When ABC posted this today, the name and identity of the driver of the car was known. He is African American. The New York Times and others had the complete story.
ABC deliberately used “luxury car” to suggest a wealthy white racist. If you really think that choice of words, without the name of the driver who bears that good, old Anglo-Saxon name of Dawit Kelete, wasn’t deliberately chosen to mislead readers, you are among the perfect victims of mainstream media manipulation.
Fox News pundit and wit Greg Guttfield tweeted, fairly and appropriately,
Your social media followers, friends and relatives who still say that mainstream media bias is a conservative conspiracy theory are insulting you and undermining your rights as a citizen. You should not, must not, passively accept this. If you do, you are enabling the deceptions and the effort to manipulate public opinion for partisan gain.
Of course, there is always the explanation that your social media follower, friend or relative is a gullible dolt with the analytical ability of a hunk of cheddar.
In which case, I urge you to ponder your questionable taste in associates.
Ethics Alarms 
Wait. The guy was going up an exit ramp the wrong way at a high rate of speed? I’ve seen the video. I assume he was DUI? Is that anywhere in the reportage? We have these horrible wrong way catastrophes on the Interstates out here in Arizona all too often. Usually, they are precipitated by confused/disoriented drivers from Mexico driving in the dark. What was this guy’s problem? I assume he was impaired? So he was black and the woman who was killed was white, right? I hope her friends will be able to utter unctuous platitudes at the “celebration of her life” (I hate that term. What’s wrong with “funeral?”) like “she died doing what she loved,” or “she gave her life for the movement” or “she redeemed her white privilege and expiated her white guilt.” You go girl.
The guy did a U-turn and headed back the correct way on the freeway.
The police had earlier encountered the man asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru. Upon ascertaining that he was black, the two officers checked their newly issued procedures manual and determined that no further investigation of the situation or restriction of that person’s actions were permitted. To avoid the possibility of taking any actions that might stem from their systemic biases, they withdrew to allow the driver to proceed without oppression. The matter was brought up before the city council, and it was decided to give both officers letters of commendation, and reduce police funding by an additional 23%.
And what the hell are these “mostly peaceful protesters” doing on an Interstate highway? At night?
The police weren’t on hand to block traffic or remove the “protesters” for their own safety? Defund the police!
The police did block traffic. They guy entered the freeway on an off ramp.
The Washington State patrol has now announced that they will now be arresting anyone walking in the freeway to protest.
I doubt the prosecutor for King county will charge them though.
So the guy was just determined to get on the I-5 and got creative. Great. Gee, the police will no longer allow people to walk on a limited access, high speed interstate highway. I’m shocked. I think the Governor of the State deserves a medal. I bet the motto of the state patrol is something along the lines of “To Serve and Protect.”
In tweets, repeated word-for-word, the car was a white jaguar. Obviously the murderous car is racist and targeted the protesters. (End sarcasm font.)
The narrative takes precedence over facts.
Guns have been killing people for years without a person involved. I suppose it was only a matter of time before cars gained the same sentience.
Fat fingered The Shadow entering the name. Dang keyboards on mobile devices.
Oh darn, I thought we had a new commenter!
There is youtube and twitter video of the accident, he is assumed to have gone up an exit ramp and then drove around a curve into a couple of cars parked on the freeway. He swerves to avoid the cars, then a crowd on the shoulder and ends up hitting two women wearing dark clothes at 130am. The WSP has been closing I5 for the last 19 nights. It really seems like they were waiting for something to happen to give them a useful idiot. I live up this way, if anyone wants more info let me know.
Gonna have to find the other nefarious reporter who described the incident as a “white Jaguar” drives into crowd.
Committed to fighting social injustice. By standing on an Interstate in the middle of the night.
Odd that a Jaguar of any color would attack and kill a veterinary assistant.
Wait. A veterinary assistant killed by a Jaguar, a white Jaguar? [Pronounced Jag-u-ah] You can’t make this stuff up.
I’ve heard Kelete grew up in Ethiopia and went to WSU as an exchange student.
I guess he wasn’t oppressed then.
I think another great example is to watch a press conference and listen to the hideous questions. The hate for Trump is so thick you could “insert your favorite example here.”
And Kayleigh rocks.
Last week they were so rude she professionally smacked them, closed her book and ended the meeting. The next day they were sweet as pie.
I really like her a lot.
Do you?
Actually, yes. I approve of anyone who fights back against the unethical, existential horror our media has become, even if their own ethics are less than admirable.
Kayleigh McEnany is my spirit animal.
“a gullible dolt with the analytical ability of a hunk of CHEDDAR.”
The CheeseHead Anti-Defamation League would like a word…
My first guffaw of the day.
Run afoul of the EAT CHEESE OR DIE folks at your peril!
I’m starting to think it might be time to use the expression “White Scare” for what’s going on now. There are too many uncomfortable parallels with what’s going on now and the Red Scare of the 1950s. The difference now (actually one of a few that makes it worse) is that the media actually was out to STOP Joe McCarthy and those who thought like him from destroying lives he shouldn’t. In this case they gleefully aid and abet the movement in ruining anyone who appears to be a suitable target. There are a million subtle and not so subtle ways wordsmiths can bend the narrative to their version. They range from little commissions like Jack has noted here, to omissions like the fact that George Floyd was drugged up at the time of his arrest and generally no paragon, to substitution of cant for fact, like that Mt. Rushmore is “a monument to two slave-holders that stands on stolen land,” to out-and-out editorializing in news articles, like describing the president’s speech as “dark and divisive.” The mainstream media is using them all, every chance they get. Then there’s the deliberate understatements, like “mostly peaceful protests” except for a few people who got very violent, or softening (protesters instead of rioters) or hardening (white supremacist instead of right wing) and the deliberate gaslighting (no evidence of Antifa, but plenty of white supremacists trying to hijack things).
The scariest thing I’ve seen so far was an article in National Review (yes, I know it’s a conservative publication) that makes a fairly convincing case that the left and the mainstream media are trying to conflate or blur the line between patriotism and white supremacy. The left has always been critical of this nation and nationalism, but, in the past, it was about bringing us closer to the best we could be. At this point, though, it’s not about fighting those who defend Confederate memorials that a lot of folks are starting to think have overstayed their welcome insisting that they listen to voices that haven’t gotten a hearing or demanding that they hold those police officers who abuse their power to account instead of defending them. These days, if you have the quaint idea that public art should be changed by democratic or administrative process rather than ripped down, you’re just in the way, those who object are sick and tired of being sick and tired of not being listened to. If you are skeptical about the radical ideas that the Electoral College should be eliminated, or that reparations are owed by those who didn’t wrong to those who were not wronged, you’re complicit with those past wrongs. If you support law enforcement and say that those accused of doing wrong are entitled to the same due process as everyone, you are a copsucking racist. Heck, if you do so much now as sing our national anthem or celebrate the Fourth of July you are a racist and a white supremacist. This is settling an impossible standard and putting white and/or conservative people in a very difficult spot, especially now that you can be cancelled for writing an opinion that has since fallen out of fashion decades ago, or telling a politically incorrect joke that no one but you and the one guy you told it to were supposed to hear years ago.
I could write more and expand on the comparisons between this and the Red Scare, but I think that will have to wait until either tonight or tomorrow.
Just like Stormfront.
The leadership of the Confederate memorial defense campaign made sure never to defame America itself. They were aware that they would deter support, and even incite opposition, if they protested against America itself.
I am suspecting those who tore down or removed statues of Columbus, Washington, and Roosevelt were not defenders of Confederate monuments.
Not to mention arguing that the Betsy Ross flag, the Gadsden flag, and the Okay symbol are white supremacist symbols. These arguments have real victims, as Jack Marshall pointed out elsewhere in his blog.
Setting this impossible standard would incite people to sympathize with, if not outright support, the Stormfront White Nationalist Community.
Is this what they want?
Or did this not occur to them?
I wasn’t going to go that far, but I’ve noted many times that after enough IRA attacks, the Protestants of Northern Ireland got fed up and formed the UDL and other militias. I’d also note that after getting roughed up one too many times by the “dotbusters,” the Indian-Americans of Jersey City started to fight back physically, until an old-style “rumble” ended that.
The media did the same thing in the Trayvon Martin case by continually emphasizing that it occurred in a gated community, and letting viewer’s imaginations do the rest. Zimmerman’s gated community experienced over 300 crimes in 2010, and median property values hover at a little over $120,000, but most people’s image of a gated community is far different.
The media narrative for the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery is much the same.
‘ Mr. Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was chased by armed white residents of a South Georgia neighborhood’ and similar headlines were purposefully written to plant impressions in people’s minds. These reports paint a picture of some white guys sitting around when they see a black man jogging down the street; they jump in a truck, chase him, and kill him in cold blood in the middle of the street. With the bias against those in the South, almost always portraying whites in the South as ignorant and uneducated, all you need are the words ‘white residents’ and ‘GA’ and people’s minds are made up. Killed for ‘jogging while black’.
In reality, Brunswick,GA is a small town of 15,997, which is 69.3% black, 33% white…black joggers are not unusual in Brunswick. The overall crime rate in Brunswick is 145% the national average, the rate of property crime 139% the national average. Crime demographic sites designate Brunswick as ‘safer than only 2% of American cities’, which in part explains why people in Brunswick are armed to the teeth. With a crime rate that high, people are bound to be suspicious and on edge.
It does not justify Arbery being shot and killed. For someone who had been a career detective, Gregory McMicheal handled the situation extremely poorly, and his son shouldn’t have been shooting at all. As far as I know, Travis is not an officer of the law. However, it was not a case of whites killing a black man for daring to jog down their street.