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Jan. 30, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:07
When Black Cops Brutalize A Black Man, That’s White Privilege | Ep. 1657
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Five black Memphis police officers are charged with murder in the killing of black man Tyree Nichols.
But the left still says it's systemic racism.
A highly touted think tank that promoted the Russian collusion narrative was a hoax, but the media promoted them anyway.
And the media tried to excuse a Palestinian Arab murdering seven Jewish synagogue goers, all in the name of peace.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, as we've discussed many times in the past here on The Ben Shapiro Show, narrative trumps all when it comes to the left wing.
And it never has this been truer than in the case of Tyree Nichols.
Terry Nichols is a 29-year-old black man who was hospitalized after a confrontation with police during a traffic stop earlier this month.
The officers were then fired.
This is in Memphis, Tennessee.
They were accused of using excessive force in an encounter that was captured on the video.
We're going to go through the video because it's kind of important to see what exactly was going on.
The key fact here, because again, narrative means everything to the left, is that the five police officers who have now been charged, they were all arrested on charges including second-degree murder, Their names are Tadarius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmett Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith.
They were all arrested, and they were all black.
And the victim in this particular case was also black.
This does not stop the left from claiming that white supremacy is to blame, because white supremacy is the ghost in the machine.
It is responsible for literally everything in life.
Just as to the feminist movement, everything in the world is the patriarchy.
To the left, when it comes to race, every single thing is white supremacy, even if it is black police officers who are beating and effectively killing a black man.
That is still white supremacy.
One of the worst things about politics is that single factor analysis tends to be the most easily available way of approaching politics.
And it's also the worst way.
People tend to think very simplistically about politics, just as they think about other things in their life.
And so if you are a hammer in search of a nail, everything looks like a nail.
And so if you are a left winger on race, everything looks like white supremacy.
If you're a feminist, everything looks like the patriarchy.
If you're a Marxist, everything looks like class warfare.
Now, the reality is that life is much more complicated than that.
That there are a bunch of different forces that play on individuals in our world, and that it's a combination of those forces and the individual decisions made by those individuals that leads to particular action.
But when it comes to politics, the easiest thing is to blame some sort of gigantic force and then say that you are fighting that force.
And if you fight that force properly, well, then this thing never would have happened.
If you're a Marxist, if you just fight the predations of capitalism, well, then all evil will go away.
If you're a feminist and you fight the patriarchy, all evils will go away.
You will alleviate the generalized condition and all of the evils go away.
Well, as we will see, this is not the case in Memphis, Tennessee, not by a long shot.
Hey, so what exactly happened in the case of Tyree Nichols?
Well, we now have video of the traffic stop.
Apparently, according to the videos, you can see that Tyree Nichols was pulled over by the cops.
And they stopped their cars in front and in back of him.
And then they tell him to get on the ground.
And he sits down.
He's not sure exactly what is meant by get on the ground.
And they tell him they want to lie on the ground.
They're yelling orders at him.
He's apparently trying kind of have to comply.
At a certain point, he just runs away.
First point, never run away from the cops.
This does not end well.
Running from the cops is a stupid thing to do.
This does not alleviate any of the evils of the police officers who are rightly being charged with aggravated assault and some of them being charged with second degree murder.
But many factors lead up to a situation in which the police do something like this.
So, you can see in the video what exactly happened.
There are multiple camera angles.
And in this particular case, what you see is that Tyree Nichols is pulled over.
One of the questions in this particular case is whether he was pulled over for a good reason or a bad reason, whether they had reasonable suspicion to pull him over or not.
He did not have a prior criminal record.
It is not clear why exactly they pulled him over.
I'm sure that's going to be the defense's case at trial, because one of the things that some of the police officers are being charged with here is kidnapping, meaning that it was sort of arrest under false pretenses.
They pulled him over for no apparent reason is sort of the implication here.
So before they actually released the tape and before we found out all the details, the Memphis police chief actually came out preemptively and said it was worse than Rodney King, which is not something that police chiefs should be saying.
The reason they should not be saying this is it sets the stage for riots.
What they should say is these police officers have already been arrested.
They've already been charged.
Most of them will go to jail, undoubtedly.
This is how the justice system is supposed to work, is that when this stuff emerges, people get arrested and they go to jail.
Instead, when you start ratcheting up the tensions, you are leading the way to something that is going to look very much like street violence, because this is exactly what we saw in Ferguson, Missouri.
It's exactly what we've seen in the past with regard to George Floyd.
Anyway, here was the Memphis police chief who was talking up the evils of the incident.
It has been said that it is reminiscent, perhaps worse, than the Rodney King video.
Is that your assessment?
That's my assessment.
I was in law enforcement during the Rodney King incident and it's, you know, very much aligned with that same type of behavior.
That it's worse?
Sort of group think.
I would say it's about the same, if not worse.
Okay, so I don't know, number one, why the Memphis police chief is doing interviews with Don Lemon, who obviously is a motivated political actor, as opposed to, for example, just doing a presser, releasing the tape, saying that we are doing our best to lock down the violation of law.
That is what a normal police chief would do.
That is not what happened here.
We're going to go through the timeline of what actually happened in the Tyree Nichols killing, and we're going to talk about the media narrative.
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So, what exactly happened?
We're going to go through the timeline.
So, 824 p.m.
that's according to NBC News, officers conducted a traffic stop in the apprehended Nichols.
They shouted, get out of the effing car.
And Nichols said, I didn't do anything, which of course is not the proper response to the police when they started.
Yelling at you.
The proper response to the police is you try your best to comply.
Now, this does not always result in the proper result.
You remember that there was a case a while back in which there was a it was in a hotel room and there was a suspicion that somebody had a gun in a hotel room and the police were actually ordering, in this case, a white victim to get on the floor and he was trying his best to comply.
They're giving all sorts of conflicting orders and they shot him to death, right?
But at the very least, you try to comply.
You don't start off with I didn't do anything. So a scuffle ensued. An officer yells, get the F on the ground.
And Nichols says, all right, I'm on the ground. And what they actually meant by that is we want you to lie on the ground. Police said they stopped him for reckless driving.
In Memphis, police chief that was Sarah Lynn C.J. Davis said early Friday morning that they found no proof of that, which again, we'll see whether that is true or not.
Nichols says, you guys are really doing a lot right now.
I'm just trying to go home.
By 825, he's pepper sprayed.
And then he attempts to leave.
And by leave, I mean run away.
And you can see this in the tape.
So we're going to go through the tape right now.
You can see that he's on the ground.
They pepper spray him and then he's gonna get up and he's gonna run away.
They keep yelling at him and put his hands behind his back.
He's not complying.
He's not putting his hands behind his back.
And then, somehow, he gets up and he takes off.
Okay, now that is not complying with the officer's orders, and that is not a smart move.
Okay, then, they hit him with the taser, and he keeps running.
And he leaves.
Backup comes.
Two police officers, two more police cars arrive at the intersection where Nichols was initially stopped, again, according to NBC News.
An officer can be heard on the radio saying they've spotted Nichols running on foot.
Now, again, if they have an impression that he is actually, he was apprehended for a good reason or that he's going to go commit another crime or something, they're allowed to pursue him on foot.
So at this point, nothing untoward has happened.
At 8.32 p.m., they re-apprehend him.
And then they spray him with pepper spray a bunch of times.
Two officers are then on top of Nichols, he is lying on the pavement, and they keep shouting to him to give him their hands, and he won't give him his hands.
So you can see that in the tape as well.
And he starts screaming for his mom repeatedly.
Apparently, the police caught up with Nichols in a neighborhood that was about 200 feet from his mom's home.
And finally, he seems to appear to move his hands to his back, and then they continue to pepper spray him.
And this is where things are gonna start getting out of control pretty quickly here.
So you can see in the tape, they apprehend him, he's on the ground, they're pepper spraying him.
Okay, here's where things start to get wild, right?
So they're starting to kick him.
They're shouting for mom.
They're telling him to give the hands. He's not giving the hands.
How many times do they have to, I mean, again, they're telling him over and over and over, give him the hands. He's not giving the hands. He's already run away once.
But, again, officers are trained to respond to these sorts of situations, and here's where things are going to get out of control.
Okay, so, you can see in this case he's still not complying.
There's a street lamp video.
The officer is using the baton on him to get him to comply.
He keeps getting up.
He's not, he's not sitting down.
And here's where things get out of control, right?
You can see right there, police officer on the, uh, on the right, on the right hand side of the video.
He actually takes a swing at this guy and he hits him with what they call hard hand and, uh, soft hand is where you grab somebody.
Hard hand is where you hit somebody.
And again, thanks to multiple police officers who I've talked to and asked about this particular case.
And this police officer is now probably in violation of the law, right?
The police officer is now hitting this guy in the face.
He appears to be somewhat under control.
It's kind of amazing to me that you have this many police officers and they still don't have this one guy under control.
That's a lot of bodies around this particular person.
And he doesn't appear to be totally At this point, physically free, right?
He's somewhat incapacitated, and they're still hitting him.
And it gets worse, right?
Officers stand Nichols upright, they pin his hands behind him, and now while his hands are pinned behind him, that's the thing, they're punching him while his hands are behind him, right?
You're not looking at aggravated assault, and if he dies, you're looking at second-degree murder at that point.
Right, so now he's on the ground.
You can see the video and now some of them are kicking him while he's on the ground.
...in real time that there's no audio on this but you do not need to listen to this because what we are seeing here is kick after kick. It looks like in the direction of Tyree Nichols' head.
The family described this video. They are literally holding him up. Oh.
And you're seeing some kicks, you're seeing punches, he's lying on the ground.
And at this point there's nobody around him, right?
He's just kind of lying on the ground.
So they're obviously not trying to subdue him at this particular point.
So that is the video.
And Nichols ends up hospitalized in critical condition after the encounter.
He dies three days later, and five officers involved in the case are fired.
So not every officer should be charged with second-degree murder.
Not every officer was hitting him in the face, for example, or participating in the actual beating of him.
People who pulled him over are not going to get the same charges, presumably, as people who actually punched him in the face while he was already subdued.
The former officers were all members of the department's vaunted Scorpion unit.
They were charged on Thursday with second-degree murder, two counts of official misconduct, two counts of aggravated kidnapping.
That's the question as to whether he was recklessly driving in the first place.
One count of official oppression, one count of aggravated assault.
And obviously you're going to see civil lawsuits as well against the police department.
In the aftermath of the sort of things you see with Tyree Nichols, I'm sure you're going to see a lot of woke signaling virtue corporations that are going to put out all sorts of statements about police brutality.
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Okay, so what is shown on screen and what is not shown on screen is going to be really the question in the actual criminal case here.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, the body camera footage capturing the police encounter that led to the death of Tyree Nichols is likely to be central in any future murder trial of the officers involved.
Lawyers cautioned even vivid videos can present challenges for prosecutors in court, which of course is true.
We've seen cases before in which the officers have successfully maintained that there is resistance by the suspect that you can't actually see on the body cams, for example.
The lamp is actually, the lamp light there, the camera, is actually obscuring the angle of what Nichols was doing on the ground, for example.
You might see that in a defense case.
Some of that footage is devastating, said Robert Frenchman, defense attorney, and Mukasey Frenchman on the flip side.
These aren't easy cases for prosecutors.
When police arrest and make split-second decisions, jurors tend to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Attorneys for three of the former officers couldn't immediately be determined.
An attorney for another of the ex-officers did not respond to requests for comment.
Prosecutors said the presence of video evidence can heighten jurors' expectations at trial.
After seeing some conduct in question in detail, jurors can begin to expect the same sort of evidence for any allegation.
Videos from police body cams obviously have become a lot more common these days.
And people are drawing a comparison to Rodney King here.
Honestly, it's possible to make the case.
I'm not sure that the comparison is particularly necessary.
I'm not sure why the comparison to Rodney, I mean to own individual criminal case.
There are a couple of factors that distinguish this actually.
Rodney King was driving 120 miles an hour apparently through like a residential neighborhood and they suspect it was high on PCP.
Also, the officers in that particular case were poorly trained.
In this case, these are like the supposedly most highly trained members of the Memphis, Tennessee police force.
So it's possible that it's actually worse than Rodney King in particular respect.
The big distinctive factor, obviously, is the race of the officers.
And this is where things start to fall apart pretty quickly.
So it's pretty easy to make the case this is police brutality.
It looks like police brutality from the tape.
It looks like people are violating the law.
It looks like the police are using methodologies that are not approved to subdue a suspect who's effectively already subdued.
Again, that is obviously putting aside the fact that the suspect got up and ran, was refusing to comply with demands, all of that's going to come up in the defense of the trial.
But once he's subdued, the last part of the video is particularly the part that's disturbing.
He's already been subdued, he's got his hands behind his back, and now they're punching him, even with his hands behind his back, right?
That's the part that looks particularly criminal here.
Spraying him with pepper spray while he's refusing to comply with demands, put his hands behind his back, that does not nearly look criminal, for example.
But it's the response that's really amazing here.
So the response comes in a couple of forms.
Response number one is the policy response.
So because of incidents like this, Memphis has now decided that they are going to disband that specialized police unit of which these officers were members.
According to Reuters, the police department said in a statement it was permanently deactivating the Scorpion unit after the police chief spoke with members of Nichols' family, community leaders, and other officers.
A police spokesperson confirmed all five officers were members of the unit.
The Scorpion Unit was Memphis's response to the fact that it is one of the most violent cities in the United States.
Statistically speaking, Memphis has one of the highest murder rates in America.
Memphis is ranked by murder rate number 12 in the United States with a murder rate of 44.4 per 100,000 people.
To put that in contrast, the murder rate across the United States is about 6.5 per 100,000 people.
So Memphis has an extraordinarily high murder rate, very, very high crime rate.
In fact, The Atlantic did an entire piece in November, I mean, just this last November, talking about the disaster area that is Memphis.
They talk about the fact that the homicide rate in Memphis is four to five times as high as the national murder rate minimum.
And there has been no real way of getting this under control.
According to the Atlantic, two years ago, at a time of historically low crime rates and unprecedented anger about police brutality, reforms to law enforcement felt possible, maybe even imminent.
Peace was not evenly distributed.
Places like Memphis were still more violent than some other big cities, but the trends were in the right direction and across generations and races.
Americans were upset about bad policing.
Now the country has entered a grim period as violent crime has risen nationwide.
The effect is both higher crime rates and failed policing seem locked in place because they're still blaming the Atlantic, quote unquote, failed policing.
But one thing that is going to happen here, is that Memphis is going to get worse in terms of crime.
Many of the policy prescriptions in the aftermath of a terrible incident like this end up being significantly worse for the people of Memphis than what existed before.
We've seen this in nearly every major American city that has had a serious police scandal.
There's a social scientist at Harvard, Roland Fry, and he's taking a look at this, and what he found is that the murder rates in cities that have been hit by high-profile protests over quote-unquote police brutality, the murder rates have risen dramatically in the aftermath of those protests.
Why?
Because if you're a cop, you're not going to do your job.
If you're a cop, you're going to sit aside.
And your response, on a predictable human level, isn't going to be, those were bad apples and they're getting prosecuted because they're bad apples.
It's, everything I do in the field is a judgment call.
If anything gets caught on tape, I may end up behind bars.
I'm not going to do any of this anymore.
When you disband things like the Scorpion unit in Memphis, is that going to make the murder rate go up or is it going to make the murder rate go down?
Is it going to make the violent crime rate go up or is it going to make the violent crime rate go down?
In other words, when you look at incidents like this, Which appear exceptional.
And you use them as an example of redoing entire policies.
To the detriment of the police force, what you're going to end up with is more dead black people in Memphis.
Because disproportionately people who are being murdered in Memphis are black.
So, the policy response to this sort of thing is usually garbage.
Usually, you'll have an incident like this, and just like everything else in American life or in politics generally, people take individualized incidents, and then they construct entire edifices of law around those individualized incidents, and the edifices of law end up being significantly worse than they were before.
A perfect example of this, by the way, would be the predations of, for example, the Patriot Act in the aftermath of September 11th.
September 11th, horrific, evil terrorist incident.
And then it turns out we emboldened our government to basically look through everything we've got.
And that's a serious problem.
The policy response tends to be disproportionate to the actual violation.
Not in terms of the violation not being evil.
The violation here is particularly evil.
But in terms of the policy response not being calibrated to stop that thing.
Instead, the policy response ends up being a blunderbuss.
It ends up being a shotgun.
And it ends up actually damaging issues far beyond this particular issue.
According to the New York Times, Chief C.J.
Davis of the Memphis Police had been on the job for only a few months in 2021 when she saw that homicide numbers were rising toward a record.
Near her new home downtown, drivers were buzzing wildly through the streets.
Often late at night, she had a plan to confront the mayhem.
For reckless drivers, she told her team, officers were to focus less on writing tickets, And more on all out strategy of seizing cars from the most dangerous drivers.
Violent offenders needed to be targeted with new urgency.
If the state could not take a case to court, she determined, her agency should ask federal prosecutors to take the case instead.
She said at a community event in November of 2021, quote, we all have the understanding about being tough on tough people.
Two days later, Chief Davis, the first African-American woman to lead the department, launched her most ambitious strategy, a new police unit named Scorpion, or Street Crimes Operation to restore peace in our neighborhoods, and would deploy some 40 officers as a strike team in some of the most volatile corners of the city.
So now she's disbanding that exact unit.
The city had for months touted the Scorpion team as a key to its crime-fighting strategy, promoting it as nearly an overnight success at a time when the city was posting record homicide numbers.
Memphis recorded more than 300 murders in 2021.
By comparison, New York City, which is 13 times larger, had fewer than 500.
Scorpion's supposed successes became a talking point for city officials, including the mayor, Jim Strickland, who highlighted the unit during his January 2022 State of the City speech.
Listed its early accomplishments, 566 arrests, 390 of them for felonies, etc.
Well now, they're disbanding the Scorpion unit.
What's the predictable result?
The same as it's been in every other major city, you're about to see a major uptick in crime in the city of Memphis.
And this is going to be combined, as we're about to see, with the left-wing narrative that this was all about race.
So the media are pushing a couple of narratives.
One of them is, of course, that the most important thing here to do is to curtail the police, which of course is going to end very, very badly for impoverished, crime-ridden communities.
The other narrative has to do with racism.
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So you have two narratives that are now being pursued by the left.
One is that policing all over the nation has to be redone.
That significant restrictions have to be put on police officers.
This is all a training issue.
Now, the reality is, sure, there are training issues in police departments.
Sure, we all want to see officers who violate the law prosecuted.
That is not quite the same thing as saying that police all over the United States are mistrained.
It's not quite the same thing as the DOJ under Merrick Garland, as I'm sure he's about to do, pushing consent decrees that are going to tie the hands of the police behind their back.
You're about to see, again, a major rise in violent crime all around the United States on the basis of reaction to incidents like this one.
So that's narrative number one.
The police are bad at their jobs.
The police are the real threat.
These are the people you should really fear are the cops.
Now, I will repeat again.
The cops in this case should be prosecuted.
They violated the law.
Also, this incident stops before it begins if Tyree Nichols surrenders to the police and puts his hands behind his back and does not run away.
Those two things can be true all at once.
Hey, that's narrative number one, and it's going to have real damaging effects in the city of Memphis.
Then there's narrative number two, and this is the broad national narrative.
The broad national narrative is that this has something to do with white people.
It's about white supremacy.
Now, you look at this and on its face, that's absurd.
How exactly are five black police officers who punch and kick a guy who's black and then the guy dies?
How exactly is that a white supremacy issue?
And yet this is precisely the response of many on the left.
Because again, when you're a hammer in search of a nail, everything looks like a nail.
So Joe Biden responded to this particular incident.
There was the president of the United States responding to what happened to Harry Nichols.
Your comments today were moving.
I don't know how you did it for Rodney.
I know Tyree's dad is devastated.
Yes, sir.
I know people are able to say that to you, but I do know I lost my son in a war.
The consequence of the war in Iraq being every year.
I lost my daughter.
I had to kill my wife and daughter.
I don't know how you stood there.
I didn't have the courage.
Joe Biden isn't going particularly racial there.
I will say Benjamin Crump being part of any case is a very, very good indicator that things are about to get ugly and racial very quickly.
Benjamin Crump is one of the great race grifters in America.
He has been by the side of people who have, this is not the case in this particular case, but with regard to Michael Brown, for example, Ben Crump was right at the center of that.
He is there whenever something bad happens that is alleged to have been the conduct of police.
He's always there on the scene in any case.
You gotta say about Joe Biden, how delusional is the President of the United States that he calls up grieving parents of a person who was killed in police custody, and his first move is to pretend that his son was killed in the Iraq war.
He was not.
I don't know how many times we have to debunk this idea that Beau Biden was killed and he served in the Iraq war bravely, and then he died of brain cancer years later.
He was not killed in the Iraq war.
Also, just as a general rule, what you don't do when you're making a mourning call, we do it routinely in the Jewish community when somebody dies, you have to, you do what's called a shiva visit.
The first thing you do is you don't talk about all the dead members of your family.
The guy just has no class whatsoever on these sorts of issues.
It's really kind of gross.
Anyway, that is not the political.
The political is, you see people who are claiming that this is an aspect of white supremacy.
So speaking of Ben Crump, here was the lawyer for the family.
Again, first on the scene.
Ambulance chaser par excellence, Ben Crump, saying that black communities have different types of police officers.
So really it is white supremacy because they get the worst police officers, which again is kind of racist considering all these police officers were black.
It almost doesn't make any sense the way they conducted themselves.
It's like we're witnessing, not police officers, but people acting like criminals themselves.
You know, unfortunately Dana, and communities of color, They often have different types of policing than many of our white brothers and sisters have in their community.
And this video illustrates it, that it's this culture that says it doesn't matter whether the police officers are black, Hispanic, or white, that it is somehow allowed for you to trample on the constitutional rights of certain citizens from certain ethnicities and certain communities.
It's always white supremacy.
Now, again, you want to deal with the issue of police brutality?
That's a real issue.
You want to deal with police violence?
That's a real issue.
You want to talk about how do you balance the needs of a community that is suffering from wild criminality like Memphis is, particularly black areas of Memphis, Tennessee, very, very high crime rates.
How do you deal with that while also preserving the civil rights of people who are, for example, pulled over for reckless driving?
That's a real conversation.
But if your first move is to turn this into, well, you know, black communities have different kinds of police officers.
That's not the key issue here.
The key issue here is high crime communities have very different brands of police officers because the police officers have to deal with a lot of crime.
I know, believe it or not, the police officers in Beverly Hills, they're not having to deal with nearly this much crime, and particularly not this much violent crime, which means they tend to engage in less violent activity.
Policing is a really ugly business.
One of the things that body cams have shown is just how ugly that business is.
You have to make split-section decisions in which you are dealing with violent criminals on a regular basis, or people who are disobeying the law in particularly egregious ways.
And so nobody ever takes that instead of just suggesting maybe we ought to recalibrate how we do some of the policing issues without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Instead, the idea is that it must be a racial issue.
This also led a Democratic freshman representative to suggest that this was the result of white supremacy.
the representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, he said, doesn't matter what color those police officers are, the murder of Tyree Nichols is anti-black and the result of white supremacy.
It's all white supremacy, you see, because everything bad in the universe is white supremacy.
It's all about systemic racism.
Now, you can't have it both ways.
The real impact of systemic racism on crime in the black community is a reporter from the Los Angeles Times named Jane Levy.
She wrote about this at length.
She wrote an entire book about crime in Los Angeles.
And one of the things she talked about was the fact that in the aftermath of the end of the Civil War, one of the things that was white supremacy was the refusal to put police officers in black communities because a lot of white communities were like, ah, who cares?
They're just black people killing each other.
That was actual white supremacy, actual racism, saying we should not have police officers in these communities.
Now when you have these communities begging for more police, and the police are put in there, and then the police do something wrong, that too is white supremacy.
Everything is white supremacy.
Which is why you have a piece in the Washington Post titled, Black Memphis Police Spark Dialogue on Systemic Racism in the United States.
I'm sorry, no.
You are sparking the dialogue.
One of my favorite brands of journalism is where you create a headline and then you say, well, people are saying.
People are saying.
Like, well, systemic racism, it's not me who's saying it.
A conversation has been sparked by me.
I'm just saying it's out there.
Quote, for the mother of Tyree Nichols, the fact that five Memphis police officers charged with beating her son are also black has compounded her sorrow as she tries to cope with this violence at age 29.
It makes it even harder to swallow.
Roe Vaughn-Wells said in an interview last week because they are black and they know what we have to go through.
By the way, that seems like a very it's an odd argument.
Obviously the grieving mother, so you take everything that the grieving mother says with the sympathy that it ought to be taken, but it seems weird that you've, like it's worse if it's black police officers who end up being responsible for the death of your son than if it's white police officers who are responsible for the death of your son.
Very, very odd rationale right there.
This is the fun of the term institutional racism.
Institutional racism suggests that the entire institution is racist.
Now, you don't have to point to any policies of the department that are racist.
police reform about the for raciveness of institutional racism in policing.
This is the fun of the term institutional racism.
Institutional racism suggests that the entire institution is racist.
Now you don't have to point to any policies of the department that are racist.
You don't have to point to any sort of actual law that's racist.
You just say the institution is racist and therefore a person who is of the same race as the suspect is also a member of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan that's out there killing black people.
The widely viewed videos of Nichols beating provided fodder for right-wing media ecosystems that routinely blame Black America's maladies on Black America.
Ah, it's fodder, you see.
It's fodder.
See, when the narrative does not meet with what the left wants it to meet with, then it's the fault.
The right is pouncing again.
So much pouncing.
So when the right says, uh, it doesn't look like white supremacy to me, the left goes, ah, that's pouncing on the white supremacy narrative.
How could you?
Provided fodder.
Well, maybe the problem is, for you, that this particular incident did not provide fodder for your narrative, and so you still have to keep cramming, cramming, that elephant-sized issue into a thimble.
It doesn't fit.
It doesn't work.
But they're not gonna stop.
The Memphis Police Department, which has nearly 2,000 officers, is 58% black, the result of a decades-long effort to field a police force that resembles the city's 64% black population.
Unlike in several recent high-profile police brutality cases, Memphis Police Chief Sarah Lynn Davis, who is black, and other officials acted swiftly in firing, arresting, and charging the Memphis police officers.
In other words, the system failed when it came to Tyree Nichols, but the system actually worked when it came to prosecuting the police officers who violated the law.
Diversifying law enforcement is certainly not going to solve this problem, said Samuel Sinyangwe, the president of Mapping Police Violence.
And then this entire article is talking about how terrible it is that the right is pointing out that this actually has nothing to do with race.
But of course, it is a racial issue, according to the left, because everything is a racial issue, according to the left.
Janelle Austin, who runs the George Floyd Global Memorial in Minnesota, She said, this is what I fear.
What's going to happen in Memphis is what happened in Minneapolis.
When Derek Chauvin and other officers were charged, the narrative turned from an issue of the police department to an individual issue.
That was a PR strategy.
What we've been screaming from our lungs for years is that the system and the culture of policing trains people's minds, regardless of the color of their skin, to behave in a certain way.
Systemic racism can be more difficult for the general public to grasp than explicitly visible white-on-black crimes, said Craig Futterman, clinical professor of law at University of Chicago Law School.
We'd like to think in the binary, the good guys and the bad guys.
It's far easier to consume the story in an uncomplicated way, seeing a white officer shoot 14 shots at a young black boy laying on the ground.
That's a reference to the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald over in Chicago.
But again, you just have to keep saying that it is, of course, white supremacy that is responsible for all this, Van Jones.
Nice guy wrong on this.
He says over at CNN the same thing.
An entire opinion piece titled the police who killed Tyree Nichols were black, but they still might have been driven by racism.
It's I'm sorry, no, maybe they're driven by the fact that.
Police tend to get over violent with criminals or people who they suspect in this.
No clear.
It wasn't clear that Tyree Nichols was a criminal.
People they suspect are criminals or people who run from them or people who resist arrest or whatever it is.
So Van Jones claims that it's about black people now being indoctrinated with white supremacy.
One of the sad facts about anti-black racism is that black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects, says Van. Society's message that black people are inferior, unworthy, and dangerous is pervasive. Over many decades, numerous experiments have shown these ideas can infiltrate black minds as well as white. Self-hatred is a real thing. That's why a black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion while treating his white patrons with deference.
Black people can harbor anti-black sentiments and can act on those feelings in harmful ways.
Why does this have to be about the race of the suspect?
Why can't it just be about police officers violating the law and doing something wrong to a suspect?
But again, it has to be about race.
It has to be, because if it's not about race, what exactly are these folks going to talk about?
Meanwhile, I had Jemele Hill, who again, everything has to be about race for Jemele Hill, tweeting out in a very, very similar way, claiming it was white supremacy, quote, just as women sometimes carry water for the misogyny and the patriarchy, black people have definitely done the same for white supremacy.
You're stuck on the faces.
I'm looking at the system and why it was created.
Absurd.
Absurd.
By the way, created by the chief of police who is black in Memphis to stop crime against black people in Memphis.
But apparently it's white supremacist violence.
Always and forever, white supremacist violence.
Again, this is part of a broader narrative that the left likes to draw, which is how you end up with, on ABC this week, panelist Karen Finney comparing banning critical race theory to police brutality.
It's all part of that.
Everything's the same.
It's all part of that, that big ball of left-wing narrative.
And if it doesn't fit, doesn't matter.
You just go for it anyway.
We know from the civil rights movement, you can't just change law.
You have to change hearts and minds.
And anti-black racism is everywhere.
We know that.
That is part of the training that these officers receive, that black and brown equals danger.
We see it.
We have to acknowledge this comes at a time when the governor of Florida says no African-American AP classes, when we have demagoguery around critical race theory, when the truth is we have to be willing to have Hard, truthful conversations in this country.
These people are ridiculous.
I'm sorry, they're ridiculous.
It's Rhonda Sanchez's fault for banning critical race theory, which is just lies about American history and about how American systems work.
It's the white governor of Florida's fault that five black police officers in a majority black police force with a black police chief in a majority black city In a different state.
It's Ron DeSantis' fault.
Slow clap for these guys.
And everybody can see through it.
And if you can't see through it, it's because you're willfully blind at this point.
There are a lot of employees of major news networks who will tell you lies about, you know, racial narratives, where racial narratives really are inappropriate.
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Also, Folks, if you're a parent, you know the radical left has infiltrated pretty much every aspect of your kids' lives, from academia to medicine to kids' programming.
They're pushing a woke agenda at every single turn, and they're doing everything they can to capture the hearts and minds of your kids.
It really is Pied Piper of Hamelin kind of stuff.
They are leading your kids away from you.
It's something they want to do.
If you're a parent, this is deeply concerning stuff.
You might feel powerless to stop the onslaught.
The good news, many people are finding a way to fight back.
That's why I'm excited to tell you about a brand new book published by DW Books.
It is written by my friends Bethany Mandel and Carol Markowitz.
It is called Stolen Youth, How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.
In Stolen Youth, they share testimonies from parents who are witnessing just how far out of control the agenda of the left is.
That agenda is corrupting our morals, and it is one that was exacerbated during the pandemic.
It's an absolute must-read for parents who want to understand how we got here, what we're up against, how to go on the offensive, and fight to save our kids.
Stolen Youth, how radicals are erasing innocence and indoctrinating a generation.
It comes out on March 7th.
You click on the Amazon link in the description.
You can pre-order your copy today.
It's a really important book.
Carol and Bethany do a wonderful job.
Go check out that book today, again, Stolen Youth.
over at Amazon or anywhere else you can pre-order a book.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of media hoaxes, we've seen the media hoax that five black police officers allegedly killing a black man is all that white supremacy.
Another amazing media hoax uncovered by Matt Taibbi, who has now become a sort of bugaboo of the left.
He is a person of the left, but because he actually tells the truth on occasion, this makes him a bugaboo of many people on the left.
He has an amazing story about an account called Hamilton68.
Hamilton 68 is an oft-cited neoliberal think tank.
He said that it spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments, and it might go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.
Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group's quote-unquote research.
Even fact-checking sites like PolitiFact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.
So what exactly is Hamilton 68?
Hamilton-68 was and is a computerized dashboard designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure Russian disinformation.
It was the brainchild of a former FBI agent, Clint Watts, who appears on MSNBC all the time.
It was backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think tank.
The latter's advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Mike Morrell, former ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and one-time Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.
Well, it turns out Hamilton-68 was a complete sham.
The way that Hamilton 68 tried to determine whether something was Russian disinformation or not is they had a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked to Russian influence activities online.
That list was hidden from the public, but Twitter was able to recreate Hamilton's sample by analyzing its application program interface requests.
That's how they first reverse engineered Hamilton's list in late 2017.
They ordered forensic analysis because Hamilton 68 kept being used over and over and over again.
As it turns out, out of the 644 accounts that Hamilton 68 was using in order to determine whether a piece of information was Russian disinformation, only 36% were registered in Russia.
Many of those were associated with RT.
Twitter execs were shocked.
The accounts Hamilton 68 claimed were linked to Russian-influenced activities online were not only overwhelmingly English-language, 86%, but mostly legitimate people in the United States, Canada, and Britain.
Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth, he said, quote, I think we just need to call this out on the BS it is.
And it is unbelievable.
So basically there was this account and it created a fake list of Russian influence actors, and then it propagated the myth that these people were promoting Russian disinformation.
The names on that list included people like David Horowitz of the right.
To Dennis Michael Lynch and progressives like consortium editor Joe Lauria.
It's just, it's an absurdity, and it was cited over and over and over again.
Because Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, George Washington University, other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source.
And many elected officials promoted that site as well.
And the institutions in our society have lost all credibility, and there is a reason for that, and it is because they are willing to be as gullible as anyone else.
They are so damned gullible.
Which I presume is why the media also are not reporting.
I mean, the same media that were reporting endlessly on Hamilton 68, I assume this is why they are not reporting on James O'Keefe's latest video.
It shows Jordan Tristan Walker, who's allegedly Pfizer's director of research and development, strategic operations, and mRNA scientific planning.
Apparently, he was caught on an undercover recording admitting that he and other Pfizer executives have discussed mutating COVID viruses in order to develop tailored vaccines to treat them, which we would call gain-of-function research.
Which, again, is something that has become quite controversial because it is most likely gain-of-function research that may, well, most likely, at least very, very possible that that is the reason why we had the COVID-19 pandemic in the first place.
So here's a Project Veritas journalist talking To the alleged Pfizer Director of Research and Development, Strategic Ops and mRNA Scientific Planning talking about the possibility of Pfizer itself doing gain-of-function research in order to create new vaccines.
Pfizer ultimately is thinking about mutating COVID?
Well, that is not what we say to the public.
The virus keeps mutating?
Yeah.
Well, one of the things we're exploring is like, why don't we just mutate it ourselves so we can preemptively develop new vaccines, right?
So we have to do that.
If we're going to do that, though, there's a risk of like, as you could imagine, no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating fucking viruses.
You have to be, like, very controlled to make sure that this virus that you mutate doesn't create something that, like, you know, goes everywhere.
You're not supposed to do gain-of-function research with the viruses.
Like, they recommend not.
But you do, like, these, like, selected structural mutations to try to see if you can make it more potent.
Yeah.
So there is research underway about that.
I don't know how that's going to work.
It's pretty good for the industry, to be honest.
Yeah.
It's bad for everyone else in America.
So, why isn't this widely reported?
I assume this has not been widely reported because, again, it makes Pfizer look really, really, really bad.
And Pfizer has already been proposed as the great savior of Western civilization thanks to the COVID vaccines.
Again, when it came to the COVID vaccines, I encouraged people who were elderly and people who were obese and had pre-existing conditions to take the vaccines.
I took it myself under the false pretense That was promoted by Pfizer and our public officials that it prevented transmission, and that it was necessary for people who were, you know, my age, 37, 38.
So I took it.
If I knew then what I know now, would I have taken the vaccine?
Probably not.
There was no purpose to it.
It doesn't prevent transmission.
In people my age, COVID presented very little risk.
By the way, I never encourage people who are under the age of, say, 35, 30, or 20 to get the vaccine.
My kids are not vaxxed, for example.
The fact is that the media have decided Pfizer are the good guys, and people who oppose Pfizer are the bad guys, so they're just not reporting any of this sort of stuff.
Another story from this weekend that mirrors this exact issue.
A shadowy army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticized the government's COVID lockdown policies in Britain, according to the Daily Mail.
Military operatives in the UK's Information Warfare Brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.
They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists like Peter Hitchens and Toby Young.
Their dissenting views were then reported back to Number 10.
Documents obtained by the Civil Liberties Group Big Brother Watch and shared exclusively with the Daily Mail expose the work of government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.
I mean, this stuff is terrifying.
Look, we at the Daily Wire were so opposed to these mandates that we literally spent seven figures suing the Biden administration.
We're the only major company in America in the media sphere to sue the federal government in order to stop the VAX mandates for American citizens.
But the institutional trust here is totally gone, and it should be totally gone.
By the way, side note here, I'd like to congratulate Novak Djokovic, who would undoubtedly be the world leader when it comes to Grand Slam tennis events, had he not been banned from tennis for about a year because he refused to get the COVID vax.
There's no reason he should have had the COVID vax.
He said he'd already had COVID, number one.
Number two, he's one of the healthiest people on planet Earth.
He won the Australian Open at the age of 35, and he won it in convincing fashion.
He's now tied for the career lead in Grand Slam trophies.
He has 22 of them.
He undoubtedly would have 23, 24, maybe 25 if he had not been banned from the sport.
He still can't come to the United States, by the way, and participate in like the U.S.
Open.
That's how insane all of this is.
And then people wonder why the institutional trust is absolutely gone.
That would be the reason why the institutional trust is absolutely gone all over the world.
And particularly trust in the media, who have been lying to you all along and are willing to propagate narratives even beyond the point where it is very clear that these narratives are no longer true.
They just hide things they don't like, and then they reveal things that are not true in the first place.
Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats are very, very upset over the fact that the Republicans are moving to boot Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar from their particular committees.
This is in direct response to the fact that Nancy Pelosi kicked a bunch of Republicans off of committees.
Now, again, some of the Republicans she was targeting aren't my favorite Republicans.
Doesn't matter.
You don't get to do that.
You don't get to kick the opposing party's people off committees.
The opposing party gets to choose who staffs their committees and who does not.
Nancy Pelosi broke the rules, therefore Republicans are responding in kind.
So, over the weekend you had Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar pretending to be very, very offended that they are being booted from their various committees by the Republicans.
Here they were over the weekend on CNN.
Do you believe that the pattern that your colleague here has put out there is, as Republicans are saying and some Democrats say, rise to the level of anti-Semitism?
Dana, I believe that this is all a pretext.
And if you look at the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, he is dining with white nationalists and anti-Semites.
This is merely the weakness of Kevin McCarthy's speakership, that he's so reliant on these extreme members.
I mean, how can you, on the one hand, suggest that These are some kind of legitimate basis for unseating Democrats from committees and put someone like George Santos on any committee.
The hypocrisy just grabs you by the throat.
Look how Adam Schiff refuses to answer the question as to whether Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite.
Of course she's an anti-Semite!
Everybody knows she's an anti-Semite.
What a pathetic human being Adam Schiff is on every particular level.
He happens to be a Jewish guy, so this is particularly ridiculous for Adam Schiff.
He sat next to her on CNN pretending she's not an anti-Semite.
She is a ridiculously overt anti-Semite, Ilhan Omar, the Congresswoman from Minnesota.
My favorite part of this particular interview, where Adam Schiff is trying to explain why he and Ilhan Omar and Eric Swall shouldn't be kicked off of their various committees, is Ilhan Omar explaining she didn't know it was anti-Semitic to say that Jews are very into money.
It's a giant mystery to her.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I'm sure it was a giant mystery to Ilhan Omar.
She was just ignorant.
That's all it was.
It was just ignorance, which is why she keeps saying anti-Semitic things over and over and over by calling the state of Israel an apartheid state and essentially rooting pretty openly for Hamas.
She loves Jews, guys.
She just doesn't understand any of the tropes.
That's the real issue here.
When you apologized for the all about the Benjamins comment you said anti-semitism is real and I'm grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-semitic tropes.
What did you learn?
A lot.
I certainly did not or was not aware that the word hypnotize was a trope.
I wasn't aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money.
That has been a very enlightening part of this journey.
Shiv's just sitting there.
He's like stone-faced.
He's like, yeah.
Oh man, this is awkward.
Oh, this is just terrible.
I can't believe how awkward this is.
It's so terrible.
Honest to God.
You people.
And when I say you people, I mean Democratic Congress people sitting there pretending that Eric Swalwell should be on the Intel Committee after banging a Chinese spy.
Or Ilhan Omar should be on the Foreign Affairs Committee being a ridiculously open anti-Semite.
Or Adam Schiff should be on the House Intel Committee after spewing for years Russian propaganda nonsense.
What a joke.
What an absolute pathetic joke these folks are.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Ronna Romney McDaniel winning re-election as head of the RNC for some unspecified reason.
Plus, the media declaring that if you are a Jew and you go to synagogue in Jerusalem and you get shot, that's a cycle of violence.
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