Opinion | Race and the Coming Liberal Crackup – The New York Times
Ben Crump, the Floyd family s lawyer, accused the Columbus police in a tweet of killing an unarmed 15yo Black girl. Valerie Jarrett, the former Obama adviser, tweeted that Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Jarrett wants to Demand accountability and Fight for justice.
An alternative view: Maybe there wasn t time for Officer Reardon, in an 11-second interaction, to de-escalate the situation, as he is now being faulted for failing to do. And maybe the balance of our sympathies should lie not with the would-be perpetrator of a violent assault but with the cop who saved a Black life namely that of Tionna Bonner, who nearly had Bryant s knife thrust into her.
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That s a thought that many, perhaps most, Americans share, even if they are increasingly reluctant to say it out loud. Why reluctant? Because in this era of with-us-or-against-us politics, to have misgivings about the left s new anti-racist narrative is to run the risk of being denounced as a racist. Much better to nod along at your office s diversity, equity and inclusion sessions than suggest that enforced political indoctrination should not become a staple of American workplace culture.
And yet those doubts and misgivings go to the heart of what used to be thought of as liberalism. The result will be a liberal crackup similar to the one in the late 1960s that broke liberalism as America s dominant political force for a generation.
via www.nytimes.com
Bret Stephens.