Woman berates pharmacy manager for calling police on black men shoplifting

An activist in the US has filmed herself berating a pharmacy store manager for calling police on two black men caught shoplifting, saying they could have been killed.

Charity Sade, who describes herself as a “she/her comedian, writer, activist” and “public speaker teacher”, posted a series of videos on Twitter earlier this week after seeing two men being detained outside a CVS in Washington DC.

“I just stopped because I saw approx 6 MPD officers stopping 2 Black men & sat them on the curb. @cvspharmacy at 2226 Wisconsin Ave NW WDC, 20007, called the @DCPoliceDept 2 Black men that allegedly took items from the store,” she tweeted.

She continued, “One officer told one of the men that their other person’s freedom was dependent on him being quiet. This is violent. People know what happens when the police are called on Black folx! They value property over people.”

After the incident, she walked into the store to confront the manager, filming the encounter.

“I live in the neighbourhood, I come to this CVS very often. May I ask why you called the police on those two men?” she asks.

The manager explains that CVS policy “dictates that if they’re shoplifters, they exit the store with merchandise unpaid for, we have to get the police involved”.

“And if the police apprehend them, we have to issue a barring notice,” he says.

“But I actually did not elect to press charges, I just wanted to say hey look, I just want them to know they can’t come in here anymore because they shoplifted and I just need them to sign that. The officers obliged and the guys said the same thing, thank you, and they left.”

The woman says “So you know what happens (when the police are called on) black men?”

The death of George Floyd in May, which sparked months of Black Lives Matter protests, occurred after police in Minneapolis were called by a store clerk alleging he had attempted to use a counterfeit $20 bill.

Ms Sade tells the store manager he “decided to call the police on two black people that allegedly took something from the store because you’re willing to uphold the policy and they could have lost their lives”.

He replies that “we can agree to disagree on this”.

“I don’t work for you,” he says. “I follow my company’s policies, not your policies, while I can appreciate your concern …”

She cuts in, “So you’re willing to risk someone’s life for what, $30,000 a year?”

The man says he doesn’t believe there was any risk, and tries to end the conversation.

She then demands his name.

“I’m not going to tell you my name when you’re sitting here video taping me so you can try and elicit some sort of violence against me, it’s not going to happen,” he says.

“Elicit violence against you? You just elicited violence against two black men by calling the police on them,” she replies.

The manager repeats that “they got to walk away”.

“One of them had a warrant and could have been arrested and the cops still let him go,” he says.

“Listen to yourself – you work with black folks,” the woman says, pointing at his colleague working at the checkout. “Just remember that.”

Activists said they were planing to protest outside the store on Wednesday afternoon and called for a boycott until the “racist manager is replaced or fired”.

Conservatives criticised Ms Sade, who appears to have deactivated her Twitter account.

“The divide in America right now is basically between the reasonable man in this video and the insane woman berating him,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh said.

“If you find yourself on the side of the insane woman, you are the bad guy.”

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BEN BRADLEY: Why I refuse to take part in the Orwellian ‘re-education’ courses on ‘unconscious bias’ that tell ordinary people they are racists

Benjamin Bradley is an English Conservative Party politician from the North

Imagine being called in to the boss’s office tomorrow morning, a bit nervous and unsure what it is you’ve done wrong, and being told you’ve been reported by a colleague.

You’ve been caught saying that you disagree with the idea that Black Lives Matter is helping to deal with racism, that in fact you don’t believe Britain is a racist country. And now you’re to be ‘re-educated’. You’re going on a course…

It sounds like something from Orwell’s 1984, yet hundreds of thousands if not millions of people in workplaces around the UK have been ordered to attend special training sessions of this sort.

Many push a ‘Critical Race Theory’ ideology that suggests that – whether you know it or not – your views are tightly defined by your age, gender and skin colour. And these courses are run by ‘educators’ who want you to recognise and ‘check’ your privilege, and to understand just how little you really know.

Now imagine your company is paying £1.4 million for this training. In fact, you work in the public sector, so it’s £1.4 million of taxpayers’ cash.

In the coming months all of us as Members of Parliament will be asked to undertake this Unconscious Bias training, which is the second phase of our re-education following a summer of ‘Valuing Everybody’ lessons ordered by the parliamentary authorities.

The first part – which I did attend – turned out to be a £750,000, two-hour journey around the benefits of not being horrible to your staff. Personally, I think I’m quite nice to my team in the office.

I’m also sure that if I wasn’t, those two hours would not have made the blindest bit of difference.

I’m fortunate, I suppose, that due to Covid-19 the session was held via Zoom rather than having to decamp to an office somewhere, though I don’t suppose that the reduced workload has reduced the cost at all! It was still a very expensive chat.

The Mail on Sunday revealed a few weeks ago that the company that has been recruited to run these lessons uses a blue puppet called ‘UB’, who looks like the Cookie Monster, in their training sessions, which makes me think of it as some kind of primary school assembly.

The puppet, whose name stands for Unconscious Bias, ‘helps’ to explain to the class how words like ‘lady’ and ‘pensioner’ should be avoided in case they cause offence. Now this company has been given another £7,000 seedcorn money to help plan the delivery of sessions for MPs and parliamentary staff.

I hope they can agree that at least the primary school puppet will not be necessary!

I spoke out last week and made clear that I won’t be taking this training. It seems totally nonsensical to me that, in my role as a representative of a community that has typically felt left behind and voiceless for many years, I should be advised that there are certain words I shouldn’t use; certain issues that I should avoid; certain sensibilities that I should not offend.

How am I to raise the true feelings of an electorate that broadly feels like it’s being preached at by a metropolitan elite who neither understand nor care about them, if I have to walk on eggshells and dance around the problem?

In an environment where Leave voters have been labelled thick and racist for holding a view on uncontrolled mass immigration, despite proving many times that they are a majority in this country, which institutions or trainers down here in Westminster are qualified to tell me which views on the subject might be right or wrong?

Who has the right to say that those views are a result of ‘unconscious biases’, of white privilege, or of lack of understanding? The answer is nobody. There is no science to back this up, and nobody has that right. We live in a free country, with free speech and freedom of expression. We used to also have a robust and resilient approach to an argument that didn’t involve silencing everyone you disagree with.

Yet, here I am in 21st Century Britain reading a document from Challenge Consultancy, the company tasked with putting this training programme together. They offer to ‘work with the Cultural Transformation Team’ to deliver ‘Cultural Competency’ training – yes we are culturally incompetent now. I’m intrigued by the offer to help me to use ‘appropriate terminology’ and to ‘demonstrate ally behaviour’.

Given that this will be delivered in the same format as the first phase of this patronising rubbish, I think it’s reasonable to assume that this will similarly be costing more than half a million quid from the public purse.

Despite what these trainers may say, we are not defined by our physical characteristics. We do not have one homogenous view because of the colour of our skin. It’s nonsense. Our views are formed by countless different factors; from our lived experiences, our backgrounds and from the communities we grew up in, but we are individuals. We are not defined by others. We are free to define ourselves.

Time after time the documents explain that ‘the BAME community thinks x’ and ‘the BAME community is calling for y’, as if the entire black and minority ethnic community speaks with one voice on this, or on any issue. It strikes me as presumptuous and arrogant.

Who is qualified to police our language, or to say which views are right and wrong? Who polices those police, and makes sure that they aren’t pushing unconscious biases of their own? What is being done to ensure that the people who choose careers in delivering Unconscious Bias Training don’t choose that profession because they actually have their own agenda to push?

It was pointed out to me last week that, as an MP, I am in a fortunate position. Only my constituents can remove me from office.

The House of Commons can’t do a great deal to punish me if I don’t take the course. Yet outside Westminster, the reality is that most employees have no such independence and no power to refuse.

No wonder so many ordinary people are scared to voice dissent.

Did every single Premier League footballer really support Black Lives Matter, an organisation that campaigns to defund the police and smash capitalism? To my knowledge, every single one of them ‘took the knee’.

What would have been the consequences for the one who said no? I can’t imagine it would have been career enhancing. Societal pressure forces us to go along with things we disagree with, and that is not right or healthy for anyone.

With that in mind, I feel people like me have a responsibility to say something, and to do something.

I know that my concern is shared by millions of people around the UK from a variety of backgrounds – but particularly among constituents like mine who, for the most part, have not shared in the wealth generated by the booming economy in the South East.

I think Brexit is a symptom of this same divide too, and of the ‘left behind’ people and places who feel like they are being looked down upon by a detached metropolitan elite determined to police the way they think and talk. There is yawning chasm between our institutions and millions of the people that they are meant to work for.

Since I raised this, earlier last week, I’ve lost count of the number of colleagues who have offered their support – and have also promised to say no to the training. I’ve been stopped by Commons staff too who thanked me for speaking out against this ‘total nonsense’.

It’s sparked more interest than I could have predicted, and for that I am grateful.

Once again I call on colleagues in the privileged position of being able to speak out and to take a stand against this Leftist infiltration of our institutions, to do exactly that and put a stop to forced ‘re-education’ once and for all.

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Rabid doomsayers revel in fear, ignorance and deceit

Comment from Australia

We know fear and ignorance have a powerful and deleterious influence on human behaviour and we have tended to think that our age of instant knowledge and communications might have rendered them impotent. Now, confronted by pandemic and climate catastrophism, and deceptions, we can see that fear and ignorance are alive and amplified in the digital age.

From the deserted streets and shuttered houses of Melbourne to the Californian towns razed by fire, we see how fear and ignorance do enormous damage and distract us from practical protections. In both cases an ideological approach pretends a natural threat can be eliminated by grand government interventions; and alarmist tricks are used to frighten people into compliance.

No one should pretend that pandemics or wildfires are not worthy of legitimate concern. We know they are age-old natural threats that our ancestors endured repeatedly without the knowledge, contraptions and accoutrements that assist us now.

We need to overcome fear, keep our challenges in perspective, confront our dilemmas with rational approaches and avoid, rather than embrace, panic. We all need leaders that can be calm in a crisis, but increasingly we have leaders advancing political arguments with hysteria and hyperbole

It is instructive that the scare tactics and fearmongering come from those who want to change public behaviour and pretend they can vanquish, rather than manage, natural threats. This is a grand deceit based on a conceit — believing humanity can control the natural environment as though with an app.

Examples of fear and ignorance abound. This week Joe Biden stood in a park near his home in Delaware — while people were still battling devastating wildfires in California and Oregon, and battening down for hurricanes and flooding in Florida and neighbouring states — and read words from a teleprompter, with feeling, into the camera.

“If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” he shouted. “If we give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?”

Climate arsonist? This is the feral and unhinged language used by Greens senator Jordan Steele-John in this country while trying to leverage our bushfires for his climate change agenda. But Biden is running for president.

The core case presented here, that re-electing Trump will lead to more bushfires and flooding in the US, is so unscientific, irrational and blatantly false that it would not and could not be supported by any scientist. It calls into question the intellectual capacity of the man delivering the words.

The corollary is that if they elect Biden, Americans will be spared bushfires, hurricanes and floods. This is an insane proposition, made and amplified only to scare people into thinking climate policies can eradicate natural disasters, including an annual bushfire menace that predates human settlement of the American continent.

That public debate should be so base and false in this age of knowledge is perhaps the most frightening revelation of our time. Yet stuff like this is seldom interrogated by mainstream media — it is only those who challenge the catastrophism who have their claims fact-checked.

In a spiteful interview this week on the ABC’s 7.30, Leigh Sales harangued former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about how Donald Trump has misled the public “on everything from the coronavirus to climate change” — fair enough, Trump often contradicts himself. Then Sales zeroed in on comments Trump made when visiting the fire-ravaged West Coast this week about how temperatures “will start getting cooler” and how, when challenged on the climate science, the President said he doesn’t think “science knows, actually”.

The easiest and most common game to play is the inane one that amuses Twitter every day; testing the President’s meandering statements against a literal standard not applied to other politicians. Or we could recognise that, banal as it was, Trump was right to say cooler weather will ease the fire situation sooner or later, and that the science about the interplay between climate change, drought, floods and wildfires is far from certain or complete.

In his recent book, Apocalypse Never, environmentalist Michael Shellenberger detailed the latest science on fuel loads rather than climate change being the most telling wildfire inputs. Trump’s typically contrarian and unscripted remarks demonstrated a much closer relationship to reality than the maniacal claims from Biden.

Yet most media report Biden’s lunacy straight, as legitimate rhetoric, while slamming Trump’s reflections as madness. Trump’s arguments centred on forest management and fuel reduction — the pragmatic and proven way to reduce bushfire damage to people and property no matter what happens to climate — while Biden holds out the insulting silliness that his climate policies can relieve people of the fire-and-flood burden.

It is a reprise of the inanity we saw in Australia before, during and after last summer. Journalists even reported the fires were so severe that the bush might never recover. How horrible (note the fear) but diametrically opposed to the reality of how our sclerophyll forests have evolved to be dependent on fire for rejuvenation (note the ignorance).

The disingenuous rhetoric is designed to marshal the masses behind radical climate change policies. Those making rational arguments such as managing fuel, the only fire input we can control, are either ridiculed or given short shrift.

Former climate commissioner Tim Flannery segued from climate alarmism to pandemic pandemonium this week. “But the coronavirus also travels unseen through the great aerial ocean,” he wrote in The Guardian Australia in a testing metaphor, “insinuating itself in lung after lung, killing person after person, until it threatens our health system, economy and society.” Well, the dams are full, so I guess he had to find another angle.

Our early, sensible, national pandemic strategy to flatten the curve, slow the spread and ensure we have the medical capacity to deal with infections has been usurped by state governments determined to see every infection as both a horrific threat to their communities and a blow to their political standing. What began as a task of balancing medical, economic and social impacts has morphed into an obsession with eliminating all infections.

It has been clear since March that only the sick and elderly have much to fear from this virus and we needed to be clever about protecting the vulnerable while allowing society to operate as freely as possible. Absent the most dramatically effective vaccine ever produced in the shortest-ever time, we will eventually have to resort to that approach anyway — it is just that in the meantime we will have inflicted enormous damage on our communities and economies.

Again, the tools to deliver these crazy state policies have been fear and ignorance. In August, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said people needed to “acknowledge that this is a virus that affects everyone” — I guess you could say he has made sure of that.

“It can be deadly and it has been deadly here and around the world in people of all age groups and, indeed, people that are in otherwise good health,” said Andrews, looking to ensure everyone was petrified. Yet the blessed reality is that the young and the healthy, with allowance for the rare exceptions that prove the rule, are virtually immune from serious effects. Fewer than 2 per cent of our deaths have been people under 60, about 80 per cent were over 80 and about 90 per cent of all deceased had comorbidities (heart, immune system or respiratory disease, diabetes and others). About three-quarters of all deaths have occurred in aged-care facilities and overall deaths from all causes in Victoria and nationally are no higher this year than usual.

Despite speaking on the pandemic daily, many politicians fail to share these facts, preferring to create a different impression. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has warned of the “danger on the doorstep” — referring to NSW. “Our borders will remain closed for as long as the risk remains,” she said last month.

In April Andrews said, “No round of golf is worth someone dying.” The premiers keep telling us they are determined to keep their states “safe”.

Yet clearly their states are safe. The coronavirus is a worrying new disease that is highly infectious and, like many ailments, can be life-threatening if it afflicts the old or the sick. Premiers do not say their states are unsafe when there is a severe flu season. They did not say their states were unsafe during swine flu or avian flu or, god forbid, at the height of the HIV-AIDS trauma.

The catastrophists are having one of their best years, even though nothing is ever bad enough for them. They love to predict Armageddon and, if we listen to them, that is exactly what we will get.

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Trump says his nomination for Supreme Court ‘will be a very talented, very brilliant woman’

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that his Supreme Court nominee to fill the vacancy caused by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death will be a ‘very talented, very brilliant woman’ as ‘I like women more than I like men’.

During a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday night that Trump branded a ‘protest’, he declared ‘I will be putting forth a nominee this week, it will be a woman’.

Before he left the White House for the rally, Trump had named two conservative women who he has elevated to federal appeals courts as contenders, a move that would tip the court further to the right.

Trump, who now has a chance to nominate a third justice to a lifetime appointment on the court, named Amy Coney Barrett, 48, of the Chicago-based 7th Circuit and Barbara Lagoa, 52, of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit as possible nominees.

Trump claimed that despite the tight deadline before voters cast their ballots on November 3, there was still enough time for the Senate review process on a nomination to take place.

‘Twenty-nine times a vacancy opened during an election year and every single time the sitting president made a nomination. That included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or perhaps you’ve heard of him, the great Abraham Lincoln.

‘Twenty-nine times, every single time, nobody said ‘let’s not fill the seat’. ‘We have plenty of time,’ he added.

Barrett has generated perhaps the most interest in conservative circles. A devout Roman Catholic, she was a legal scholar at Notre Dame Law School in Indiana before Trump appointed her to the 7th Circuit in 2017.

A Barrett nomination would likely ignite controversy, as her strong conservative religious views have prompted abortion-rights groups to say that if confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she would likely vote to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

When questioned about her Saturday evening, Trump said: ‘She’s very highly respected, I can say that.’

Ginsburg’s death on Friday from cancer after 27 years on the court handed Trump, who is seeking re-election on November 3, the opportunity to expand its conservative majority to 6-3 at a time of a gaping political divide in America.

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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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