Some black people are so whipped up over the Confederate flag — and eager to silence the free speech of others — they’re willing to be run over by moving vehicles to do it.
Video captures a black man running up to a semi in slow-moving traffic on the highway to rip off a Confederate flag from the truck’s tailgate.
The Grio, a black news website, grabbed the video from Twitter and posted it, with James Brown’s “The Payback.”
The video shows the unidentified man trotting behind the truck, struggling to remove the flag. After several moments, he rips it off and gets out of the road.
The site reports the truck “appears to be a part of ‘TRIBE Transportation, Inc.,’ a company ironically owned by a Native American woman.”
For whatever reason, Grio called the company to tell on the driver and get reaction.
“Any issue like that we’d handle internally,” TRIBE Executive Vice-Preisdent Matt Handte said. “Regardless of what happened, that’s something we’d handle internally.”
In the week after nine people were shot dead at Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina, five churches with predominantly black congregations in five Southern American states burned. Three of the fires were being investigated as arson.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are working with local authorities to find those who set them.
The church fires come days after police say Dylann Roof, 21, shot and killed nine people during a prayer service on June 17 at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, including the church’s pastor. Roof has been charged with nine counts of homicide and possession of a firearm.
Since the shooting, lawmakers and civil rights leaders have been focused on banning the Confederate flag. Now authorities are looking into the recent church fires at predominantly black churches, which the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that tracks hate crimes, reports “may not be a coincidence.”
Though the recent cases are not being investigated as hate crimes, motives remain unclear.
Amid last week’s fires, the Atlantic’s Emma Green inciting more racial strife when she wrote that such incidents are “often association with racial violence: a highly visible attack on a core institution of the black community, often done at night, and often motivated by hate.”
The fires may very well have been started by black activists trying to create sympathy for themselves.
“But no matter why they happened,” Green added as if trying to absolve such arsonists, “these fires are a troubling reminder of the vulnerability of our sacred institutions in the days following one of the most violent attacks on a church in recent memory.”
A Facebook petition is calling for a National “Burn The Confederate Flag” Day.
Only 8,000 people have “liked” the petition as of Monday morning.
“The Confederate flag has flown in America for 150 years too long. The Civil War is long over. Fortunately, our First Amendment right gives us the power of free speech that will allow us to display our feeling by burning the flag of slavery from sea to shining sea. Join us for a PEACEFUL DAY OF PROTEST and burn the Confederate flag,” the petition reads.
It continues, “This is our day to demonstrate that it is no longer acceptable to fly this flag anywhere. Organize a Confederate flag burning event in your area on Saturday, June 27th, and flood social media with pictures and videos using the hashtags #FeelTheBurn and #TakeItDown.”
The Confederate flag has become a topic of debate once again after a white gunman opened fire during Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week, killing nine. Suspect Dylann Roof, 21, has been charged with nine counts of murder.
In an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, Joe Lapointe called for the Confederate flag to be burned.
“In that South Carolina will never willingly take down the flag, the time has come for opponents to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech and burn the Confederate flag – at the state Capitol in South Carolina, in front of the White House, in front of Fox News or maybe even outside the Grand Ol’ Opry,” Lapointe wrote.”
Lapointe said the Confederate flag is as “evil and vicious to African Americans as the Nazi swastika flag is to Jews.”
“The display of the Confederate flag – anywhere – is a nonverbal statement of race hate. Its burning would be a nonverbal response to its crude attitude,” he wrote. “You’re sure not going to change their attitudes with sweet reason. Fight their figurative fire with the real thing.”
South Carolina was the last state to fly the Confederate battle flag from its Capitol dome. A compromise in 2000 moved the flag to a 30-foot flagpole elsewhere on Statehouse grounds, where it has been flying at full staff.
The Indian governor of South Carolina Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state Capitol Monday, less than a week after a 21-year-old white man gunned down nine people at a historic African American church.
Support for the flag to come down from leaders around the state and around the country has been steadily growing in the wake of the attack.
“Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it is time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds,” Haley said during a news conference attended by Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, along with other state leaders.
Haley called on Monday for South Carolina to do what just a week ago seemed politically impossible. The announcement was met by applause and cheers from those in attendance.
Haley said The flag “does not represent the future of our great state”. Jeb Bush, who ordered the removal of the flag from the Florida statehouse while governor, said he was confident that South Carolina would “do the right thing”.
The MSM is still strangely silent on the shooting in Philidelphia.
Haley is one of two sitting Indian American governors in the United States, the other being fellow Republican Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. She is also the third non-white person to have been elected as governor of a Southern state.
Meanwhile doubts were raised about the authenticity of the shooter’s “manifesto”. It is highly unlikely that a 9th grade dropout somehow attained exceptional writing skills, yet there has been no investigation by the media into the matter.
The two black shooters from West-Philidelphia have not issued a manifesto yet.
As the University of Oklahoma expelled two students Tuesday for leading a racist song that sparked outrage across the country, the fraternity involved said it would investigate incidents at other campuses as it faced questions over the chant’s use by members at other universities.
Former members of the fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, claimed on social media that the same chant was used at colleges in other states, and University of Oklahoma officials investigating the episode said they did not believe the song had originated on their campus.
Protests were held in Norman on Monday on the University of Oklahoma campus.
MSM has been buzzing since members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon were shown in two videos chanting a song whose lyrics included racial slurs boasting that there would never be an African-American member. The song also referred to lynching, with the words “You can hang ’em from a tree.” The videos were recorded on Saturday night as fraternity members and their dates rode a bus to a formal event celebrating the national organization’s Founders Day.
The fraternity — started in 1856 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., before the Civil War — celebrates its Southern heritage. Its online magazine, The Record, described an initiative “to bring Sigma Alpha Epsilon closer to its antebellum roots, closer to the original experience and goals shared by the founding fathers.”
A libertarian group, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said Tuesday that it was unconstitutional for the university to expel fraternity members for their speech, no matter how hateful.
A new video spread on social media on Tuesday showing the white woman who was the fraternity’s live-in “house mother,” Beauton Gilbow, 79, laughing as she repeatedly says a racial slur while singing along to a rap song in the background. The footage was posted in 2013 to the video sharing service Vine.
In Stillwater, the Oklahoma State University student newspaper published pictures of a Confederate flag visible in the room of a Sigma Alpha Epsilon member at the fraternity house over the weekend. The chapter’s president told the newspaper, The O’Colly, that the Confederate flag had never been a symbol of the fraternity and that he and other chapter leaders had asked the student to remove the flag.
In 1982, the University of Cincinnati suspended its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter for two years after it held a “trash party” on the eve of the holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and passed out fliers encouraging revelers to bring canceled welfare checks and “a radio bigger than your head.”
The Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter in Norman has had black members, but very few, and none recently, according to alumni. William Blake James II wrote on his blog that when he joined in 2001, he was only the second black member, “and there still hasn’t been a third black man,” an account supported by some of his former fraternity brothers, writing on Facebook.
Like coal mining in the Eighties, the anti-racism industry is in decline. Governments can no longer afford to subsidise “diversity workshops” for which there’s no demand. Especially from young people.
On both sides of the Atlantic, teenagers and students are giving the finger (as they might put it) to the hypersensitive race relations ideology drilled into them by their teachers. They laugh at jokes that, a decade ago, would have been regarded as racist. If, after a few drinks, one of their friends crosses the line into ethnic stereotyping, they’re more like to argue with them than to notify the campus police.
The disintegration of traditional anti-racism was brought home to Americans this week when Brad Paisley, a young country music star, and LL Cool J, a black rap artist, released a song entitled Accidental Racist. In it, Paisley clumsily tries to explain why he’s attracted to the Confederate flag. He sings: “I’m proud of where I’m from but not everything we’ve done/And it ain’t like you and me can rewrite history.”
Cool J replies: “Just because my pants are saggin’ doesn’t mean I’m up to no good /You should try to get to know me, I really wish you would… If you don’t judge my gold chains/ I’ll forget the iron chains.”
Cue melodramatic gasps of horror from progressive columnists. But what’s interesting is that most fans of Brad Paisley and LL Cool J (and there isn’t much overlap between the two groups) aren’t offended. A white singer takes grudging pride in the Confederate South? A black singer makes fun of his own sagging pants and refuses to harp on about slavery? Cool. Or at least, like, whatever.
This nonchalance confuses the elderly activists who, until recently, lumbered from one workshop to another, pocketing wads of cash in the process: “racial sensitivity” doesn’t come cheap.
I put those words in quotation marks because these bores did nothing to promote harmony. On the contrary, ethnic minorities were taught to be ultra-sensitive towards unintended slights (as opposed to real racism, which they didn’t need lessons in identifying).
As for white people, it was all about guilt-tripping. Chief executives booked themselves on reprogramming courses, patting themselves on the back. (One of the benefits of austerity, in my opinion, is that firms can no longer afford these feelgood exercises.) In schools, lessons focused relentlessly on race, with risible results. “Our English teacher would read poems by black authors in a Jamaican accent,” recalls a young colleague. “No one could keep a straight face.”
This readiness to mock pompous anti-racists isn’t evidence of hard prejudice. Old-style “racialism”, as it used to be called, is pretty much dead, in the sense that fewer and fewer of us are interested in the colour of people’s skin. The word “darkies” is antiquated as well as nasty. On the other hand, if young people of any background want to tease members of another group for its annoying or anti-social habits, then they go right ahead. And if they feel threatened by aggressive behaviour – for example by Islamists trying to segregate men and women at London University, as happened last month – then they won’t be silenced by right-on quangos.
I’m not denying that, in the heat of the moment, horrible things are said. This is what happens in a (mostly) colour-blind society that allows free speech, as opposed to one governed by the phoney etiquette of the grievance-mongers. But, in the words of the song, racism is increasingly accidental rather than intentional. Surely that’s progress. – Damian Thompson, From Saturday’s Daily Telegraph
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