Journalist Megyn Kelly said in an interview set to be published Friday that the summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations in response to George Floyd’s death “morphed” into a movement “co-opted by activists.”
Kelly told Carlos Watson of "The Carlos Watson Show" that she initially was more sympathetic to the racial justice protests after viral bystander footage showed former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for several minutes.
“When George Floyd was killed I think a lot of Black people and white people were deeply affected by that tape,” she told Watson, the co-founder and CEO of OZY...
But Kelly said she “began to feel very differently” as the summer went on and demonstrations evolved and some activists promoted the slogan “defund the police.”
“I began to feel very differently, as it morphed into more of a political movement, where to me it seemed co-opted by activists, as opposed to just people who wanted change,” Kelly said. “And some reform in law enforcement turned into ‘defund the police.’ ”
Uh, no. In fact, the movement, initially spurred by Black Lives Matter, became less political as millions of Americans, some of them apolitical, turned out to protest in beautiful, early summer weather after months of being cooped up because of the coronavirus. Additionally, there were sporadic violent protests, as likely to have been instigated by anarchists or alt-right agitators as by Black Lives Matter or other leftist ideologues.
In an op-ed appearing in The New York Post on July 1, 2020, two staffers of the Heritage Foundation maintained "Visit the Black Lives Matter website, and the first frame you get is a large crowd with fists raised and the slogan “Now We Transform.”
That is in the past, when Black Lives Matter definitively called also for the end of the nuclear family. Alas, its website has now gone mainstream, strategically watered down. However, it still posts and boasts the hashtag "DefundThePolice" and (for those might not understand "police, "defund," or "the") calls for "a national defunding of police."
That's not reducing funding; it's defunding. It's not defunding the police department in Minneapolis, in Atlanta, Baker, Montana, or in Brattleboro, Vermont. It's national- everywhere.
Another influential anti-police organization, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), has to its platform 29 signatories- including Black Lives Matter Network- which also are member organizations and part of a "United Front." The platform proposes "an end to all jails, prisons, immigration and youth detention, and civil commitment facilities" and to "divest from surveillance, policing..."
This, as well as investment in the black community, is what Black Lives Matter stands for and what it advocates. Defunding the police is terminating police departments nationwide and always has been central to the Black Lives Matter movement.
It's remarkable that a veteran journalist such as Megyn Kelly wouldn't understand that. It should be a reminder that with journalists as with police officers, there are the good, the adequate, and the bad.
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