Another wonderful article. I saw the video on Twitter but I didn't know what it was all about. Thank you so much for the information. (And I kept thinking as I read about the Westboro Baptist idiots, so I had to smile at your second to last paragraph. Zealotry in all its forms will be the death of our society.)
There's this trope that the media shamelessly sensationalizes urban crime to scare white people and demonize black people. That may have been the case in the '80s and '90s. The present reality is the opposite. The media, aside from the few remaining small local papers and some right-wing outlets, in fact sanitize and erase urban violence.
I know this from having worked in the court system for over a decade. Middle and upper class people, including me before I went to law school, are completely unaware of the extent and brutality of urban violence, and also violence in poor rural white communities. Then, on those rare occasions when cops appear from some video clip to be the perpetrators of violence, it is front page news and trending on Twitter for days on end. This coverage often includes raw numbers of people killed by police and the disproportionate number of those who are black.
Completely lacking context due to the effective prohibitions on covering background urban violence and violence by police against white people, people like these Antifa white kids have this worldview where poor minority communities are just peacefully carrying on with life until police come by and randomly savage them. This worldview has no basis in reality. It is pure ideologically-driven media coverage bias.
It is also extremely dangerous for the people in crime-ridden communities on behalf of whom the white radicals and out of touch well-to-do minorities purport to speak. Poor disproportionately black communities clearly need things they are lacking. A power vacuum left by retreating police is not one of them. These protesters are dangerous idiots.
Thanks for this, Leighton. What a shameful display from these dullards. Just wondering, you think any of the Oakland “Antifascists” attended one or more of the “mostly peaceful protests” of 2020? Asking for Donnie and Fredo over at CNN
Another perceptive, well-considered piece from this Substack to which I have nothing to add except . . . if a couple of the SUSO people had walked over and taken that kid's bicycle, I mean, just got on it and ridden off . . . that would have been hilarious.
Well-written coverage, however — they are not politically irrelevant, or a fringe, in many places (including your city of Oakland), and they have an outsize influence in bullying, hectoring and skewing reporter from those "mainstream" Twitter-driven journalists who are in fact not mainstream at all, but *just* to the right of Antifa. I came via Bari Weiss ss btw.
I lived just above lake Merritt for a couple years, and even did a documentary showing what a great place Lake Merritt was. The author of this piece and the people criticized in it are equally responsible for the emerging disfunction in what was always a dicey city of losers, liberals, and wealthy DNC types.
Another wonderful article. I saw the video on Twitter but I didn't know what it was all about. Thank you so much for the information. (And I kept thinking as I read about the Westboro Baptist idiots, so I had to smile at your second to last paragraph. Zealotry in all its forms will be the death of our society.)
There's this trope that the media shamelessly sensationalizes urban crime to scare white people and demonize black people. That may have been the case in the '80s and '90s. The present reality is the opposite. The media, aside from the few remaining small local papers and some right-wing outlets, in fact sanitize and erase urban violence.
I know this from having worked in the court system for over a decade. Middle and upper class people, including me before I went to law school, are completely unaware of the extent and brutality of urban violence, and also violence in poor rural white communities. Then, on those rare occasions when cops appear from some video clip to be the perpetrators of violence, it is front page news and trending on Twitter for days on end. This coverage often includes raw numbers of people killed by police and the disproportionate number of those who are black.
Completely lacking context due to the effective prohibitions on covering background urban violence and violence by police against white people, people like these Antifa white kids have this worldview where poor minority communities are just peacefully carrying on with life until police come by and randomly savage them. This worldview has no basis in reality. It is pure ideologically-driven media coverage bias.
It is also extremely dangerous for the people in crime-ridden communities on behalf of whom the white radicals and out of touch well-to-do minorities purport to speak. Poor disproportionately black communities clearly need things they are lacking. A power vacuum left by retreating police is not one of them. These protesters are dangerous idiots.
Thanks for this, Leighton. What a shameful display from these dullards. Just wondering, you think any of the Oakland “Antifascists” attended one or more of the “mostly peaceful protests” of 2020? Asking for Donnie and Fredo over at CNN
Another perceptive, well-considered piece from this Substack to which I have nothing to add except . . . if a couple of the SUSO people had walked over and taken that kid's bicycle, I mean, just got on it and ridden off . . . that would have been hilarious.
Who ya gonna call?
Well-written coverage, however — they are not politically irrelevant, or a fringe, in many places (including your city of Oakland), and they have an outsize influence in bullying, hectoring and skewing reporter from those "mainstream" Twitter-driven journalists who are in fact not mainstream at all, but *just* to the right of Antifa. I came via Bari Weiss ss btw.
I lived just above lake Merritt for a couple years, and even did a documentary showing what a great place Lake Merritt was. The author of this piece and the people criticized in it are equally responsible for the emerging disfunction in what was always a dicey city of losers, liberals, and wealthy DNC types.