Last week, on Friday and Saturday, Democratic Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Tim Ryan, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio all tweeted out deliberately false statements about the shooting of Michael Brown in Fergusen, Missouri 5 years ago, all apparently doing so to pander to African Americans, especially those who don’t read newspapers.
Ethics Alarms focused on Warren, being the biggest and most shameless demagogue of the group, in this post, which concluded,
“Warren isn’t intellectually lazy, or flummoxed by a false narrative. She is pandering. She is lying. She is doing what she evidently thinks will gain her power and the Presidency: saying what she thinks will attract needed support, even though she knows, knows, that it is false. Warren is a law professor and a litigator, and from all reports skilled in both roles. She knows that the facts made it obvious that Brown wasn’t murdered. She knows that competent, fair citizens must not call other citizens murderers when not only have they not been charged, tried, or duly convicted, but when authorities have concluded that there is insufficient evidence for an official accusation.The tweet isn’t a mistake or an opinion. It is a deliberate lie, a public and a defamatory one. I see no reason why Darren Wilson could not sue Warren and win.”
That is still accurate and true. Several Ethics Alarms readers pointed out that Kamala Harris also advanced the long de-bunked narrative that Mike Brown was a nice, friendly, “gentle giant” heading for college who was gunned down by a racist cop while holding up his hands and pleading for his life.
Harris, like Warren also a lawyer (and presciently runner-up to Warren in the Ethics Alarms “Who is the most unethical Democratic candidate?” poll, as you can see…
…was almost as despicable as Warren, writing, “Michael Brown’s murder forever changed Ferguson and America. His tragic death sparked a desperately needed conversation and a nationwide movement. We must fight for stronger accountability and racial equity in our justice system.”
As both Warren and Harris know, Mike Brown was NOT murdered, as both an integrated grand jury and the Obama Justice Department found that the forensic evidence and eye-witness reports corroborated Officer Wilson account, meaning that he fired in self defense.
Harris and Warren, then, were lying, straight up. The other Democratic hopefuls were just deliberately misleading, race-baiting, pandering and inflammatory, falsely implying that the police officer was a racist and that Brown was an innocent targeted for his color, the false narrative spun by Brown’s family and Black Lives Matter. I doubt that any of them could be sued for libel, because the framed their version of the false narrative with sufficient deceit.
Cory Booker tweeted: “5 years ago, Michael Brown was killed by a police officer … I have been thinking all day about Mike and his family, and my prayers are with them. I am also thinking about the everyday citizens who stood against this police violence and racism and were tear gassed for their patriotic acts. Ferguson called to the conscience of our nation and inspired a movement that rightly continues.”
Gillibrand : “5 years ago, a Ferguson police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager. He shot him 6 times. Nothing will bring Michael back, but we can’t stop fighting the injustice done to his family and so many others.”
Ryan: “Five years since the tragic death of Michael Brown and we still have significant work to do. We must rebuild trust between police and the communities they have sworn to protect.”
DeBlasio: “Michael Brown should be here today. My city knows the pain of Ferguson all too well … NO ONE should die due to the color of their skin.”
I can’t let that one pass without noting what a weasel this guy is Brown would be here today—maybe—if he didn’t resist a lawful arrest, didn’t try to grab an officer’s gun, and didn’t charge Wilson with all of his 280 or so pounds. Any white perp who behaved similarly while being built like a tank would suffer the same fate, and deserve to.
Heeeeeere’s Beto! “Five years ago, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer. … We are reminded of an idea as urgent, and as ignored, today as it was when Michael was killed: Black Lives Matter.”
Bernie: “Michael Brown should be alive today. Five years after his death, we must finally end police violence against people of color.”
This brazen servicing of an unquestionably false narrative isn’t even getting the usual shrug and pass from the left-biased media, at least on line, so indefensible is it all. FactCheck.org, perhaps the closest we have to a fair factchecking service, focused on the two worst, Warren and Harris, in its methodical take-down, but its analysis suffices for the rest. The only part of the article that betrays the site’s bias is the headline, “Harris, Warren Wrong About Brown Shooting,” as if they missed a press release of something. Their lies were deliberate, not “mistakes.”
The Hill also flagged this mass mendacity—Did the DNC put out some kind of official talking points for the Ferguson anniversary? Many of those tweets are awfully similar—noting in part,
[T]he very candidates regularly accusing President Trump of being a liar and divisive, of making claims “without evidence,” have made their own divisive, false claims. Not only are these claims “without evidence,” they contradict the evidence, according to the Obama Justice Department.
Oh good, I was about to make that point to my Facebook friends, who are so obsessed with the “Trump lies all the time” trope that they post in outrage every time the President utters or tweets a misstatement, botched fact, exaggeration or garbled point, no matter how trivial.
Slate, usually a reliable apologist for any Democrat, especially one who opposes Trump, went after Warren, was represented by long-time columnist Will Saletan, who tweeted,
Sen. Warren, in this tweet you repeated a criminal accusation that was refuted years ago by forensic evidence and an Obama DOJ report (http://bit.ly/33mYgqB). Fact checkers have flagged your tweet and sought comment from you. It’s 3 days later. Will you retract the accusation?
No, she hasn’t, and won’t. The rest won’t either. This mass dishonesty in the service of racial division was even too much for Vox, which also reviewed the Brown shooting facts, and also, like Factcheck, minimized the offense by calling the Harris and Warren tweets “controversial” while implying that those and the others were mistakes, writing, “Five years after the shooting, though, major presidential campaigns are still getting the details wrong.”
What a coincidence!
Notably missing from the Parade of False Tweeters were Pete Buttigieg, who is embroiled in a police involved shooting controversy of his own in South Bend and had the sense to take a pass, and Joe Biden, who may have dropped that DNC talking points memo in the sink or something.
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Pointer: Victory Girls
Ethics Alarms 
No justice (doing whatever is demanded regardless of the facts), no peace (or else). This is where we are.
I’ll take a double order of or else. (See how long you last.) Appeasement does not work it only emboldens the demanders and their demands. Welcome to the totalitarian Alinskyite revolution.
I actually posted about this.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Talk.Politics.Guns/rkOPVZdFTEM/GPb5UtdHBwAJ
“Local law enforcement must be able to use their discretion to determine
who can carry a concealed weapon,” said Kamala Harris, who was then the
California Attorney General.
I have always wondered how #BlackLivesMatter would view this. After all,
according to their narrative, cops are just Klansmen with badges who
habitually gun down unarmed black men. How could we trust such people with
discretion to determine who may carry a concealed weapon.
And yet, just yesterday, she tweeted this:
Today, we remember #MikeBrown and recommit to ensuring truth,
transparency, and trust in our criminal justice system. #BlackLivesMatter
So I wonder if any reporter from the network broadcast and print media would
ask her any of the following questions:
– If the reason that “[l]ocal law enforcement must be able to use their
discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon” is because they
are just Klansmen with badges, why shouldn’t the Stormfront White
Nationalist Community also get to decide who can carry a concealed weapon?
– If the reason that “[l]ocal law enforcement must be able to use their
discretion to determine who can carry a concealed weapon” is because they
habitually gun down unarmed black men, why shouldn’t the Crips also get to
decide who can carry a concealed weapon?
– Is more black men dead or in prison a worthy price to pay to make lawful
gun ownership more difficult?
– Is making lawful gun ownership more difficult a worthy price to pay to put
more black men in prison?
– Does some magical guardian fairy turn these Klansmen with badges into
freedom riders whenever they exercise their “discretion to determine who can
carry a concealed weapon”?
And people wonder why I can’t choose the most unethical of the candidates anymore.
What is going on here, and where will this lead?
The most curious salient point is the betrayal by whites of the truth about this particular situation, but also the ramifications of white people who are taking the side of POC in a strangely-grounded rebellion movement which seems to be sweeping the nation.
The underlying motive in this POC rebellion needs to be more thoroughly investigated and understood. One of its strong features appears to be that of what I call ‘undermining’ the base or the foundation of America. Be it toppling monuments, exposing the contradictions in foundational figures (like Jefferson), working to undermine important historical authority-figures, these efforts are similar to destruction of religious temples that once were the focal point for a people’s cultural identity. Destroy the temples — destroy the links to the sacred traditions — and you destroy the unity of those people and their ability to group themselves around their ideal. So, the underlying *purpose* of all this needs to be seen in its profound psychological dimension.
But to say all this is to refer to many other things as well, and things not immediately related to the race conflicts. This POC Rebellion Effort is just one plank of various undermining projects. Perhaps it is possible to group them under the heading of ‘Alinskyism’, but that would have to be further clarified to reveal what that really means. Alinsky defined tactics but what should be of interest (to us I was going to say) is less the tactics being used and much more the intentions of those using these tactics.
But the most salient feature of this effort is less the ‘surface’ and what they say they are doing and why they do it, but is more revealed in the animus directed very directly at Whites and whiteness. This is revenge and reversal. That is the *mood*. But there are also clearly power-issues that are strong motivators, and then power and economic issues on the part of government and also business. For both business and government the most rational choice would be to team up with those now constructing a New America, or birthing the New America, that will be the governed and the consumer-culture of the future respectively. If there is a ‘marketplace’ and the marketplace makes choices, it is not hard to see what those choices are.
What I find especially odd, though I also understand it, is that most white people do not seem to allow this knowledge to coalesce in consciousness. That is to say their dispossession.
In regard to France (and perhaps in some various places in Europe) Renaud Camus put it like this:
So, what I suggest is needed here, in America, is an interpretive model. That model is dispossession. What was yours I am not going to take. But the most central part of my effort will be to undermine and dis-justify your vary existence.
They seem to know it is happening, or perhaps they understand this at a subliminal or half-conscious level, but they cannot bring themselves to state it openly. To see it, to say it, and to live it. Why is this? I have to feel my way through this problem by projecting myself into them and then trying to answer this difficult question.
“I said yesterday the I am ashamed of the color of my skin. I am privileged just because I’m white. I feel shame. Because of all the violence that is happening in America and other racist countries.”
[That could almost be Spartan, couldn’t it? Or Chris?]
OK. At the most basic point, in the most reduced sense, perhaps at the most psychological, it is a desire to kill oneself. Not to exist. To cease existing. It could be described as a self-infliction against the very foundation-of-self and seems connected to the external shame-strategy and the external wielding-of-guilt, anger and hatred so strongly evident in the POC Rebellion Movement.
These are virulent emotions in their essence and have their base in a very strange, a very devastating, use of psychological power. It has to be stated in this way. If you expose a child, let us say, to this psychological violence and undermining, you will likely destroy something essential to that child’s being. If that child is *white* that child will not be able to remain a white child. No one wishes to identify with the villainous.
That these things are playing out on a National Screen and that people are not able to see and describe them as they really are, now that is fascinating. That indicates schism of course within the perception-structure of people.
Well, Politifact.com decided that both Senators’ comments/tweets using “murder” was too politically charged to determine if they were, in fact, wrong. Oh, you think I am making that up? Really? Well, humble reader, have a gander at these:
and
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/aug/14/death-michael-brown-legal-facts-democratic/
That’s right. “Murder” isn’t a legal term learned lawyers should know how to use. Yep. Jack says Sen. Warren is bright, an experienced educator and legal scholar. She apparently does not know the elements of murder (according to Politifact) and should be forgiven for not appreciating the implications of accusing an officer, once cleared by local, state, and federal authorities of murder and racial animus, of murder. Nice. Then, our friend Sen. Harris doubled down and out-woke Warren. Sen. Harris should be forgiven, too, I guess, even though she is a former prosecutrix, clearly unaware that “murder” is an intentional crime. Would that I had such luck.
jvb
Just saw this in moderation and released it, but AFTER I noted this in the Warm-Up.