America’s white rightwing bastards are having a real moment with the murder of Tyre Nichols. It’s like they’ve finally found a police murder where they really truly feel rage toward the murderers, and they’re mad because they feel like the rest of us aren’t raging at the cops correctly.
See if you can see what we mean, if you can put your finger on how we are not mad in a way that pleases these white men.
“Everyone agrees the Nichols video is far worse than Floyd,” says Walsh.
What we hear him saying is that he didn’t think Floyd was that bad.
Walsh seems very angry the protests haven’t become violent. Of course, when protests become violent it’s often because Proud Boys and other rightwing agitator types show up. The Tyre Nichols protests haven’t provided as much opportunity for that, for a number of reasons.
And of course, there’s a huge difference between protesting when the murdering cops have already been charged with murder, when more people are being fired every day, when it at least appears like people in power are furious about what happened too. There is much to discuss about what the Memphis Police Department and departments around the country really need to do now, and nobody thinks anybody is doing enough, but this time, accountability has started to come quickly.
Walsh says “the Left doesn’t care about police brutality if there isn’t a racial angle.” There is a racial angle, of course, but it’s not one Walsh wants to talk about. It’s the racial angle Fox News is furious people are pointing out, the one about how policing in America is an inherently white supremacist institution, and Black cops who are part of that institution aren’t immune to becoming part of the problem.
Posobiec says the media has “stopped talking about” the Tyre Nichols murder, which is weird because the media is talking about it nonstop. This appears to be a particular rhetorical flourish of his, though, claiming that people have stopped talking about things.
Funny how this blog post has already stopped talking about Jack Posobiec.
How FURIOUS must the New York Times be that there wasn’t more violence, tweets Charlie Kirk, who’s totally not mad, THE NEW YORK TIMES IS MAD.
Golly, what are these white men so upset about?
Last night, Tucker Carlson claimed the racial justice protests about George Floyd weren’t actually about racial justice, and said that as a result of the Floyd murder, police departments started hiring less qualified, less white applicants.
CARLSON: The race riots of 2020 were never about George Floyd, obviously. That’s why there are no statues of him in American cities. They were about changing the country forever. The first step, of course, was defunding police departments across the country and forcing them to lower their standards to attract unqualified applicants: hiring officers based on skin color, rather than integrity or skill or self control, all in the name of equity.
He called the Memphis cops who murdered Nichols “affirmative action hires” and bitched that we couldn’t talk about that more. As Justin Baragona from the Daily Beast pointed out on Twitter, Tucker’s argument here is explicitly that hiring more Black police officers makes law enforcement more dangerous.
On Friday night, Tucker angrily insisted that no matter what, “white people did not play any role” in what happened in Memphis. He said that saying otherwise is “yet another attempt by our leaders of our country to inflame racial hatred in the United States.” (Against white people.)
That night he also seethed that people were mad about the police murder of Tyre Nichols, but not the killing of Ashli Babbitt, a white domestic terrorist who was in the process of attacking the US government.
And he hosted a Black guest named Jason Whitlock who was willing to argue — as Tucker nodded along — that this happened because of “young Black men and their inability to treat each other in a humane way.” Whitlock then made a really weird and sexist analogy about Memphis police chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, a Black woman.
By the way, Kat from Media Matters also made this video about just how horrifically weird and fucked up the guests are that Fox News has brought on to comment on this. It’s worth watching and sharing.
Want to see the Babylon Bee’s HILARIOUS angle on this? It is this “laughing until I’m crying” emoji of an article about how when Netflix makes the movie about Tyre Nichols, they are going to make the cops all white. Get it? GET IT?
The Right is starting to get better at comedy, etc.
The men in this post aren’t all making the exact same arguments, and quite frankly, it feels like they’re all a bit unmoored and grasping at straws, unable to settle on exactly what their narrative should be.
After all, American conservative men aren’t known for having nuanced brains capable of understanding, for instance, how the white supremacist history of policing could have led to a night where five Black police officers murdered an innocent Black man in Memphis three doors down from his mother’s house while he cried out for her. They can’t process that.
Our humble theory is that the only thing these men can process about this is that five Black men committed a murder, and they are outraged that even now they are not allowed to really let their Birth Of A Nation flags fly about it.
It would be better if they just shut their mouths and didn’t even try to contribute to the discourse. It’s been clear for decades they have nothing of value to add.
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