Daily Verse | 1 Chronicles 5:20
He answered their prayers because they trusted in him.
Friday and we’re heading into the weekend after another infusion of cultural Marxist incoherence smeared across our collective conscience, an assault that started last year and, like a snowball rolling downhill, has only picked up more speed and weight.
The latest glass beads added to the blackjack being smacked upside the head of white America are courtesy of Bree Newsome and LeBron Raymone James. They come in the wake of another police shooting, this time in Columbus, Ohio. Officer Nicholas Reardon responded to a 911 call reporting that someone was “trying to stab us” and threatening the caller’s grandmother.
What happened next unfolded in nine seconds from the time Officer Reardon got out of his patrol car to the time he shot 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant.
As Reardon got out of his vehicle, he encountered seven people outside a two-story brick home and asked, “What’s going on?” Yelling could be heard in the background.
An unidentified girl appeared to fall to the grass after being attacked by Bryant and then kicked by an unidentified man. The video footage then showed Bryant, who was holding a knife, appearing to lunge toward a person dressed in pink who was pinned against a car parked in the driveway.
“Hey! Hey!” Reardon said as he pulled his gun. “Get down! Get down!”
He fired four quick shots, and Bryant dropped to the ground at the edge of the driveway.
A witness yelled, “Why did you shoot her?”
The officer responded, “She came at her with a knife,” apparently referring to Bryant and the person dressed in pink.
Officer Reardon is white and Ma’Khia Bryant is black. The shooting happened just after a Minneapolis jury returned a guilty verdict on all charges in Derek Chauvin’s trial for murdering George Floyd last year. Needless to say, a white male cop shooting a black girl in that context merely inflamed an already tense national conversation with a lot of hot takes.
Bree Newsome, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist who achieved notoriety for pulling down the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina Statehouse in 2015, responded by telling the police to not interfere.
I’m as flabbergasted as the next guy. She’s sincerely suggesting that the police should just “let girls be girls” and have a knife fight. In this case, it may have meant that the girl in pink could’ve been stabbed to death. But Bree Newsome claims that Blacks “do not need police to address these situations” with a weapon.
Does she realize how preposterous that sounds? She’s advocating for a return to some form of lawlessness where people take matters into their own hands without interference from the state. What she means is that rather than a cop pulling a weapon and shooting an attacker, the Black community will just handle it themselves. And she’s entirely serious about it.
How would that work, exactly?
Then there’s LeBron James, one of the most recognized names in the world of sports, who has almost 50 million followers on Twitter. He tweeted, then deleted, this about Officer Reardon.
A bunch of opinionists said the tweet was threatening the officer with death, but I think he’s just saying the officer will go the way of Derek Chauvin. However, the heat got to be too much, so he deleted it. Afterwards he posted another one.
How about holding Ma’Khia Bryant accountable for her actions?
Ma’Khia Bryant chased two women and shoved one down to the ground. Ma’Khia Bryant didn’t stop chasing the women when she saw the officer. Ma’Khia Bryant brandished a knife. Ma’Khia Bryant trapped another girl against a car and looked as though she was about to stab that girl. Ma’Khia Bryant didn’t obey the officer telling her to get down.
The officer had a split second to decide whether to use lethal force against Bryant, who was clearly attacking another person with a potentially lethal weapon.
I don’t blame him for deciding to shoot.
Because I hold a different view from the pervasive CRT view—that white supremacy is the cause of all black versus white conflict—I need to clearly say that I don’t deny the severity of Ma’Khia Bryant’s death. I can’t speak for others, but I am grieved by her death. I mourn for much different reasons than CRT demands, but I am saddened all the same that a sixteen-year-old girl was shot and killed.
But I’m also tired of being blamed by black activists for blacks who commit crime and refuse to cooperate with responding officers and get themselves shot. That isn’t right, either.