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At 5:11 p.m. Kenosha police said officers responded to a call of a "domestic incident in the 2800 block of 40th Street. There, they would encounter 29-year-old Jacob Blake who is seen on video posted to social media in an altercation with officers before they Tase and ultimately shoot him seven times in the back as he leans into a vehicle. The Kenosha department does not have body cameras so officers were not wearing them at the time of the shooting. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Blake's family, said Blake was “simply trying to do the right thing by intervening in a domestic incident.”
He went through the evidence and step-by-step timeline. Blake resisted arrest, fought by police, and by his own admission, was carrying a knife, after multiple attempts to subdue him, including taser, failed. Blake was shot when he made a move with the knife, having switched it to his right hand, towards the police officer. Contrary to the popular narrative, Blake was not shot seven times in the back, three of the shots were to his side consistent with the twisting motion with the knife towards the officer. The officer’s seven shots were objectively reasonable because police are trained to keep firing until the threat is removed, which in this case was when Blake dropped the knife.
Blake lied when he said he didn’t know there was a warrant for his arrest, his phone internet records proves he knew, which would provide motive for his to resist arrest in front of his children, and makes him a not credible witness at trial. There also was a 2010 incident in Chicago where Blake similarly displayed a knife resisting arrest, and actually slashed at the officer.
We see a familiar pattern of media negligence:
o Jumping the gun to get unsubstantiated headlines
o Building a false narrative
o Carelessly stirring up emotions without regard to the consequences
o Presenting the resulting riots and destruction as mere "protests" and free speech
The media defense of what passes for "free speech" is now showing itself in the media's defense of anti-Israel protests on university campuses across the US.
But there are legal limits to free speech. In a recent interview, Alan Dershowitz explained:
When you take people on college campuses who are calling, “Death to the Jews,” who are calling to prevent Jews from going to class, who are calling for immediate attacks and harassment of Jews–that’s not protected speech. On the other hand, if you make an abstract talk and say, well, it would be good if there were no Israel–that hate speech is protected speech...Abstract arguments, even if they are hateful, are permitted under our Constitution. But direct incitements to kill or harm other people or block their access or deny them the opportunity to go to class–those are not protected by the First Amendment.
Journalist Douglas Murray raises a parallel point during a recent Tikvah webinar, The War Against the Jews Comes to Washington with Professor Ruth Wisse. The moderator asks Douglas about his book, The Strange Death of Europe, and whether we should be concerned about the strange death of America.
Murray responds (at 27:17):
I think there are early warning signs, and we remain almost incapable of rising to the challenge. The most obvious one has been thrown up very visibly. I don't really like to linger on the campus issue because most people don't go to Ivy League universities anymore, thank goodness, and so it always sounds like a rarefied point to make, but just consider how most of the ivy League universities in the last two years have permitted violence and intimidation as the norm, and pretended that the figures like those in Colombia University are free speech martyrs when in no other situation, would they have got away with this if they had done this against any other minority.
And, you know, people say, well, the limits of free speech and so on. Nobody has yet been able to persuade me. But if for the last two years, there had been people from abroad coming into America using their time or student visas to call for the lynching of Black Americans, nobody can tell me that from right to left, from the universities to people in politics--nobody can persuade me that this would have been a mere free speech issue. It would not have been. People would have said from the get-go, I would have thought no more than 24 hours, whether I think under a Democrat or Republican government. They would have said: no, we have no need in our society for importing racists calling for racist violence. The case of the Jews? Yes, that's been permitted and more than permitted, encouraged.
The media's sloppiness shows itself in its coverage of campus disruptions. They insist that university disturbances are merely expressions of free speech and that the Trump administration's attempts to hold universities responsible for the safety of their Jewish students are somehow proof of its authoritarianism.
Five years ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton on the need to use US troops to support the police in the face of riots.
Once the op-ed was printed, the paper couldn't back off fast enough.
They ended up prefacing the article with a 5-paragraph apology, explaining the supposed flaws in the piece that prevented it from meeting the New York Times' standards. The paper went so far as to claim that maybe the piece should not have been printed at all.
The lengths they went to repudiate the op-ed were due, in part, to the rebellion in the New York Times newsroom:
More than 800 staff members signed a letter protesting its publication, according to a union member involved in the letter. Addressed to high-ranking editors in the opinion and news divisions, as well as New York Times Company executives, the letter argued that Mr. Cotton’s essay contained misinformation, such as his depiction of the role of “antifa” in the protests.
Dozens of Times employees objected to the Op-Ed on social media, despite a company policy that instructs them not to post partisan comments or take sides on issues. Many of them responded on Twitter with the sentence, “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” More than 160 employees planned a virtual walkout for Friday morning, according to two organizers of the protest.
One of those employees was Taylor Lorenz, who in a since-deleted post on X, bewailed the alleged danger Cotton's op-ed posed to the black New York Times staff:
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