KONSTANTIN KISIN: How America’s Racial Politics Poisoned Britain.

To understand how we got here, you have to understand what the post-Floyd “reckoning” actually did to British institutions—especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional, nor was it just symbolic. It was ideological, and it was systematic. Police forces across the country, including the one that attended Henry’s murder, underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism training. A page still on the force’s website today states that its officers are committed to “ensuring Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary . . . is anti-racist in all it does.”

The principle drilled into officers, explicitly or implicitly, was that accusations of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness—that the historic failure of institutions to believe minority victims of racism was the original sin, and it needed atoning for.

Racism is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply the concepts of anti-racism without real-world judgement: You train officers to weigh an allegation of racism so heavily that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in Southampton—a man bleeding to death on the pavement, begging for help, being told by the officers who should be saving his life that they don’t think he’s been stabbed.

What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers, kneeling on his back, handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. Politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.

In his 2000 book, The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens wrote:

Too often this era is dismissed lightly with the old cliché that the American troops were ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Thanks to David Reynolds’ book Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1941–45, we now have a serious account of this immensely influential period in the national life, one which changed the British people’s view of themselves and turned the eyes of millions towards America as a place where life was more abundant and less bound in by history, tradition and class. More than fifty years after the American forces left, the radical journalist Jonathan Freedland urged in Bring Home the Revolution that this country should introduce American democratic methods and become a republic on the U.S. model. But what the British common people actually liked about America was its way of life, its food, its music, its language and its classlessness, not its way of choosing its town council, its judges or even its head of state.

They had already been exposed to a rather lurid idea of America through the cinema—even in the 1920s and 1930s it was noticeable that working-class audiences preferred American movies, while the middle class were happier with British-made films. Now real Americans, in huge numbers, arrived to live amidst the British.

Fast-forward to 2o2o:  George Floyd death: Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes a knee in support of Black Lives Matter movement.

UPDATE: “The race card would not have been used by the perps — indeed it would not even have been imagined by them — had it not been manufactured and indeed subliminally advertised,” Richard Fernandez tweets. “Two knives were plunged into the dying student that night. First the physical blade now in some evidence room. But there is a second political one and it is still loose on the streets.”

MORE:

Tweet concludes, “This is happening now. Real-time suppression. The cover-up is not history. It is happening in front of you. A British Prime Minister is silencing his own people to protect a narrative that kills children. Let that sink in. Then scream.”

UPDATE (June 3rd, 12:45 am): And thus, 2020 comes full circle:

CHEATING TAKES TIME:

UPDATE: Vital context from Jarvis follows.

Another update (along with a bump):

UPDATE (From Ed):

CBS TERMINATES SCOTT PELLEY’S CONTRACT:

And so, as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say aloha, Five O’Clock Pelley, and return to our duties. Let me me remind you that the Weblog is open 24 hours a day for your dancing and dining pleasure.

UPDATE:

 

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

K’PLAH:

HOPENCHANGE IS BARACK IN CALIFORNIA! ‘Barack Obama’ Is Running for California Governor, but There’s a Catch.

Hailing from the sunny streets of Alameda, Barack D. Obama Shaw has entered his not-so-unique name in California’s upcoming gubernatorial election against 61 other candidates.

Born as Cecil Shaw III, the governor nominee legally changed his name to Barack D. Obama Shaw in 2013, while he was serving in the US Army Reserve. In a recent interview with Spectrum News, Shaw credited the Democratic Party leader with opening up political possibilities for the likes of him.

He noted, “When I would stand to attention…and his picture was on the wall, and I was proud. He made it happen that a person like me could become president. And the word on the street was it’s not going to happen in our lifetime,” adding, “Barack Obama is the superhero. I’m the guy wearing his suit, that’s me. I’m the one that has the privilege that carries that banner around.”

If Barack D. Obama Shaw isn’t to your liking, also running for governor of California is LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott.

I have a plan to STOP illegal ICE operations; and a chaplain’s heart to remember who the system serves. I’m 100% against the miles-driven tax. To Make California Great Again, PROTECT THE PEOPLE! As the old parties are debating the heat over who bought the matches, while the dumpster fire burns; I’m handing you a fire extinguisher! That’s why I am the best choice for Governor of California.

No word yet if Kevin Phillips Bong or Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim bus stop F’tang F’tang Olé Biscuit barrel are running as well:

 

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The merciless mistreatment of Henry Nowak.

For me, the most chilling thing in the bodycam footage of Henry Nowak’s last moments of life is the cops’ cruel presumption that he is lying. As he writhes in terror and agony and cries out ‘I’ve been stabbed!’, a voice in the background – presumably that of the lowlife who murdered him, Vickrum Digwa – says: ‘He hasn’t been stabbed.’ A female officer responds. ‘I know’, she says. ‘But we have to check, don’t we?’

I know. It is delivered with dry, bureaucratic indifference. Henry is heard moaning, begging, ‘I can’t breathe’, yet here is a representative of the state seeming to agree with his knife-wielding tormentor that he is making it up. That cold, cavalier utterance – I know – will have cemented dying Henry’s great dread: that the police were taking the side of his killer rather than him. As his young, precious life came to an end, he heard himself being disbelieved, distrusted, icily written off as a fabulist. His murderer, meanwhile, was afforded respect. The state blindly bowed to his filthy lies.

The bodycam footage of the arrest of 18-year-old Henry Nowak after he was stabbed in Southampton in December last year is horrifying beyond belief. It is one of the most harrowing two minutes of video I have ever watched. Henry can be seen sprawled in agony in a stranger’s driveway, the place he sought sanctuary after being knifed four times by Digwa. His failing voice is thick with pain and fear. What he wanted in that moment – what he needed – was to be believed. The belief of others was the only thing that might have delivered him from his terror-stricken state. But it never came. He said ‘I can’t breathe’ nine times. He said ‘I’ve been stabbed’ four times. ‘I don’t think you have, mate’, said an officer with chirpy, inhumane derision.

Read the whole thing, and then watch Zia Yusuf of Reform UK reminding Cathy Newman of Sky News of her George Floyd-era rhetoric and the Hampshire police’s ‘race action plan’ that O’Neill mentions in the above Spiked essay. “I am not impugning the intention of people who created all this,” Yusuf tells Newman, but what is crystal clear is that we saw in a harrowing, distressing and tragic body cam footage is directly downstream… and what it makes crystal clear is that reaction of the police proves that the burden of proof for a man making an accusation of racism was zero. Henry was arrested pretty much immediately even as he [was] bleeding to death yet the burden of proof in saying repeatedly ‘I have been stabbed’ was such that the police responded as he [was] bleeding to death by handcuffing him and saying ‘I don’t think you have.'”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

GOOD, THAT KNOCKED ME OFF STATINS: A Painful Side Effect of Statins Explained After Decades of Mystery. “For millions of people, statins are a daily shield against heart disease. But around 10 percent of those who take statins to lower cholesterol experience a mysterious, painful side effect that causes many to discontinue these potentially life-saving medicines. Scientists have recently found one possible reason why. Research from Columbia University and the University of Rochester in the US revealed a potential culprit: a tiny calcium gate inside muscle cells that statins may force open. The resulting calcium leak can damage muscle tissue, offering a new explanation for at least some cases of statin-associated muscle symptoms (SAMS).”

BRITAIN’S GEORGE FLOYD MOMENT:

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UPDATE: A riot is the voice of the unheard.

FIGHT FOR BRITAIN’S FIRST NATIONS: