MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Ahmaud Arbery’

The Real Lesson of the Rittenhouse Trial – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on November 27, 2021

This fate befell him because of unsubstantiated media charges, seconded by President Biden, that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist murderer. If he was found guilty even in the face of video evidence that proved his innocence, why would we think that a superior court would reverse that initial decision? Perhaps the judges involved would be afraid of risking media incitement directed against their own persons.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/the_real_lesson_of_the_rittenhouse_trial.html

By Paul Gottfried

In a critical assessment of the Rittenhouse trial, Conrad Black denies that the outcome of the case vindicated the American justice system

Because of the confluence of a competent and determined judge, courageous and diligent jurors, ludicrously incompetent and dishonest prosecutors, and enough intelligent media attention to counter the 15 months of biased reporting that could easily poison the jury pool, justice was clearly done, to peals of horror of the Americophobic riffraff that infects most of America’s media. It would be a tragedy if this exemplary outcome were to whitewash what is in large measure an evil justice system. 

Black is mainly concerned here with the plea-bargaining system that state prosecutors use to condemn defendants even before a trial has taken place. But this is not the part of Black’s criticism that riveted my attention. The American justice system has become “evil” for a reason that Black only mentions in passing, namely the role of the media in inciting mob violence by racializing criminal cases.

 We saw this play out in the Rittenhouse case; we are now witnessing something similar taking place during the trial of three white men in Brunswick, Georgia, who shot a young black, Ahmaud Arbery. During the thirteen days that the trial was in session, blacks, many of them carrying guns, demonstrated in front of the courthouse. The mainstream media, which raged against Kyle Rittenhouse for carrying a rifle in violence-wracked Kenosha, took no offense that the antiwhite Left paraded around with firearms. Those bearing these arms enjoyed the status of victims, which was applied to the rioters and looters in Kenosha as well as to gun-toting BLM members in Georgia. Apparently bearing arms, even illegal ones, is not a bad thing, if the bearer is a nonwhite racialist or a crazed white leftist, even one with a long criminal record.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Louisville Police: Incident Report on Breonna Taylor’s Killing ‘Unacceptable,’ Full of ‘Inaccuracies’

Posted by M. C. on June 12, 2020

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is taking action to end the kind of “no-knock” warrants that led to Taylor’s death. “After talking with Breonna Taylor’s family, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s long past time to get rid of no-knock warrants,” Paul said Thursday as he introduced his new bill, the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act. “This bill will effectively end no-knock raids in the United States,” he continued.

Militarized police, no-knock raids, qualified immunity, SWAT teams serving pre-dawn warrants…the madness has to stop.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/11/louisville-police-incident-report-on-breonna-taylors-killing-unacceptable-full-of-inaccuracies/

by Nate Church

Under extreme national pressure, Louisville Police finally released a bare-bones incident report on the raid which killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor.

Taylor, a Kentucky EMT, was fatally shot in her bed by officers of the Louisville Metro Police during the execution of a “no-knock” warrant — the primary target of which was already in custody. According to a lawsuit filed in response, “officers [entered] Breonna’s home without knocking and without announcing themselves as police officers.”

Detective Brett Hankison, Detective Myles Cosgrove, and Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly are accused of firing a full 20 rounds of ammunition into the home in the early-morning hours of March 13. Hankison also faces allegations of  sexually assaulting drunk women after offering them rides home from local bars.

“Shots were blindly fired by the officers all throughout Breonna’s home and also into the adjacent home, where a five-year-old child and a pregnant mother had been sleeping,” the lawsuit continued. Kentucky representative and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell condemned the killing, saying the officers looked “pretty darn guilty.” Further:

These events, which, the facts surrounding them are pretty obvious, are absolutely horrendous, and you can understand the outrage in reaction to witnessing events like this. They need to be thoroughly investigated. And if prosecution is appropriate, and it sure sounds — looking at both these cases, like that would be the case. Justice needs to be done.

Now, amid the national racial justice and police brutality demonstrations that have ignited the country, Louisville has finally released the incident report regarding her death — which barely contains any information and almost entirely redacts what it does contain.

In fact, even widely reported information, such as Taylor’s address and date of birth, has been blacked out. Worse, her injuries, after being shot eight times in her bed, are listed as “none.” And despite the fact that officers reportedly bashed her door down with a battering ram, “no” has been checked under “forced entry.”

“I read this report and have to ask the mayor, the police chief, and the city’s lawyers: Are you kidding? This is what you consider being transparent to taxpayers and the public?” asked Courier Journal editor Richard A. Green. “At a time when so many are rightfully demanding to know more details about that tragic March evening, I fail to understand this lack of transparency. The public deserves more.”

The police department also appeared to find the document unsatisfactory. “Inaccuracies in the report are unacceptable to us,” it said in a statement, “and we are taking immediate steps to correct the report and to ensure the accuracy of incident reports going forward.” But Mayor Greg Fischer is pushing back harder, calling the report “unacceptable.”

“Full stop. It’s issues like this that erode public confidence in LMPD’s ability to do its job, and that’s why I’ve ordered an external top-to-bottom review of the department,” he said. “I am sorry for the additional pain to the Taylor family and our community.”

Taylor’s case has taken on extra resonance as the nation also reels from the alleged murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and other black Americans — and protests for their sakes have turned violent in multiple cities.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is taking action to end the kind of “no-knock” warrants that led to Taylor’s death. “After talking with Breonna Taylor’s family, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s long past time to get rid of no-knock warrants,” Paul said Thursday as he introduced his new bill, the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act. “This bill will effectively end no-knock raids in the United States,” he continued.

 

Be seeing you

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Racial Revenge? – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

https://www.takimag.com/article/racial-revenge/

Last Friday, the day after two whites in Georgia were arrested in the vastly publicized killing of the black jogger/prowler Ahmaud Arbery, a young black gunman murdered two octogenarian whites, Paul and Lidia Marino, while they were visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery in Delaware. After a six-hour firefight with the police, the shooter, a 29-year-old black man, was dead—whether at police hands or his own remains unknown.

In contrast to Arbery’s killing, this second interracial killing case has gotten virtually zero national media attention through Tuesday morning, even though it’s fairly spectacular in scale and quite curious in motive. For example, an eyewitness speculated that the killer appeared to have brought extra ammunition for his planned shoot-out to the death with the police.

The cops don’t have an explanation for the killer’s actions yet. It wasn’t a robbery. It doesn’t sound like a contract killing. (I can’t rule that out, but I did check if the victims, a retired lithographer and a housewife, were close relatives of any mafioso of the same surname, but found zero connections.) It could be some kind of personal beef, but nobody has found a connection between the killer and the killed at this point.

No confession note, social media, or interviews with the shooter’s family have yet emerged to explain his motivations. Although, to be frank, the press doesn’t seem to be all that motivated to get to the bottom of this seemingly random slaughter. There isn’t even much talk about what kind of weapon the killer used, in contrast to the gun porn after similar mass shootings.

Imagine that the circumstances were reversed and if on Friday a young white man had hunted down an elderly black couple visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery.

“What happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer?”

The national media would be in full cry over this racist atrocity. President Trump would attend the funeral. The prestige press would demand that whatever web sources of information and opinion the gunman had followed should be, First Amendment or not, permanently exterminated.

But what happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer? For example, a search of the New York Times archives finds 104 articles mentioning the name of Ahmaud Arbery so far just in the month of May. That’s even more saturation coverage than the Times normally devotes to late-breaking developments in the Emmett Till case.

The possibility that the cemetery killer was inspired to shoot some random whites by the enormous media hoopla over the still-ambiguous death of Arbery is not something that the prestige press is rushing to look into. We are never supposed to consider whether The Establishment getting all hyped up over the shooting of blacks by whites (or by nonwhites in the case of Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile) might inspire other blacks to shoot whites.

In contrast, the shooting by a homely white in Georgia of handsome young black criminal Ahmaud Arbery immediately after Arbery chased him down and punched him in the head while grappling for his gun has been promoted into an enormous story by the prestige press, because, after all, when has Black Twitter ever led the media astray? If you can’t trust Black Twitter for a disinterested, objective evaluation of a complex, fast-happening event, who can you trust?

I mean besides in the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray cases… Sure, the media falling mindlessly for the various Black Lives Matter fiascos was central to the national homicide rate leaping a record 24.8% from 2014 to 2016 and perhaps getting Trump elected president. But it’s racist to know those facts.

It turns out that there is much security video of Arbery, who was arrested for bringing a gun to a high school basketball game and for stealing a TV from Walmart, engaged in what looks like casing the joint for a burglary.

But the subsequent Delaware shooting is of no interest to the press. The concept that some blacks might take seriously press incitements about how they should hate whites simply doesn’t exist. The text string “Black Lives Matter terrorism” has almost never appeared in the news media, even though there have been multiple high-profile assassinations carried out by BLM supporters.

For example, after the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014, a Black Lives Matter advocate murdered two NYPD officers in retribution for the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown of Ferguson, as the killer explained on Instagram.

The most lurid Black Lives Matter terrorist attack occurred on July 8, 2016, soon after President Obama’s speech from Poland denouncing police bias against blacks following the shootings of Castile and Alton Sterling. Obama cited numerous tendentious statistics to encourage blacks to feel that their problems are the fault of white people, the way Obama always blamed his speeding tickets on racist cops. The ex-president, who is not really a math person, summed up:

So that if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.

Now, these are facts.

Sure, but what fraction of crimes do they commit? The Obama Administration’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2011 that from 1980 to 2008, blacks alone made up 52 percent of homicide offenders, despite being only about 13 percent of the population.

Not surprisingly, a Black Lives Matter enthusiast soon shot fourteen cops in Dallas, murdering five. A week later, three more cops were slain in Baton Rouge.

This may have been a key turning point in the history of the last decade because it helped propel Donald Trump into the White House by demonstrating that the Democrats were encouraging cop killers.

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

If your Party controls the media, you can have all these unfortunate events memory-holed, so that you never get confronted with tiresome questions about just how much blood you have on your hands in the murders of elders visiting their son’s grave.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »