After George Floyd’s death in police custody, the nation rallied in bipartisan support of systemic changes to our criminal justice and policing systems.
Within two weeks, support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased by as much as it had in the previous 21 months. Nearly 7 in 10 Americans believed that the killing of George Floyd was a sign of broader problems in the treatment of black Americans by police, including almost half of all Republicans.
At long last, we had the political momentum to enact concrete, systemic change.
A month later, bands are renaming themselves in the name of wokeness. Rioters are running (and ruining) cities while they topple statues of abolitionists. The cultural elite are savaging those with the gall to extol the values of free expression. Oh, and that sweeping police reform authored by Sen. Tim Scott? It has languished and died in the Senate.
To put it bluntly, we have lost the plot. The people with actual political and social power have wasted the bipartisan momentum of the moment on stupid irrelevancies. Protests have devolved into violent lawlessness that’s disproportionately destroying minority businesses and resulting in more black lives being violently ended.
Last weekend alone, 65 people were shot in New York and another 87 in Chicago. Every single person shot in New York City in July was nonwhite, and 97% of the city’s shooting victims in June were minorities. In Chicago, 78% of the year’s homicide victims have been black. As woke, white New York Times writers and CNN pundits hid out in the Hamptons, black children were murdered in cities across the country, both by outright criminals empowered by a police force in remission and by protesters turned violent.
Every meaningful effort at police reform has been turned aside in favor of frivolous, ostentatious, and irrelevant self-flagellation. Turns out, it’s much easier to burn books and shame your peers than it is to effect real change.
Because of Floyd’s killing, country band Lady Antebellum has changed its name to Lady A. Now the band is suing a black musician who’s already using that name. Sounds like a win for civil rights, doesn’t it?
Because of the killing of Floyd, the New York Times decided to overhaul its entire opinion page to print a narrower scope of opinions. The Washington Post decided to get a complete nobody fired from her job because she wore blackface with the intention of mocking people who wear blackface — at a Halloween party two years ago!
And the few official actions of politicians, those cheered on by the mental lightweights in our media, have been devastating primarily to minority communities. The Minneapolis City Council voted to abolish its police department, and shockingly, violent crime has exploded. Meanwhile, Democrats have gotten off scot-free, so to speak, for killing Scott’s police reform bill — a rare piece of sweeping legislation that would have been as practically significant as it is politically possible to pass.
The wokes flail their arms and whine that J.K. Rowling literally puts lives in danger because she believes in biological sex and that Noam Chomsky (of all people) is complicit in making people feel unsafe because he co-signed a letter supporting free speech. Yet the same people do not care at all that Congress and localities are doing nothing. Young black men and even children are being slaughtered in the streets at an accelerating pace, in some cases thanks to reduced police protection.
The elite meltdown over free expression, the conspicuous and woke self-abasement, the rioting that is destroying minority-owned businesses — none of this is about avenging Floyd’s death or preventing others like it from happening in the future. The real question is, was any of this ever about that?
