On Monday, Daniel Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the choking death of Jordan Neely. In May of 2023, Neely boarded a subway train and began to threaten other passengers. Penny and a few others subdued Neely until police arrived. Neely ultimately died, and Penny was charged with second-degree manslaughter in addition to criminally negligent homicide. For most Americans, Penny was seen as a hero, a good Samaritan jumping in to help his fellow citizens in a dangerous situation. Of course, not everyone is happy about the trial's outcome. Like clockwork, Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists, a.k.a. agitators, showed up outside the courthouse, declaring the incident a racial one and demanding "justice."
But something is different. The BLM activists jumped up and down and yelled and screamed about being oppressed and had the prerequisite number of people standing behind them nodding their heads, but as I heard someone say on Monday, you could still hear their voices. Hundreds of other protesters had not drowned them out. Has BLM lost that 2020 magic?
In 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, it seemed like almost immediately, violent protesters took to the streets of Minneapolis. They looted and burned anything in their path because nothing says "justice" like burning down an innocent person's business. And it didn't just end in a day or two; it went on for weeks. When it was all over, there were billions of dollars in damage, and that area of Minneapolis looked like a war zone.
BLM's unchecked tyranny and their insistence that every American believe as they did didn't stop with physical damage. They bullied and guilt-tripped nearly every major American corporation to give hefty donations to their "cause." Companies like Target, Walmart, and Levi's all not only donated to BLM, but they also donated to other minority endeavors, for example, Target donated 10,000 hours of pro-bono consulting to businesses in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that were black-owned or owned by other minorities. The long arm of BLM did not even stop with strong-arming American business. Who can forget Congressional Democrats kneeling in a moment of silence in the Capitol's Emancipation Hall, wearing Kente cloths around their necks, paying homage to St. George?
Make no mistake, BLM has been salivating over the thought of a George Floyd 2.0. Do they think they have it with the Daniel Penny case? They might think so, but a few things are vastly different from 2020. Since that heady time of being able to do whatever they wanted, information has come to light about BLM. After raising roughly $80 million in the wake of Floyd's death in 2020, reports came to light that many of its leaders, including founder Patrice Cullors, bought real estate in California and Georgia with a price tag of $3.2 million. Cullors also shared the BLM windfall with family and friends. After the scandal emerged, BLM was forced to shut down fundraising in 2022. But it's hard to keep people that angry for that long. In 2022, the Black Lives Global Network only managed to raise $9.3 million in fiscal year 2022, an 88 percent drop.
Also different: Fast forward to the 2024 presidential election. After years of Democrat identity politics, black Americans clearly demonstrated that they are no longer buying what the Democrats are selling. Donald Trump won the largest percentage of the black vote of any Republican candidate in 48 years. He won 21 percent of the vote among black men, up two percent from 2020.
But maybe one of the biggest differences is that now, BLM seems to need help ginning up the masses. While some protests took place Monday evening in New York City that were posted on X, there was nothing big enough and violent enough to warrant any break-ins in coverage on Fox News or anywhere else. So, the media has stepped in to help. My colleague Brandon Morse has reported on sensational headlines from legacy media designed to portray the Penny case as a racial one, and combined with activists and politicians working together, BLM could get the violence they called for, and the threat of riots and protests could be on the rise. However, as Brandon points out, legacy media now has stiff competition. That competition is the American people and their ability to share information on places like X.
But ultimately, as Brandon also points out, and I will as well, could it just be that Americans of every race and ethnicity are simply tired of being thrown into groups by BLM and other leftists? The one thing the last four years did was force all of us to endure the Biden-Harris economy. We were all forced to endure soaring crime rates, we were all forced to endure the invasion of illegal immigrants at the southern border and its effects, and we were all angry at seeing America's standing abroad devolve into a laughing stock. Americans of all colors want to be just Americans.
So, BLM, it looks as though your fifteen minutes of fame are just about up. You have worn out your welcome. We are hip to your grift, and it's just not going to work anymore.
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