being found guilty of the murder of George Floyd — Twitter activists, cable news hosts and even the White House doubled down on the tale of a racist police officer sticking his gun where it didn’t belong. Bree Newsome, the activist famous for scaling a flag pole and tearing down a Confederate flag tweeted, ‘Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. Y’all need help. I mean that sincerely.’
Valerie Jarrett, a former Obama adviser, echoed this sentiment by tweeting, ‘A Black teenage girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice.’ While appearing on CNN, former head of the NAACP Cornell Brooks declared it a schoolyard fight:
‘What if it were your daughter, what if it were your child, a member of your family, your neighbor in a — essentially in a teenage fight, a schoolyard fight?’
Attorney Ben Crump tweeted, ‘As we breathed a collective sigh of relief today, a community in Columbus felt the sting of another police shooting as @ColumbusPolice killed an unarmed 15yo Black girl named Makiyah Bryant. Another Child lost! Another hashtag.’
The New York Times later printed Mr Crump’s tweet, editing out his claim that the girl was unarmed. The Times has not explained why they edited a published tweet without editorial comment.
The incident made it all the way to the White House, where press secretary Jen Psaki insinuated that this was another police shooting driven by race, stating, ‘black women and girls, like black men and boys, experience higher rates of police violence.’ The footage and 911 call, wherein a woman begs for help because she is being attacked by someone with a knife, released by Columbus officials and the mayor have been deemed inconvenient to the left. The activists speaking out are sending a message that police had no business breaking up or stopping an armed altercation between two black teenagers. Most likely, had the police not been there to stop a girl from being stabbed to death, this incident would have been ignored by the media and the Biden White House. This would have been another faceless tragedy in a Democrat-controlled city among poor urban communities — and would have gone the way of gun violence in Chicago, which is never to be used as an example when it comes to gun or street violence. We are meant to look the other way because even bringing it up is allegedly structural racism at work.
Oh, and speaking of the Windy City, this is not a Babylon Bee headline: Chicago Mayor: Police should get permission before chasing anyone.
