Here's What Violent Protesters Should Know About the Death of Daniel Prude

Daniel Prude, who was naked, bleeding from cut glass, and high on PCP when he was arrested by police in Rochester, New York around 3 a.m. local time on the near-freezing night of March 23rd, was pronounced dead seven days later in a nearby hospital. It's not the ideal allegation of police brutality, but Black Lives Matters activists are running with it nonetheless.

A protest over Prude's death, fueled by recently-released bodycam footage, turned violent in New York Thursday night and early Friday morning, with two officers reportedly injured and eight suspects arrested in a protest marked by arson, vandalism, and looting.

In March, Police received reports of a man, matching Daniel Prude's description, breaking a window in the nearby area. Prude's own brother, Joe, called 911 for help, telling police that Prude was acting suicidal and had thrown himself "head first" down 21-flights of stairs. Joe was also worried that his brother may have jumped in front of a train.

Bodycam footage of the 41-year-old's arrest was recently released, showing officers placing a spit shield over Prude's head. Prude had refused to stop spitting and told officers he had the coronavirus.

After Prude demanded officers give him a gun, threatened to "kill everybody in that house" and defiantly stood up from the ground, officers restrained the high, erratic, and apparently homicidal Prude by lowering him back to a prone position, where an individual is much less likely to harm himself and others.

When paramedics arrived on scene, one paramedic told officers that she was giving Prude something to help calm him down. Officers told the paramedic that Prude may be on PCP and stated that he had the coronavirus.

At 3:22 a.m., an officer asks Prude, "You good, man?" When Prude didn't respond, an officer states that Prude is puking "straight water." One minute later, when Prude appears to no longer have chest compressions, the officer instructs others to help roll Prude on to his side. Prude remains unresponsive and appears limp. At 3:24 p.m., after one paramedic shouts to another for help, Prude is turned over and administered CPR. Prude's cuffs are removed and the suspect is placed on a gurney.

According to a copy of the autopsy report obtained by Prude's family lawyers, the Monroe County Medical Examiner ruled Prude's death a homicide, citing complications of PCP intoxication, excited delirium, and asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.

So maybe it's a homicide in the sense that Prude's drug dealer provided him with PCP. But activists are pointing to the cops, who, true, did restrain Prude when he didn't comply, as they do with all suspects who want to break into a house and "kill everybody" inside. But the cops also helped paramedics render assistance when Prude suddenly became unresponsive. Joe is accusing the cops of "lynching" his brother and has called the death a "cold-blooded murder."

Both local and national media have completely mistrusted the facts in the case to support the Black Lives Matter narrative that white cops have once again killed an "unarmed black man" in their custody. As is clear from the bodycam footage, Prude's death is a tragic death alright, but one whose fault lay in the dangerous drug he was on, the suicidal and homicidal behavior it caused, and the deadly effect that drug and past drug abuse may have had on Prude's body.

And it's hard to imagine the police would have acted any differently had Prude been white. If the police didn't restrain Prude, there's no telling how Prude may have harmed himself or others. Joe had called the police because he feared his brother may have been struck by a passing train. Remember, Prude was trying to kill himself and made a statement about killing people inside a home.

"We don't know what to do with him because of that stuff he was on," Joe's wife told an officer after the arrest.

The police are damned if they do and damned if they don't. The media shouldn't be a stooge for the Marxist Black Lives Matter crowd.

SOURCE





Rich White Leftists Encourage Black People to Loot Their Neighborhoods

A hardcover copy of "In Defense of Looting" will run you 21 bucks at Amazon and 28 bucks at Barnes and Noble. That’s just how capitalism works for the distribution and sales of a product from one of the biggest publishing companies in the world that’s part of the Lagardère empire.

Why is the largest publishing company in France pushing what Publishers Weekly called, “a provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting” to Americans? Because it makes money.

"In Defense of Looting" quickly ended up a major topic of conversation on social media.

And that means Arnaud Lagardère, the head of the French empire that swallowed Little, Brown and Company, adds to his $220 million net worth and keeps the model he married, half his age, in the style she expects at his country estate. So what if a whole bunch of small businesses, many owned by immigrants and black people, get trashed and put out of business.

"In Defense of Looting" was published by Bold Type Books, a Lagardère subsidiary imprint in partnership with what used to be Nation Books. The Nation, a hard lefty magazine, is partly owned by Katrina vanden Heuvel, the daughter of an MCA heiress who was worth over $38 million when she jumped out of her apartment window.

And then there's Vicky Osterweil, the author of “In Defense of Looting”, who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell, where he tried to make his own movie, before moving to Brooklyn to live out the hipster dream of playing in a punk rock band while aspiring to become a novelist.

Two years later he was being profiled in the New York Times attending an Upper East Side party. Such are the hobbies of the worthless dilettante brats of the New Left.

The son of a professor and a producer from a wealthy suburb of Boston, Willie, his original name joined the Park Slope Food Coop, and scribbled terrible movie reviews, “capitalism is built on the bones of the witch, her magic the first threat against capitalist rationalization”, followed by equally terrible leftist screeds for The Paris Review, Jacobin and The Nation. In 2011, he was in Barcelona, taking part in protests there as training for his work on Occupy Wall Street.

Fast forward to the present, Willie had married Sophie Lewis, a British lesbian feminist who has two degrees from Oxford, had translated “Communism for Kids”, and had her own book “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family”, which attacked the existence of the family. Willie, her new “wusband”, now appeared to be Vicky Osterweil.

The happy young white couple both had major books with radical Marxist premises.

Sophia was calling for the elimination of the family and Vicky was defending looting. And the upscale couple was doing it in the name of destroying capitalism.

"Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family," The Nation headlined a review of her book.

All of this made marriage a little awkward, but there was nothing that couldn’t be overcome.

A splashy Vice profile mentions that at their wedding, instead of vows, the happy couple gave speeches disavowing the institution of marriage and the biological family.

And then they headed to Boston where Willie's mother wanted a more traditional wedding.

You can disavow the institution of marriage, but you’re still going to get married. And you can write a book attacking the existence of the biological family, but when your ‘wusband’s mommy wants a traditional wedding she can invite her friends to, you drop the nonsense and go.

Spending your twenties and thirties deconstructing everything is the luxury of the upper class. It’s the hobby of people who don’t really have jobs or a family depending on them for support. That’s why the deconstruction is fundamentally unserious. After writing a book calling for the abolition of the family, Vicky and Sophia got married. Vicky’s living in West Philly where the riots and the looting are going on, shopping for antiques, and writing a book in defense of looting.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness."

A generation of upscale leftists is smashing up everything while knowing that they can retreat to the pricey suburbs that spawned them, to their country estates and condos, while the chaos and destruction happen to someone else. Tom might be calling himself Thomasina and Daisy might be calling herself a lesbian, but they’re still playing games and amusing themselves at other people’s expense in the vast carelessness of theoretical reasons for destroying it all.

Upscale areas will still have street level retail once the Black Lives Matter riots die down. But the poorer black areas hardest hit by them won’t. The white leftists promoting looting will still have their quaint cafes, punk hair salons and social justice yoga studios that Vicky and Sophie rave about, they’ll also have local supermarkets like Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, groceries, restaurants, boutiques, coffee shops, and the rest of the hipster detritus of gentrification.

That’s because they have the money and spend the money to make street retail profitable.

When the rioting is done, there will be burned out neighborhoods ripe for real estate speculators to move in, renovate, and peddle to the wealthy white hipsters who want to live there.

SOURCE






Who Will Save America From the Democrats’ Race Obsession?

Roger L. Simon

Worse than Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Democrats suffer from Racial Derangement Syndrome (RDS)—a desire to find racism under every rock and down every rabbit hole.

Recent examples are myriad. A particularly amusing one comes from their presidential candidate Joe Biden who told a (remarkably sparse) largely black audience in Kenosha, Wisconsin that the light bulb was not invented by Thomas Edison but by an African American, Lewis Latimer.

It’s hard to know where Biden—who plagiarized in law school and a fair number of times thereafter and now has, shall we say, issues—gets his information but this would have been news to Latimer himself, a brilliant man with an inspiring story who happens to be the author of “Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System.” [italics mine]

More significantly and less risibly, a cabal of far left-leaning Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and House members Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) with the choral support of Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) have initiated legislation declaring racism a “public health crisis.”

If this is true—and it’s not; it’s a politically motivated crisis—the “viral load” transmitting this particular illness comes directly from those same Democrats and their media claque. They should all have been wearing masks.

The first spores of this disease appeared during the Obama administration after a black man had been overwhelmingly elected president by supposedly “racist” America not once, but twice.

At first the power of racist accusation appeared to be waning. Many people were forgetting about race and treating each other normally and equally, as the renowned African American actor Morgan Freeman once prescribed (2006) as the solution to racism on “Sixty Minutes.”

No endless protests, no prevaricating celebrations of oppression à la the New York Times’ recent “1619 Project,” just ordinary existence. The best way to end racism, Freeman said then, was to “stop talking about it.” “You call me Morgan,” he continued, “and I’ll call you Mike.” (Mike Wallace was his interviewer.)

Although he couldn’t have been more right, Freeman was pressured by the usual suspects to walk back his statement. And throughout the Obama administrations the opposite approach was taken.

Racism was talked about incessantly from the most minor dustups like Harvard professor Henry Lous Gates Jr’s dispute with a Boston cop to the Ferguson riots that engendered the “Hands up. Don’t shoot,” lie that endures to this day, repeated by Black Lives Matter demonstrators ad infinitum. Racism had to be kept alive.

So here we are in the era of BLM, Antifa and “critical race theory,” that pseudo-intellectual European import force fed into the brains of Yale sophomores for plus or minus $70K per annum, a particularly dangerous “theory” that, played out in real life, has most of our cities in an uproar, stores and businesses destroyed, our citizens at each other’s throats with all white people declared racist because they are, alas, white. In the words of Lady Gaga, they’re born that way.

It’s all the fault of the Enlightenment—or something. Or, speaking of the pseudo-intellectual, academic gibberish like “systemic racism.”

And now we have a racial “health crisis,” just like we have an abortion “health crisis,” but like the supposed abortion crisis, it’s almost always a matter of morality, not of health. Life, and values, have been turned upside down. Again, racism must be preserved at all costs.

The situation has never seemed more hopeless.

Except for something quite interesting. The African American community may be getting fed up with this, as well they should be. We all suffer from this insane nonsense, like defunding the cops, but they most of all.

NBA stars may be wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts, but the less fortunate, non-zillionaire, black man on the street is having less of it. So, too, a growing number of other normal African Americans, many of whom appeared at the Republican Convention.

And lo and behold, a recent poll has appeared with Donald Trump receiving a whopping, practically unheard of, for a Republican, 45 percent approval rating from African Americans.

Yes, this is a Rasmussen (read: Republican) poll, but Rasmussen was among the more accurate pollsters in 2016. He has a reputation to protect, despite whatever bias he might have.

If something even close to these poll numbers holds, African Americans will be in part responsible for a Trump victory in November, but arguably more importantly, they will have the capacity to change the angry zeitgeist dominating today’s USA.

They, our black population, could put Black Lives Matter (upper case) back into lower case where it belongs, right along with all lives matter.

This would honor most of all Dr. King whose desire for all of us to be judged by our character, not by the color of our skin, is currently being stomped on by the left.

SOURCE






Bettina Arndt reports

She's battling Australia's feminist harridans

Last Thursday, The Canberra Times carried a story announcing I was to keep my Honours award. The article was written by UTS journalism lecturer Jenna Price.

Price is one of the founders of the feminist action group, Destroy the Joint, which in 2015 persuaded most of our media and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to quote their fake homicide figures doubling the number of domestic violence related deaths to claim two women are killed every week in Australia. Destroy the Joint’s fake stats were based on cumulative figures of female deaths featured in media reports, including an elderly woman who was euthanized by her doctor son. Price’s group justified their distorted data by claiming “all violent deaths of women are the result of societal misogyny.”

It’s pretty revealing that this activist is a senior lecturer in journalism at one of our major universities. Price’s journalism displays a similar disinterest in the truth and she’s always delighted in taking pot shots at me, misrepresenting my views on any number of issues.

So here was this journalist using the news about my AM to have another go at me, in an article which included quotes from the Honours Council Chairman Shane Stone. At that point the Council had decided not to make an official announcement about the decision but reconsidered when I wrote to Stone pointing out it was not a good look for him to grant an exclusive interview revealing news on this controversial matter to such a journalist.

Stone then released the attached document which puts Price and her mob in their place, pointing out that my award was destined to stand since I had done nothing to contravene their rules – I had not committed a crime nor had the Council found that my award was based on false or misleading material.

He pointed out that the manufactured outrage about my views was irrelevant:

In a system that recognises the service of hundreds of people each year, it is inevitable that each list will include some people who others believe should not be recognised. Unanimous community approval is not a criteria for Council to make a recommendation. Nominations for Awards are from the community. Similarly, individuals are neither qualified nor disqualified on the basis of their political leanings, social views or religious convictions.

Congratulations for what?

Many people very kindly sent good wishes regarding the decision, which I do appreciate. But it is odd to find people congratulating me on retaining the award.

As I pointed out to Sky News’ Chris Kenny in the only interview I have chosen to give on this subject, it is as if I’ve spent eight months with my house being vandalise and graffitied by nasty thugs and now I am supposed to be thrilled that they didn’t actually get to burn the place down.

Here’s the Kenny interview - https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6188680854001

I’d be delighted if you would help promote this to show they didn’t succeed in cancelling me. I have posted on my website all the latest information about who wanted me cancelled and why. I’m really keen that people know what was going on here – so please help me spread the message.  

In fact, it was always obvious that I would keep my award, given the regulations governing the honours committee. And the long delay was not due to the fact that the committee was conducting a forensic examination of all my alleged wrong-doing. They simply meet only twice a year and the February meeting was cancelled due to Covid. Various media stories with Council officials over recent months made it obvious what the decision would be but the September meeting needed to take place before they could announce it.

Flexing their muscles

The feminists overplayed their hand. In their determination to take me out, they displayed for all to see the control they have on key sectors of our society, from our captured mainstream media, to their puppet bureaucrats. (Note - they managed to recruit two Attorneys General, the key legal officers for their state, to promote misinformation about me.)  And then there was the Australian Senate, led by Keneally and Wong, who used a scurrilous political stunt to wedge upper house government Senators, so they’d agree to a misleading motion condemning me.

I feel this has all served to alert the public into the dangers of our current situation, where we have allowed ideologues to control so many important institutions. It exposed the lengths these people are prepared to go to silence anyone who challenges their narrative. I hope this leaves many of you thinking about what’s going on here. Are we really all just going to sit back and wonder who is next?

But the good news is the whole kafuffle has led to growing support for my various campaigns exposing what the feminists are up to, on our campuses and elsewhere. 

Perhaps even more importantly, the mob also made it abundantly clear that my work really matters. Why else would they go to such efforts to use my award to try to cancel me?

That’s cause for celebration – a sure sign that I’m making my mark. The gruelling saga has actually proved an inspiration to me, convincing me that my efforts must be making a difference.

Thriving and concentrating on the main game.

In a way the activists did me a favour. I’ve decided to give up social media – they can keep that cesspool to themselves. And I plan to do very few interviews with the Australian press who have proved themselves such a cowardly bunch, more interested in sucking up to the feminists than doing their homework to expose what’s really happening in our society.

I intend keeping a lower profile which gives me more time to work hard on the key issues that really interest me. We are attracting more lawyers and other serious players to our Campus Justice group and have some exciting plans to expose the appalling way our universities are behaving.

I’ve mentioned the Mothers of Sons group, who are soon to launch their website featuring some extraordinary videos and stories from mothers about the injustice being experienced by their sons. You’ll be appalled by what their stories reveal about our justice system. I’m helping them get their show on the road and will be telling you more about this soon.

And I’m doing live chats on thinkspot with amazing people across the world who are working in similar territory. Last week I chatted to Diana Davison, co-founder of The Lighthouse Project, a Canadian non-profit that helps the falsely accused and wrongly convicted. Our discussion was really fascinating and I’ll get that to you next week. But here's a taste of what's to come. And another more amusing part of our long conversation.

Bettina Arndt
E: bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au
Website: www.bettinaarndt.com.au
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thebettinaarndt
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebettinaarndt

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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