I didn’t get a chance to respond to your comments on my previous column, but thank you all for the kind words. I can’t tell you how much it means to get positive feedback for the completely therapeutic ranting that CO allows me to do here!
As I’ve watched the murderously peaceful leftist rioters over the last several months, I’ve noticed that their defenders seem to be missing a key part of Logic 101: the essential link between claims and evidence. Specifically, the fact that to be convincing, a general claim must be followed by pointing to specific examples that support it. You can tell a lot about how valid a point someone has by judging the quality of examples he or she cites.
For example, if you were to claim that conservative writers can be deeply insightful and yet simultaneously hilarious, and someone challenged you on that point, you might cite the example of… oh, I don’t know… Martin Simpson.
To which your opponent would be forced by honesty and propriety to say, “Well played,” or “Touche,” or maybe, “The field is yours.”
Or consider a counter example. Say a former first lady — who once helped to rescue Princess Leia from some kind of Imperial spaceship garbage compactor– were constantly claiming that her life has been made hellish by the relentless and vicious racism of her white countrymen. But when an interviewer asked her for an example, all she could come up with was, “One time this white lady cut in front of me at Haagen-Dazs. And another time, a deplorable cracker petted my dog without first genuflecting in my presence.”
The metaphysical lameness of those examples would make you say, “Get out of here with that specious argument.” And also, “Why must you judge us by the color of our skeen? We want Melania!”
This series of thoughts occurred to me because I’ve noticed that Biden and the Democrats seem constitutionally unable to pick examples that support their inflammatory claims. For example, they’re constantly citing a never-ending parade of saintly black men who are daily being gunned down by vicious, racist cops. But I can’t help but notice that nearly all of the examples that they cite are – how shall I put this? – not exactly saintly.
In fact, a lot of them seem to have been criminals, who were doing something criminal right before they were shot.
Off the top of my head:
Ungentle giant Michael Brown – founding martyr of the BLM movement – died due to two crimes he committed. First he was caught on video in a strong-arm robbery of a small Indian man (India Indian, not Grandma Squanto non-Indian) (#wemustneverstopmockingher) in a convenience store. When a cop contacted him because of that crime, Brown never held his hands up or said, “don’t shoot,” opting for the strategy of assaulting a cop and trying to take his gun, but getting only the bullets.
Rayshard Brooks was the Atlanta man with a long criminal record, including various colorful violent felonies and a previous DUI, who was on probation and driving drunk (again) on the night that he ended up fighting with cops, tasing one of them and trying to tase the other when he was shot.
George Floyd is a tragic case, but he was also a career criminal, and was committing more crimes when he died. He tried to pass a counterfeit bill (hence the store clerk’s call to the cops) and had near-fatal levels of meth and fentanyl in his system when he began fighting with cops, and although the cop kneeling on his neck was out of line, a medical report suggests that Floyd might well have died by overdose even if the cops had never met him that night.
Jacob Blake, whose shooting started the Kenosha riots, was another career criminal and sexual predator, with convictions for weapons, violence and sexual assault. He was awaiting trial for another sexual assault when he went to the apartment of his prior victim, assaulted her again, and stole her keys. She called the cops, and he fought with them, was undeterred by a taser, and was armed with a knife when he tried to get into a car with kids in it when he was finally shot.
What do these examples say about the strength of BLM and Antifa’s blanket indictments of all American police as brutally racist? With the exception of the Breonna Taylor example and a very few others, the vast majority of the examples that they themselves choose to prove their case are nearly identical to the ones I just mentioned: career criminals, in the act of committing crimes, contacted by the cops because their (mostly minority) victims called them, who then fight the cops, either with weapons or as part of an attempt to arm themselves, and then are shot.
If in a nation of 330 million people, these are the best examples they can find, what else can we conclude, other than that there must not really be a hell of a lot of racist cops murdering innocent black men for no reason?
Or consider the events during the Kenosha riots, when “right-wing white nationalist thug” Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly “executed” three people. The left quickly jumped on this case, citing it as an example of a right-wing killer and innocent protestor victims.
So let’s look at their examples.
First, Rittenhouse. What was his previous criminal record? Well, he took classes and became a lifeguard, and also got some training to provide medical help, though he was too young to be an EMT. He was also active in a “Back the Blue” group that supported the police. No allegations of felonies or violent or sexual assaults, and no criminal trials or convictions.
The worst thing that the left could say about him – once it inconveniently turned out that he had no criminal past like their heroes do – was that he was a nerdy, pasty, self-dramatizing kid who went to Kenosha with dreams of being a vigilante who protected businessmen from cartoon evildoers.
Well, he was 17, and fantasies of being a hero are not unheard of for young males that age. Take for example the unkempt hordes of starry-eyed, self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” and would-be Che Guevaras who issue narcissistic manifestos from their parents’ basements, and flock to protests and riots, to preen and shout obscenities and virtue-signal about how they’re going to stand up to The Man.
Aren’t you tired of the leftist press mocking their “immature, self-dramatizing narcissism,” the way they did to Rittenhouse? No, you are not. Because they have never written any such thing.
So okay, maybe Rittenhouse wasn’t a criminal in the past. But he certainly was that night, committing crimes that led to his shootings the same way that Brown, Brooks and Blake did. Right?
Not so much. Earlier in that day he is recorded doing such evil deeds as… cleaning up graffiti and giving medical aid to protestors. The monster!
In my favorite bit of video, a bunch of ne’er-do-well Biden voters managed to light a bunch of garbage in a rolling dumpster on fire, and using their feeble, pasty little muscles, they got the dumpster slowly rolling in the direction of a gas station.
A gas station that was systemically racist, obviously. D’uh!
But just as the pajama boys and man-buns get the flaming dumpster — or as I sentimentally call it, “the DNC convention metaphor” – rolling, Kyle appears with a fire extinguisher and sprays the dumpster, killing the fire. (Or as I hopefully call it, he “pulls a November 3rd on the DNC campaign metaphor.”)
If you haven’t seen that, watch it, because it is hilarious. The lefties strain to light “the dumpster fire heard ‘round the world,” only to watch their dreams extinguished before their eyes. They all stand around for a minute, and I swear I heard a sad trombone, before several of them said, “C’mon! Why’d you do that?”
Fast forward to a few minutes later – and you can find video that records all of this – and one leftist pacifist named Joseph Rosenbaum chased Rittenhouse and lunged at him, trying to take his gun. So Rittenhouse shot him. Then he tried to help the guy, until more members of the leftist mob arrived and threatened to over-run Rittenhouse.
So he ran down a street toward police lines, pursued by peaceful rioters screaming such peaceful things as “Get him!” and “Get his a**!” When Rittenhouse stumbled and fell, one of the Ghandi-esque brainiacs named Anthony Huber attacked him, slamming his upper body with a skateboard, causing Rittenhouse to shoot him.
And if you remember your Rochambeau rules – rock beats scissors, paper beats rock, rifle beats skateboard – you can guess how that turned out.
Another super-peaceful holy man – with a badly spelled first name and a Panzer commander’s last name (Gaige Grosskreutz) — was nearly on top of Rittenhouse after he had fallen. When he saw that Rittenhouse had recovered control of his gun, Grosskreutz had a brief moment of sanity, and held the pistol in his right hand up in the air, as if to say, “Please don’t shoot me with that rifle like you just did that moron with the skateboard.”
Then he thought better of it, and stepped forward, pointing his pistol at Rittenhouse, who promptly shot a big chunk of the offending right arm right off. (The video is pretty graphic.) In a “salt in the wound” twist, Grosskreutz had some pretty sweet ink on his arm, and that ink is now spread as a fine dust over a street in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
You were probably not shocked to learn that the media’s prime example of a rabid, white nationalist, cold-blooded murderer is neither rabid, nor a white nationalist, nor cold-blooded.
You were probably even LESS shocked – if such a thing is possible – to learn that the trinity of peaceful leftist shooting-victim martyrs turn out to be… wait for it… criminal scumbags.
Rosenbaum was never on an honor roll, but he had managed to make it onto the sex offender registry, having been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor. Other resume highlights included open cases for bail jumping, battery and two counts of domestic abuse.
Some witty commenter in an internet column – and I SO wish I’d thought of this – summed up Rosenbaum’s story this way: “He died doing what he loved: chasing minors.” I salute you, anonymous internet contributor!
Huber had previously earned gold stars for felonious strangulation (no mere misdemeanor-ious strangulation for this guy!), as well as multiple charges of domestic abuse, use of a dangerous weapon, false imprisonment and disorderly conduct. (Reports that he ever indulged in either “truthful imprisonment” or “orderly conduct” could not be confirmed.)
“Lefty” Grosskreutz (HA!) is a member of something called the People’s Revolution Movement, and had a previous conviction for carrying a firearm while intoxicated. (I guess he won’t be charged with THAT again.) (Unless he starts carrying his firearm in a fanny pack.)
I like to think of this column as an educational publication. So what can we learn from this little morality tale?
First, if all of the people you say are terrible villains turn out to be life-guarding property defenders and cops who rarely shoot people who aren’t criminals in the process of attacking them, and all of the people you say are innocent saints turn out to be violent criminals and sex offenders who try to kill life-guarding property defenders and cops who are just doing their job… you might want to re-think your premises.
Second, don’t bring a skateboard to a rifle fight, doofus!
Avenatti/Lefty Panzer-guy 2020!
Martin Simpson 