Colin Kaepernick doesn’t want to “defund” the police. He doesn’t want to “reform” the police. He wants to abolish the police because, well, they’re white supremacists and they want to kill black people.
The white supremacist institution of policing that stole Breonna Taylor’s life from us must be abolished for the safety and well being of our people. #BreonnaTaylor #SayHerName #AbolishThePolice
— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 23, 2020
Of course, the “safety and well-being” of black people would be threatened without any police to stand between the innocent and the violent thugs who are shooting down members of their own race in near-record numbers. This is something self evident and doesn’t require much thinking to figure out.
But thinking is hard. And Kaepernick doesn’t do hard.
Kaepernick is known for kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games. He now says he was protesting “police brutality.” But at the time, in August of 2016 when he decided to kneel, his reasons for his protest were a little different. The man who signed a $39 million contract to play a kid’s game was being “oppressed.”
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
How that protest against oppression morphed into a call for an end to police brutality is still a mystery. It appears that Black Lives Matter appropriated the protest to serve their own ends: get police out of the way so that violent criminals can own the streets.
What’s remarkable about the reporting on the Breonna Taylor grand jury decision, where no officers involved were indicted on charges relating to Taylor’s death, is the herculean effort by the media to obscure the simple fact that Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired shots at the officers before they fired back in self-defense. Those shots wounded Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly. You would think that would be a significant detail to explain what happened the night of Taylor’s death and why the police might have been shooting in the first place. But Newsweek, Fox News, and most other reporting on the Kaepernick story fail to mention it.
Wanting to abolish the police isn’t a serious political position to have. It’s posturing. It communicates a radicalism that is increasingly attractive to the black community as hysteria over the deaths of black men and women reaches a fever pitch. There aren’t any more deaths in police custody today than there were five years ago. But with the media in a frenzy over the issue, activists and revolutionaries who have been waiting for the opportunity are fully exploiting the fear and unreason gripping America.
Colin Kaepernick is a tool. He’s a means to an end for those who have a very different agenda than he does. But as long as they can stand him up in front of microphones and let him rant, he is of use to the cause.
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