Actually, some clarity is starting to emerge regarding the larger meaning of Floyd's murder and the reaction

I've recently written three pieces over at Precipice entitled "Minneapolis," "Color" and "Truth Lies In Particulars," the common theme of which was that precise terminology, accurate recounting of events, and an ability to acknowledge a range of simultaneously existing facts that don't fit a narrative are essential to anything positive coming out of the tumult of the last nine days.

That was the only conclusion I was willing to draw. For starters, the horror of the video that started it all - George Floyd dying over the course of eight minutes while his neck was under the full weight of Derek Chauvin's knee - was so fraught with ramifications that my inner compass told me to hold off on a take that encompassed anything beyond that.

But we're now over a week into this matter occupying nearly all the nation's attention. I can see the contours of a broad set of implications taking shape.

First, some facts:

All four of the officers on the scene have been charged in Floyd's death, Chauvin with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and the others with aiding and abetting those crimes. 

George Floyd was on fentanyl and methamphetamine at the time of the incident. Yes, he had moved from Houston to Minneapolis to start a new life after years of run-ins with the law and several periods of incarceration and there are several accounts from those who knew him that he was a peaceable fellow, but the fact is that he was on hard dope.

One of those periods of incarceration stemmed from his conviction on an armed-robbery charge back in Houston in 2009. He'd been part of a group of seven men who'd staged a home invasion which involved Floyd pressing a gun into the abdomen of a pregnant woman.  His other convictions had to do with hard drug possession.

He was struggling with a pattern of egregious sin and not doing so well at overcoming it.

Black Lives Matter was started by three women who had established their public profiles by being focused on intersectional identity politics - "gender conformity" and "queer activism" and such. The first two situations it exploited - the Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman case and the Michael Brown - Darren Wilson case - were blatant twisting of what was determined to have happened into lies.

There is no epidemic of racist police shootings. 

There is no doubt that black men get pulled over and questioned out of the blue with some frequency. Conservative Republican Senator Tim Scott, who personally experienced this seven times in one year and was asked for his ID badge by Capitol Hill police, said that this is a nationwide phenomenon in a 2016 speech on the Senate floor. Anecdotes by other blacks about how being inconvenienced, humiliated, and even wrongfully charged with crimes have surfaced that substantiate this assessment.

Okay, now for some viewpoint.

For starters, the nightly ritual of demonstration has made its point and ought to close up shop. The rioters and looters have been exposed as opportunistic thieves and snot-nosed anarchists, and the well-meaning impassioned peaceful marchers have catalyzed a nationwide soul-searching. Mission accomplished. At this point, the daily marches, the bullhorns and the signs are an exercise in self-congratulation and preening. It's purely a gratification of the need to appear to be a caring citizen.

What the hell is Al Sharpton - he of the Tawana Brawley hoax and the incitement of the fire-bombing of Jew-owned Freddy's Fashion Mart - doing at the memorial service for Floyd?

And now we have the playground-bully bending back of the knuckles of American citizens who deign to express viewpoints perfectly within the range of acceptable perspectives on the present moment. They dutifully dropped to their knees and demonstrated where the line between fealty to their convictions and fear of the identity-politics mob lies.

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, in an interview with Yahoo Finance, said that he does not care for the take-a-knee-during-the-national-anthem gesture that became normalized during the era in which Colin Kaepernick - he of the Malcolm  X cap and the Fidel Castro tee shirt - had his moment of cultural significance.

It took hours for him to drop to the ground begging for the knuckle-bending to stop:

Drew Brees

@drewbrees

I would like to apologize to my friends, teammates, the City of New Orleans, the black community, NFL community and anyone I hurt with my comments yesterday. In speaking with some of you, it breaks my heart to know… https://instagram.com/p/CBA1P3gHpT_/?igshid=1qstwzxn87p2n…

8:22 AM · Jun 4, 2020·Instagram

Grant Napear was likewise served notice that his viewpoint fell outside the parameters dictated by the identity politics police:

Sacramento Kings play-by-play announcer Grant Napear was placed on administrative leave by his radio station Monday after tweeting “All Lives Matter,” a controversial phrase associated with belittling the Black Lives Matter movement.

“All Lives Matter… Every Single One!” the 60-year-old Napear tweeted Sunday after former Kings star Demarcus Cousins asked the KHTK radio host for his view on the Black Lives Matter movement.

And then there is the case of New York Times employees assuming the now-quite-familiar woke-snowflake stance in the wake of the paper printing Senator Tom Cotton's opinion column calling for the invoking of the Insurrection Act. Now, mind you, I, as a conservative, have found Cotton a major disappointment since he's established himself as a figure to reckon with, and I disagree with his position on this, but, come on. 

So, to sum up, the George Floyd murder and all that has transpired in its wake has not moved the needle. Those who are so easily cowed that they walk on eggshells in any situation in which race might be a significant factor are going to rush to burnish their bona fides as caring Americans. Institutional bullying will separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of who has the spine to stick with what they say the first time. We'll keep having diversity circles, implicit-bias workshops and "difficult conversations." Human-rights commissions will be newly empowered in their quest to get such Howard Zinn-inspired indoctrination as the 1619 Project inserted into public-school curricula.

And human fallibility will continue to show itself in ways ranging from police brutality to utterly pointless riots.

Democrat party: too far gone for moral rescue

Abe Greenwald at Commentary provides the requisite bluntness:

Disease is reversible—rot isn’t. Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib brought the disease of anti-Semitism into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party when they were elected in November. The party could have fought the disease. It chose instead to nurture it. And that’s when the irreversible rot set in.

The rot explains why Democrats, from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on down, are vigorously defending Tlaib’s recent lies about Arabs welcoming Jews after the Holocaust. It doesn’t matter what Tlaib or Omar say, how blunt their Jew-hatred is, or how often it’s aired. A defense pact is already in place that covers all calumnies against the Jews. Both the Democratic leadership and the liberal media establishment will back these bigots against any and all charges of anti-Semitism in return for smooth relations with the social-justice left. It’s a monstrous deal made by people too weak to defend their party and speak the truth.

Everyone who sees this is now faced with the imperative to choose candor when encountering situations in which the Democrat party is being defended.

About two months ago, I got an email from the campaign of a young woman running for city council where I live, asking for support. I know her personally. She is a great person and an asset to our community. Her family and mine have been good friends for three generations. I was particularly close to her uncle when we were growing up. Her grandfather held some local governmental offices - as a Republican. Alas, when I saw at the bottom of her email that she was running as a Democrat, that was the deal-breaker. (Actually, the young man who will be her opponent in the fall is someone of whom I am a huge fan, so there wasn't much doubt what I was going to do even before that.)

I responded, "I implore you to reconsider your association with this evil organization. Pray about this, please."

I see her at meetings I cover and I suppose it could be me, but I think she acts a little differently towards me now. This is unfortunate, but I have no regrets at inviting her to part ways with the rot.

Yes, the anti-"hate" bill is an act of cowardice, but Dems seized on it to take the opportunity to villainize America once again

Sure, H.R. 1 is the result of fear on House leadership's part that if it didn't ignore the specific anti-Semitism that Omar is rapidly legitimizing, her fury would take yet another quantum leap.

But while watering it down, the leadership said, "Well, okay, let's use the opportunity to further entrench the notion that America is basically a moral flawed nation in the public's mind.

The litany of victims trotted out for specific mention reads like a rant at Unitarian coffee hour:

The final version of the resolution “encourages all public officials to confront the reality of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, racism, and other forms of bigotry, as well as historical struggles against them, to ensure that the United States will live up to the transcendent principles of tolerance, religious freedom, and equal protection as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the first and 14th amendments to the Constitution.”

It also includes language condemning Japanese internment camps in World War II, the century-old Dreyfus affair in France, former President Kennedy being questioned over Catholicism and the white supremacist events in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

Democrats made a last-minute change Thursday to add Latinos, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, and the LGBT community to the list of "traditionally persecuted peoples" targeted by white supremacists. The previous version unveiled earlier in the day only included "African-Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, immigrants, and others."

BTW, shouldn't that be "Latinx"?

Will this be a bridge too far for Jewish Democrats?

"Why are we unable to singularly condemn anti-Semitism?" Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) said on the floor earlier in the day. "Why can't we call it anti-Semitism and show we've learned the lessons of history?”

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on the floor shortly before the vote Thursday evening that Omar's comments "touched a very real, very raw place for me."

"And my desire for the House to go on record again specifically condemning anti-Semitism wasn't a desire to single the gentlewoman out or to stifle debate on U.S. policy toward Israel," Engel said. "But it was a desire and need to say that certain words, no matter who utters them, have no place in our public discourse and indeed can be very dangerous." 

Why not indeed, Rep. Deutch.

Behold what's become of the party you've affiliated yourself with.

You and it may not be a fit anymore.

A Christian university's lame "explanation" for disinviting Ben Shapiro

This pathetic statement about its move by Phoenix-based Grand Canyon University starts out trying to establish some kind of set of common values, but before the paragraph dealing with it is over, it has already started to delve into meaningless mush:

We believe in many of the things that Ben Shapiro speaks about and stands for, including his support for ideals that grow out of traditional Judeo-Christian values and his belief in a free market economy. Our decision to cancel Shapiro’s speaking engagement is not a reflection of his ideologies or the values he represents, but rather a desire to focus on opportunities that bring people together.

From there, it deteriorates into discussions about its financial model, the diversity (of course) of its student body, how its partnership with Habitat for Humanity has increased home values in parts of Phoenix, and other irrelevancies.

This is pure chicken you-know-what. If the school "believes in many of the things Ben Shapiro speaks about and stands for," what's keeping it from having him appear? Are you that intimidated by the unsubstantiated prospect of hotheads among your student body causing a ruckus? And by the way, what's with this "many"? Where are your points of departure with what Shapiro stands for?

In a time when Immanuel Christian School, Covington Catholic High School and Trinity Western University are getting vilified for adhering to sound doctrine, we can ill-afford the kind of cowardice we see here.

The divine record book will show who did and did not take a stand when the moment came for one to do so.