The rioting and looting were bad enough, but the social justice crowd has showed up to the George Floyd protests to make them worse.
It will be no surprise if the whole thing goes the same way as the #MeToo campaign, which was initially intended to make it easier for women to come forward but has devolved into a movement with rules that conveniently change depending on who stands to benefit politically.
Likewise, the social justice mob is threatening to undo any goodwill built up for the Floyd protesters who want changes made to how police interact with the black community.
To that end, an editor at the New York Times resigned from his job after several journalists at the paper complained that his judgment to publish an opinion piece by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas amounted to physical harm.
The piece by Cotton argued in favor of deploying the military to cities that were going up in flames from violent rioting related to the Floyd protests.
In response, journalists at the paper wrote on social media, “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
In reality, the National Guard was pushed into Washington, D.C., where several nights of looting and vandalism of high-end retail stores and locally owned restaurants had raged right up until that point. Once the guard’s presence was clear on street corners, its armored vehicles in the streets and its helicopters whirring overhead, all of that stopped. The guardsmen weren’t there to bring violence. They were there to stop it. We ended up not needing actual gun-strapped troops, but to oppose the idea by calling the mere proposal a form of violence is absurd.
Normal adults might oppose using the military in a U.S. city for a number of reasons, including that they think it’s un-American. But to demand that such a view not be heard at all, particularly by suggesting that the opinion itself is life-threatening, runs counter to the tradition of open debate.
New York Times media columnist Ben Smith covered the controversy at his own paper, citing an unnamed union activist saying the Cotton piece “wasn’t just an opinion, it felt violent — it was a call to action that could hurt people.”
In response, the New York Times walked back its decision to publish Cotton’s op-ed and then affixed a lengthy editorial note to the top of it online, bemoaning it as “needlessly harsh” and unsuitable for “useful debate.” (By “useful debate,” the New York Times apparently means opinion pieces like the one it published by Linda Hirshman last month, wherein she said she believed Joe Biden to have sexually assaulted a woman but that voting for him is still “worth it.”)
This wasn’t about personal safety. This was about shutting up someone these people don’t agree with by deeming arguments oppressive and “violent.”
The same deal is playing out with the delusional “defund the police” slogan that some in the Floyd saga are now pushing.
After Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, a black Democrat, had the phrase “Black Lives Matter” painted down an entire street and renamed the area in front of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” social justice babies did what they do best — they took offense.
The D.C. chapter of Black Lives Matter called the street painting “a performative distraction from real policy changes” and an effort to “appease white liberals while ignoring our demands.” The group then painted its own phrase nearby: “Defund the Police.”
The trend for the George Floyd aftermath is moving from fair and racially equitable policing toward destroying institutions and systems wholesale.
That’s the same thing that happened to the #MeToo movement when it moved from holding powerful figures accountable for their misdeeds to robbing men of their right to due process and the presumption of their innocence until proven otherwise.
If the real protesters aren’t careful, their own movement is going to turn into a joke at a time when the public is more open than ever to making changes to the way police forces operate.
