By Che
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
The time is due for another police shooting to make its way to the top of your news feed. We already have women’s rights and gun control at the top of this year’s electoral ballot, all we are missing is a police shooting involving white officers and an unarmed black man. It appears Jayland Walker has been selected by the establishment to be the sacrifice needed to manipulate the people into continuing to vote them into power.
I say selected because since the summer of 2020, when massive protests turned to rioting following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, there have been roughly 2,000 fatal police shootings, but they didn’t make much of a splash in the news market. No, they know people tire and become desensitized to the same story so they wait until the opportune time to unleash it on the public. That’s what’s happening here. Mass shootings call for stricter gun measures, overturning Roe v. Wade means women have been relegated to second class citizens, and now racist police need to be dealt with. All of this can be solved if we only give more power to the power structure.
Why this case and not the other couple of thousand? The media has the power to dictate how you perceive the world. They show you what they want based on their agenda. It’s election season so they need to double down on the narratives that get their people elected. That’s why this latest case is gaining momentum, it’s necessary to consolidate power.
The media is creating the hostility that manifests itself in cases like Jayland Walker’s. It’s their biased reporting, their omission of facts that give a clear picture of the story, and their willingness to amplify hostilities that sells views and empowers their favored politicians.
If you’re Jayland Walker, a 25-year-old black man, and you’ve bought into the narrative that any kind of encounter with the police will lead to your imminent death, you’re going to react out of fear. You’re going to allow fear to take over your rational mind and instead of reacting with reason and logic, you opt to be emotional. This emotional decision will lead you to do irrational things like fleeing the scene with no real end game. Where did he expect to go? Did he think the cops were going to give up and he could resume his normal life tomorrow?
I ask these questions because they need to be asked. My intention isn’t to posthumously degrade him, but to extract lessons that should be learned in order to educate the next man who finds themselves in a similar situation. If we fail to do this, we set ourselves up to continue talking about the same tragedies.
Every single case that has been thrown to the national forefront has one thing in common: the victim forfeited his power. The Walker case is no exception. The moment he decided to run, he changed the entire situation. If officers were simply pulling people over for a traffic violation and opening fire unprovoked, we would have a much different conversation, but we’re not. We’re talking about another life taken much too soon.
The stories that flood the timelines of Joy Reid, Don Lemon, and Rachel Maddow depict young black men as helpless victims who can easily be preyed upon by racist police officers whenever they want. Mind you, the very same pundits, along with athletes and entertainers like LeBron James and D.L. Hughley, don’t live the same experiences. These people live in gated communities with 911 on speed dial. They aren’t living the day-to-day experiences they spew in their social media feed. Yet, the average person eats up the narrative as if it’s true.
Grifters are people who lie and force false narratives in order to compel you to give them money and/or clout. Black Lives Matter founders raked in almost $100 million in donations in order to purchase multiple mansions in predominantly white neighborhoods so they could “heal.” It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. They didn’t help anyone but themselves and the power structure that wishes to subjugate young black males with fear.
Those are the real villains, the ones who willfully lie and do so with the intention of profiting from these lies. They omit facts and exaggerate reality to fit the narrative. They will say things like “he was killed over a traffic violation,” a blatant disregard for the truth. The reality is he was killed because he resisted arrest.
These lies are dangerous not only because it creates a false reality that we react to. We operate with fear and emotions instead of logic and reason, a combination that leads to poor decision making and fatal consequences.
It also prohibits the next person from learning from those poor decisions. This is the greatest crime of all.
We all lamented George Floyd, killed by a Minneapolis police officer after he resisted arrest. Floyd was found to have had fentanyl in his system. The officers’ attempt to restrain him meant a knee to the back of his neck for 10 minutes, eventually killing him. This could have been a lesson on the dangers of using drugs and how it impairs your decision making, but that doesn’t benefit the grifter. So, that which can actually help is swept under the rug and labeled a “racist talking point.”
I take issue with things we are not allowed to talk about because that is usually where the answers lie. This system has an agenda, and it’s one that empowers the state, not the individual. Empowering the individual would mean allowing for discourse that makes one accountable for their actions, like when the jury found Derek Chauvin accountable for murdering Floyd. This is not the case with what we see today.
No one left watching someone like George Floyd get killed thinks “drugs are really dangerous therefore I should avoid using them.” Instead, the narrative is that police will put their knee on your neck for ten minutes while you plead for help, killing you for no reason even though the reason exists right in front of your face.
The same goes for Jayland Walker, who bought into a narrative that many have bought into, one that leaves people like him helpless and at the mercy of police who are more powerful than he. This is wrong and dangerous. It’s time to reclaim power by acknowledging the truth and walking in power. If not, you will find more bodies to be buried and more money to be donated to those who need to “heal” while we all suffer.
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