Patrick Lynch, the NY Post editorial page, and these anarchists should sit down together. And never leave that room. http://t.co/aRlyWiW5gT
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) January 3, 2015
I’d been sitting on the protest video, and on the subsequent Daily Beast stories (“The Monsters Who Screamed for Dead Cops” and “Trayvon Martin’s Family Rejects ‘Dead Cops’ Marchers“) because it felt like bringing theatre to a crowded fire. But the flapmouth arseholes (ir)responsible for the chant have decided to out themselves at Buzzfeed…
NEW YORK CITY — On Dec. 13, about 100 protesters splintered off from the #MillionsMarch in lower Manhattan — a huge, peaceful demonstration against police brutality — and headed up Sixth Avenue…
The chant in the video — “What do we want? Dead Cops! When do we want it? Now!” — has been viewed nearly half a million times and rallied critics of the protest… Indeed, the chant soon became central to allegations that the movement against police brutality, whose leaders have called for non-violent action, could not be as easily separated from the murders as its members would like. That claim has, in turn, has produced outrage from nonviolent protesters and their leaders.
But one group has been largely silent since lighting this particular match: the people who marched down 32nd street, chanting.
BuzzFeed News on Friday spoke to one person who participated in the Dec. 13 chant heard on the video, along with two other people who marched with other radical contingents involved in the protests that day. All of them claimed that, despite the literal words of the chants, they weren’t actually advocating for the murder of police officers…
The unplanned chant, the person said, was to distinguish a more radical message from the vast majority of the protesters. “The larger march … had a liberal, reformist agenda. The people who wanted a broader transformation, they were gravitating toward whatever chants could express that,” the person said.
“In that moment of outrage, the chant was the only way to express that we wanted to separate ourselves from people who just want to get a guy fired,” the person added. “We wanted to see the police disbanded.”…
“I don’t think people wanted dead bodies,” the person who participated in the chant said. “It was not bloodlust. Some people were laughing when they were chanting it — there was a humorous element to it. Everyone is a human being, and I don’t think any of us wants to see someone suffer and die.”…
Rhetorical calls for violence against the police are nothing new, the third person argued.
“Death to cops chants have populated protests since the ’90s and beyond!” the person told BuzzFeed News. “Blaming TMOC [the ‘Trayvon Martin Organizing Committe’, i.e., the idiots chanting] is a mess, and a dangerous one for sure, especially considering that fighting cops is so entrenched in popular imagery,” including popular rap music….
So, this was the “street fighter” version of the well-worn trustafarian “Rap musicians use the n-word, why can’t I establish my radical credentials the same way?” whinge. Can someone wrap the Mumia hoodies really tightly over their mouths, now? Because I think they’ve contributed more than enough to the conversation already.
eric nny
I’m sure the RWNJ’s are making hay with this.
opiejeanne
Like you said, idiot(s).
Patricia Kayden
@eric nny: Even if every protest was peaceful, the RWNJ would still make a hay of them. They don’t like it when the inferiors exercise their First Amendment rights. I don’t recall Dr. King and Civil Rights protesters shouting about killing cops, yet look how they were demonized.
liberal
OT: weird fact: the TPP doesn’t have to be passed by 2/3 of the Senate. Similarly, NAFTA just had to be passed by a majority of both houses.
kc
Huh. I read that Fox News made up the dead cops chant.
I just need to stop believing anything I read.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Patricia Kayden: True, but the RWNJ and their courtesans in the press didn’t need the assist. Massively stupid move.
Anne Laurie
@kc:
Read the Buzzfeed article. Fox News ‘made up’ (dishonestly edited) a different ‘dead cops’ chant — in Baltimore. The video here was taken in NYC, and BF had an audio expert examine it to prove it hadn’t been doctored.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@kc: Not so. Fox Baltimore faked one: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=ZJGoVOLrMoOwggTX6IOwDw&url=http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-affiliate-edits-protest-chant-to-sound-like-kill-a-cop/&ved=0CCAQFjAB&usg=AFQjCNHlT60NMAOI6nbUEz_NDO8ODc9IXg&sig2=t-tjEI4ZG0Xm25uu961tBQ
Mnemosyne
@kc:
There are two different videos — there’s this one where they say “dead cops” and then there’s the doctored one where the audio was altered from “killer cops” to “kill a cop.”
dr. luba
@kc: That was a different march, in DC, and Fox did splice film to make it sound like “Kill the police.” People got fired. Low level people, sure, but there were firings.
kc
@Anne Laurie:
Yeah, I just read it. I hadn’t been paying enough attention. I didn’t realize it was a different march.
kc
@Mnemosyne: @Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): @dr. luba:
Got it, thanks. Should have read the article before commenting!
raven
fuck it
Violet
Apparently Bill Bratton has asked the cops not to turn their backs on the mayor at the next funeral. I guess we’ll see what they do. And what Patrick Lynch decides to do.
eric nny
@Patricia Kayden: Agreed but thus really gives them
fodder. They’ll work this angle for months. It’s unfortunate because it’s a distraction from the issue.
KG
@liberal: fast track authority. basically, Congress and the President agreed to ignore the constitution to pass treaties more quickly. Treaties should require 2/3 majority in the Senate (no input from the House), but ratification also allows the Senate to include reservations regarding certain parts (basically saying we agree to the treaty except for this part or based on a clarification). Instead, under fast track, both the House and the Senate get to vote, up or down, no committees, no amendments, no filibusters, no reservations. Another example of Congress abdicating its responsibilities to the executive.
different-church-lady
Technicality: in the Fox instance, the audio was not “doctored” or “spliced”. It was merely cut-off before the the fourth phrase of the chant, which easily allowed people to conclude the indistinctly phrased “’til killer cops…” was actually “…so kill a cop.”
Still shenanigans, still a violation of journalistic integrity, still a fire-able offense (especially considering that the reporter misquoted the protesters with her own voice before airing the cut-off audio), but no extra-special audio editing effort was required nor performed.
Bobby B.
Kill them! Kill them to death! Sorry, what were we talking about?
lamh36
Um hmm, go back to my comments round the time the video came out and you will see that I made mention that the protestors I know said that there were some outside agitators who more than likely were the ones condoning eruptions and riots and who also attempted to highjack the peaceful protests with their own “anarchist” tendencies.
Seems I was right.
I’ve said it before the activists who are peaceful really need to be mindful of those who are there to not support peaceful protests, but to latch on to the attention the peaceful protests were getting and use it to further their own agenda…
lamh36
Keith G
I don’t get it. Cops get their rocks off by intimidating citizens. Some scraggly idiots return fire (verbally) and cops turn into wussies with feelings made of gossamer.
But then again, I bet King George had his feelings hurt when he was burnt in effigy 239 years ago. Making bullies and tyrants feel uncomfortable is a fine American tradition.
I support the free speech rights of the protestors.
raven
@Keith G: yea great
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Keith G:
Yeah, except for the fact that those burning George in effigy 239 years ago were egging on a civil war for which they’d been preparing for a while by building armories.
I, too, support the free speech rights of the protestors, but this isn’t really about free speech. It’s about effective speech. Sometimes the most effective thing to say is absolutely fucking nothing.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Bwah-ha-ha-ha.
That’s a real knee-slapper, that is.
raven
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): You don’t think these fuckers want civil war?
Anne Laurie
@lamh36:
Say it, fellow Scorpio! And now let us give the Quelling Glare to that wet-eyed jackoff in the second row, whining that “attempting to discriminate how people express their honest feelings“ makes us “authoritarians who are no different than the KKK”…
ETA: Not you, specifically, Keith G. I don’t agree with your argument, but you are making it in the proper forum (i.e., not at a street march).
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@raven:
I don’t think they really want to fight one.
NotMax
A most peculiar excursion in film airing at 2 a.m. Eastern on TCM: Nothing Lasts Forever.
Not a recommendation, necessarily, rather it’s a weird 90 minutes from the mid-1980s for the sleepless and/or curious.
raven
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): No, they want someone else to once they start it.
BBA
@NotMax: Wow, the feature-length Schiller Reel. Never thought it would see the light of day…well I guess with a 2 AM airing it still isn’t.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@lamh36:
IIRC, they’ve been doing a good job in Oakland of having community protesters surround the anarchists who show up and basically prevent them from making a spectacle of themselves for the TV cameras. I remember reading about it prior to the verdict coming down in the Oscar Grant case.
And, yes, if you have a large group of protesters, I have no problem with the majority shushing a small group that’s out of line with the rest of the protest. If the small group feels stifled, they can go have their own protest somewhere else instead of using the larger protest as a cover to push their own agenda. “Free speech” doesn’t mean you get to override other people because you go to Berkeley and the other people have to live in the neighborhood you’re vandalizing in the name of “free speech.”
Keith G
@Anne Laurie: Protesting can be a messy business. It is all well and good for keyboarders to engage in after-the-fact play calling, but those protestors did what everyone here did not. Zeus love ’em for that.
I don’t have to agree with every step they took. What’s done is done. I am not going to buy into the narrative they were rude and that the cops are the victims of a peaceful protest, nor am I going to preach to citizens who took time to do what I and you did not do.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Keith G:
The problem is not that they were rude. The problem is that they made all of the other protesters who didn’t decide to act childishly look bad. They gave the media an excuse to dismiss the other protesters’ legitimate complaints about police brutality and enforced the meme that the only people complaining about police violence are criminals who want to kill or injure the police.
They did the right wing’s work for them and changed the conversation away from police violence and towards themselves. We’re not talking about ACT-UP style protests where the purpose is to be disruptive of an an ongoing event. They disrupted the actual protest to draw attention to themselves and away from Eric Garner’s death. Do you really not see any problem with that?
Keith G
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Back in 2009 elements of the Right raised holy, and immensely disruptive hell, rudely and obnoxiously rebelling about government policies and proposals that they did not like. Fellow conservatives did not shush them, did not tell them to join their voice into a more temperate message. No, they let them roll and ways were found to utilize the resultant energies (yes even negative energies). And they had a significant impact…and to some extent still are.
Now it is the turn some of our liberal brethren to raise hell and confront activities and policies that are well beyond odious. What are fellow progressives doing? Well, from the safety of the living rooms they are lecturing them on proper demeanor.
Notice a difference?
Since when did the Left turn into a collection of so many Aunt Pitty Pats?
No wonder progressivism is under powered.
mclaren
How much you wanna bet the “Death to cops” chanters were undercover police who infiltrated the protest specifically in order to discredit them by chanting that stuff?
Countdown to the “surprise” revelation that the chanters were undercover police in…3…2…1…
BruceFromOhio
No. There was not.
@Keith G: No wonder progressivism is under powered.
If being “powered” means marching and chanting to have police officers killed, then, yes, it’s underpowered.
Keith G
@Keith G: BTW, I was not referring to those who engaged in property damage, as that is a different issue. I was referencing those who apparently were chanting things that police found disagreeable.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Keith G:
These protesters weren’t “raising hell” to protest police brutality. They were doing it to aggrandize themselves and convince themselves they were badass anarchists and not white kids from the suburbs who were slumming it in the big city. I have a whole lot more sympathy for Michael Brown’s stepfather having an understandably emotional meltdown than I do for a bunch of anarcho-kiddies trying to hijack someone else’s protest.
I’m sure that if you had gone to an ACT-UP protest in the 1980s and the only footage on the news was from a group of people saying that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, that would have been fine, because you were all protesting the same thing, yes?
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
Interesting bit from the linked story:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): I think it’s Hamsher. Or maybe McClaren
mclaren
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Person?
So a grand total of one person was chanting this stuff?
If more than one person was chanting, this piece of “news” is meaningless; if only one person was chanting, it’s equally unimportant.
Yes, advocating an end to “racist police practices” is extremely radical. Next thing you know, those radical extremists will be demanding, oh, I dunno, some crazy stuff like
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Absolutely insane. How people can tolerate these kinds of radical extremists, I can’t imagine.
Omnes Omnibus
@Keith G:
Two things: 1. Want to offer proof that no one commenting here participated in any of these protests? 2. Just because one exercised one’s First Amendment rights doesn’t mean that one did so effectively.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
I knew a kid in college who matched that description. He gleefully explained to me how he was going to Seattle as part of an organized group to protest the World Trade Organization, and how he was going to try to get tear gassed. He spent almost no time whatsoever talking about economic issues, just what a great activist he would be taking part in a riot.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@mclaren:
Perhaps you could read what Anne Laurie posted?
I know it seems crazy, but people living in crime-ridden neighborhoods want police around to go after actual criminals instead of harassing people for Walking While Black. Generally speaking, people who live in crappy neighborhoods don’t actually want the police disbanded, unlike the white radicals who can go home to the suburbs and not have to worry about being robbed or having their apartment burgled.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Frankensteinbeck:
If I can stereotype my own people for a minute, it’s usually white, upper-class college undergraduates who want to be “radical” but don’t want to put in the hard work of becoming community organizers and actually helping people. They’re just in it to break shit.
Omnes Omnibus
@efgoldman: That as well. Do they have the right to do what they did? Abso-fucking-lutely, I will go to the mat over that one. Was it a good choice? No, it was not.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: So basically you’re accusing these folks of inappropriate use of a Guy Fawkes mask?
different-church-lady
@raven:
These little faux-anarchist shits will be cowering under their beds in mom’s basement if the rubber ever meets the road. They don’t want to own even their own chants, so why would they own the blood?
Omnes Omnibus
@Keith G:
Please let me go back and add that your implication that criticism of what some protesters did constitutes a lack of support for their free speech rights is insulting. If you ever wonder why you get accused of being sanctimonious, this is why.
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady: You just described mclaren.
different-church-lady
@Keith G:
Make idiots of themselves in front of TV cameras? Yeah, I’m ashamed I wasn’t there…
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: Twofer!
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
Absolutely — nothing says “faux-anarchist shits [who] will be cowering under their beds in mom’s basement if the rubber ever meets the road” like suggesting that police have an obligation to follow the constitution, and that the fourth amendment against unreasonable search and seizure is being grossly breached by current police asset forfeiture practices which often fund whose police departments around the United States by effective highway robbery.
Whenever someone points out that the eighth amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and thus that a mugger with a badge is violating the eighth amendment of the constitution for gunning down a 12-year-old kid who happens to be holding a toy gun, well, everyone surely agrees that pissant little upstarts who say things like that are “faux-anarchist shits [who] will be cowering under their beds in mom’s basement if the rubber ever meets the road.”
And of course it goes without saying that requiring legal accountability for out-of-control cops and prosecutors who murder innocent people for no good reason is the very definition of “faux-anarchist shits [who] will be cowering under their beds in mom’s basement if the rubber ever meets the road.”
different-church-lady
@mclaren: You still here? I thought you’d be in the streets by now.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: My dear boy, nothing you have ever said has indicated that you have done anything other than pose as “pure progressive” on the internet. Have you ever been in the streets protesting anything where you were at risk? I doubt it. I think you are full of shit; I think that you enjoy posting your apocalyptic, oh-so-progressive jeremiads. I think you are a poseur.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
Retake your Test of English as a Foreign Language a few dozen more times. Eventually you’ll learn to read an English-language sentence.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
And I thought you’d be institutionalized by now, heavily sedated, and getting a weekly dose of electroconvulsive therapy.
See how what you expect never seems to happen?
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Yeah, but why aren’t you out in the streets? Why aren’t you organizing an armed resistance? Oops… Have I given something away? Eh, I doubt it.
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, violence in politics is a sign that you’ve already lost.
Change must be non-violent or it is nothing.
different-church-lady
@mclaren: Oh, I get it, you’re posting these observations from a mobile device (encrypted, of course) while out on public boulevards protecting our constitutional rights. My mistake.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@different-church-lady:
To be fair, since Fawkes was trying to overthrow the Protestant government and restore a Catholic monarchy, any use of a Fawkes mask by anarchists is idiotic. It’s all Allan Moore’s fault, unfortunately.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Okay, why aren’t you out there organizing a nonviolent resistance? Dude, I suspect that your radical activism is limited to bitching at liberals. Please prove otherwise or stand revealed as coward and a hypocrite.
BruceFromOhio
… any use of a Fawkes mask by anarchists is idiotic.
Perhaps, but it still looks really cool, like that guy in V for Vendetta.
mch
@raven: Gee. I guess I’d just say, it’s not just about rights or being right, it’s about responsibility. I also support the free speech rights of the protestors. I also remember that protestors have included lynchers. Let’s sort some things out here.
priscianus jr
@Keith G: I support the free speech rights of the protestors.
Sure they have the right. They can’t be arrested for it. But it was fucking stupid and did a lot of harm to the message of the legitimate protest by playing right into the fascist’s line. From your various comments I would say you’re just as clueless as they are.
BruinKid
And just like every time a Tea Party nutjob makes a veiled death threat against Obama and gets called out for it, their first response is usually that it was just “a joke”, and how “you libtards have no sense of humor”.
How the fuck are we supposed to know it’s not serious? Idiot.
Yeah, I’m sure all those racist gatherings we’ve had in our country for decades that had the n-word thrown around didn’t have pre-planning meetings where they decided to say it either. It just happened organically, because that’s who those people truly were. When something springs up organically, that’s usually a sign of what’s truly in a person’s heart. So if it’s “dead cops”, then that’s what those people truly wanted. What this person’s trying to do now is to provide some flimsy excuse now after the fact.
Oh, and nice of you guys to appropriate Trayvon Martin’s name for your group without ever getting his parents’ permission. Sure, it may not be illegal to do so, but it’s still a total fuckstick move to make.
BruinKid
@priscianus jr: As xkcd noted:
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: @Omnes Omnibus: Can you offer anything? My guess is no. You have nothing positive to offer,
sharl
A “Storify” consisting of an aggregation of tweets*: On so-called radical progressive dudebros and revolution.
…….*Just thought I’d note the nature of that link for those who find such a format annoying
Also, a bunch of tweets out there on allies vs. “allies” to the cause of #BlackLivesMatter – a few examples:
**That second tweet from FeministaJones refers to a racist response she got from the U.Maine Parking twitter account, and all the resulting responses that resulted when she retweeted that.
As for the request from Black Girl in Maine: wish we could help, but nobody puts
Babymcclaren in the corner – NOBODY!chopper
@mclaren:
actually, nothing says “faux-anarchist shits [who] will be cowering under their beds in mom’s basement if the rubber ever meets the road” like this sort of shit:
as i’ve said before, you’re just a different type of chickenhawk.
Aimai
@Omnes Omnibus: ive always assumed mclaren was a (rather foolishly) paid agitprop tool. He/she always preaches violence and despair.
Marc
@Keith G:
That’s right… they hijacked a much larger demonstration, robbed it of its moral authority, and handed its opponents all the ammunition they need to dismiss it. All in the service of a message that they don’t even believe in.
You and Zeus might love them for that, but the rest of us wish they would fuck off.
Marc
@sharl: Maybe I’m missing something here, but what does a racist using a university parking account to attack somebody have to do with allies? I’m pretty sure they weren’t an ally to begin with.
Btw, when I tried scrolling back through her twitter feed to see if I was missing some other context, all I found was good reason never, ever to take @FeministaJones seriously.
sharl
@Marc: Regarding your first paragraph – that tweet was complaining about a number of the responses from supposed “allies” to her encounter with the racist using the UM-Parking twitter account, rather than about that offending tweet itself (though she obviously wasn’t happy about that either).
As for your second paragraph, yup, she jumped the gun on that; a common and unfortunate habit found among users of social media, especially when responding to “breaking news”. I’ve been guilty of it myself, though I think I’m getting better about that sort of thing – silence is an option that is not exercised nearly as much as it should be. Having said all that, the UM-Parking tweet and all that followed ain’t the same thing at all. I suppose it could be an elaborately constructed lie, put together with the help of text and image editing applications, but that seems like it would be an awful lot of trouble to go through, especially given the (IMO) rather common nature of the original offending tweet.
worn
@lamh36: I think you are exactly right. I was at the WTO protests at Seattle and the first portion was a real thing of beauty: tens of thousands of citizens, of all stripes, marching peacefully. There was a point, when in the canyons of downtown, where you could not see an end to the people in either direction. My friend & I wound up at WTC end of things and as the day wore on, the black masked anarchist crowd began to show up in dribs & drabs. Then, as they always do, proceeded to break shit. It was infuriating, for I’m guessing there were only 40 where I was and it was crystal clear who the troublemakers were. I say infuriating because I came away with the thought “50 pairs of handcuffs and we non-violent folks could easily put a stop to this shit.” Would’ve been nice to see them manacled to light poles when the tear gas rounds they provoked started to fly in earnest.
worn
@Frankensteinbeck: Probably one of the little fuckers I was talking about.
Marc
@sharl: No, I don’t think the two are the same thing (and I have no reason to assume the racist tweet was a hoax – as you say, there’s enough of those to go around already), but it does make me question her judgment.
Accusing a total stranger of murder on absolutely no information, and then failing to correct or remove the accusation, goes just a bit beyond “jumping the gun.” Why should I trust her opinion on allies or anything else?
chopper
@worn:
Yep. Same thing happened at the WB protests in DC. The black bloc showed up and did everything they could to derail the whole damn thing.
liberal
@KG: not just fast track. Older and more general than that.
liberal
@chopper: sometimes fine of those folks are agents provocateur.
sharl
@Marc: There are a lot of tweets, blog posts, etc. – including this OP – that note the problem with self-appointed white “allies” to the #BlackLivesMatter cause. [As comments above note, e.g., on the WTO protests, this sort of thing happens outside of racial issues as well, btw.]
My dip into twitter was to find a few tweets that were representative of post-Ferguson complaints about this from the AA community, rather than the most reputable and unblemished voices. Yeah, FeministaJones really shouldn’t have posted that tweet-fart of a (speculative) accusation, although – and this is no excuse – she is hardly alone in doing crap like that. I’ll further note that AFAIK she has no formal training in race relationship studies; her thing is serious and humorous discussions of sex (example of her humor I like is here, I’d rate it hard ‘PG’ fwiw). However, her tweets have been quite representative of the AA folks I’ve read on the topic of white allies vs. white “allies”.
Obviously I didn’t check the TL of either FJ or BGiM (did you find anything similarly troubling in the latter’s TL?), and I tend not to do that for any tweets I cite, unless they seem particularly anomalous and/or incendiary.
Would I have cited her had I known of the shitty tweet you linked, and the fact she never issued a correction? I dunno. She is probably like so many other social media users who (incorrectly) consider such exchanges to be like f2f conversations where minor* errors aren’t worth the trouble to revisit, since they are among folks who know one another, and are usually quickly forgotten. Given the high number of followers she has, and the fact she’s trying to sell a book, and the fact the the internet doesn’t forget, she should really reconsider the manner in which she uses social media, for the sake of her own professional success. And in fact maybe she already has changed her ways. As I said, I haven’t checked.
I think I’m with ‘Improbable Joe’ on this:
*I’m calling that unforced error you cited “minor” because she clearly didn’t know the individuals personally, didn’t know the situation, and isn’t in law enforcement or a similar position where she could have influenced events or massive public opinion (AFAIK). In other words, where that shitty tweet was concerned, she was just another asshole on the Internet offering her (horribly uninformed) opinion, her high follower count notwithstanding. Having said that – and limiting discussion to only notorious AA persons for purposes of this discussion – I would not have cited anything from Tawana Brawley, OJ Simpson, Al Sharpton, Don Lemon, or (now) Bill Cosby on the topic of self-serving white “allies”, even for such a self-evidently truthful observation as this. I don’t see FJ’s crime against good sense and responsible social media use rising (sinking?) to the level of the wrong that those folks have done and/or are doing. Of course YMMV – and on this matter, yours clearly does!