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July 6, 2020

Black Lives Matter protests claim two more lives over the weekend

By Andrea Widburg

If you read the home page of the Sunday New York Times, you would never know that two people died this past weekend because of Black Lives Matter protests.  If you wished to learn about these deaths from the Times, you have had to go looking for them on the Times' website because neither fits the approved narrative.

In Seattle, a black driver killed a white protester, and in Atlanta, a member of an armed Black Lives Matter mob shot and killed an 8-year-old black girl.  You can imagine how different things would have been for the Times if a white driver had killed a black protester or a white person killed that little girl.

You may recall a lot of images showing Black Lives Matter protesters blocking freeways.  It turns out that the Washington State Highway Patrol has been facilitating freeway takeovers by blocking access to the roads to give the protesters free rein.

Saturday night, that highway patrol barricade failed when Dawit Kelete, a 27-year-old man in a white Jaguar sedan, went around the barriers and plowed through the protesters.  Shocking footage emerged showing the Jaguar throwing two women in the air like ragdolls.  (Please note that this is a very disturbing video to watch.)

A 24-year-old young woman named Summer Taylor died, while the other woman is in serious condition.  Police arrested the driver.

The Times assigned the story to a young college graduate who's working there on a fellowship and hid her report from the front page.  Although the young woman who died was fashionably non-binary, there was no getting around the fact that she was white and he was black.  That's not a story an agenda-driven paper wants to promote.  Instead, the story is straight news, which is refreshing but also hypocritical.

The Washington State Patrol, in the meantime, rethought the whole concept of allowing people to walk all over freeways:

Kamala Harris immediately tried to make political capital out of the young woman's death:

That's a tragic story, but the story out of Atlanta is even worse because a true innocent died.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, Atlanta's mayor, has been allowing armed protesters to "stand guard" by the burnt out husk of the Wendy's at which Rayshard Brooks met his death after stealing a police officer's taser and trying to use it against the police.  Saturday night, a woman driving in a car with Secoriya Turner, her 8-year-old daughter, attempted to turn around in the area and ended up going through illegal barricades that the protesters had put in place.  Someone in the group responded by opening firing on the car, killing Secoriya.  The child's parents spoke to the press, and it will make your heart ache:

The Times again avoided the front page for this anti-narrative story.  Instead, it opted simply to reprint an AP report — and the AP, too, wrote this up as straight news because it was impossible to politicize it in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement.

If Mayor Bottoms cherished hopes of becoming Biden's veep pick, she had better put those hopes in a memory box and put the box in the back of her closet.  Her policies giving license to the activists have been disastrous for Atlanta, something else that the Times avoids covering.

Incidentally, as of the night of July 5, the Washington Post has also avoided placing either story on the front page.  We no longer have a national news system.  We just have narrative-shaping Democrat party outlets that still cling to their former (and, more often than not, undeserved) reputations.

Image: Twitter screen grab.

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