Uncommon Bravery, All-Too-Common Narrative

It was a year ago yesterday that a depraved lefty walked into the national Family Research Council headquarters a a pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, and the intention to kill every person in the office. 

He was stopped by a building manager and acting security guard, Leo Johnson, who, although shot twice, subdued the leftist gunman, who had walked into the lobby claiming to be a new intern.  Johnson asked for ID. 

After Corkins takes a suspiciously long time rummaging through his bag to produce identification, Johnson cannily stands up and walks around the desk to get a closer look at what Corkins is doing. Corkins bolts upright, gun in hand. Without the slightest hesitation, Johnson rushes Corkins, who fires twice. A bullet shatters Johnson’s left forearm. “And I just couldn’t hear anything, my arm just kind of blew back. So at that point I was thinking: ‘I have to get this gun,’ ” Johnson told The Weekly Standard. “That was my sole focus—I have to get this gun—this guy’s gonna kill me and kill everybody here.”

From there, Johnson somehow manages to push Corkins across the lobby and pin him against the wall with his bad arm. “I just started punching him as hard as I could, until I could feel his grip loosen,” recalled Johnson. Eventually he takes the gun from Corkins with his wounded arm. Before long, Corkins is subdued on the ground. Corkins now admits that it was his intention to shoot everyone in the building. There’s no question Johnson saved a lot of lives.

This was a genuine hate crime; the shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins, had a backpack full of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear into his victims’ faces after shooting them, apperently to suffocate the wounded. 

Johnson was a hero.  And you’ve heard scarcely a word about it in the mainstream media, who spent most of the past 18 months trying in vain to pound the utterly-non-bias-related Martin-Zimmerman case into a “hate crime”, and the past couple of years trying unsuccessfully to politicize the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings.

And yet here was the real thing (and by no means for the first time).  And…

(crickets)

There are some illuminating contrasts between the media’s handling of the political dimensions of the Family Research Council shooting and the shooting of Representative Giffords. In the latter case, the media rushed to assume political motivations and were quick to blame, of all people, Sarah Palin…there is no evidence whatsoever Loughner saw this map or that allegedly violent political rhetoric—even “campaign” is a term borrowed from war—was in any way a cause of the Giffords shooting. That didn’t stop serious news organizations from lending institutional credibility to the irresponsible allegations…though Giffords was shot in January 2011, as recently as this year in an article on gun violence the New York Times saw fit to remind readers that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords.”

 And NBC news fairly raced to blame the Aurora shooting on the Tea Party. 

By contrast, the media handled awkwardly the revelation that Corkins admitted to plotting mass murder as a means of furthering a popular liberal cause. “A detail sure to reignite the culture wars that erupted around the shooting is the fact that Corkins told FBI agents that he identified the Family Research Council as anti-gay on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” wrote the Washington Post during Corkins’s trial in February. It’s a little unseemly for a newspaper, when finally forced to confront actual politically motivated violence, to worry about the shooting’s impact on the metaphorical “culture war.” Particularly when irresponsible actors in that culture war continue to get a free pass from the media.

The SPLC – cited with grave solemnity as an authority by rafts of lefty bobbleheads – has become a bit of a hate group in its own right:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was once a laudable civil rights organization that sued racists and violent extremists. Now it regularly demonizes anyone who runs afoul of its knee-jerk liberal politics, and despite this it is still regularly cited by the media as a “nonpartisan” watchdog. Some of the SPLC’s newly targeted “hate groups,” such as pickup artists, are merely kooky or distasteful. Others singled out by the SPLC, including Catholics who go to Latin mass or Christian organizations similar to the Family Research Council, are well within the mainstream. Tellingly, the SPLC doesn’t just name the Family Research Council on its website—it posts the council’s address on a “hate map.” That map is still on SPLC’s website, and the organization refused calls to take it down after the Family Research Council shooting.

But they won’t. 

I bring it up because we’re seeing the same thing with the Widstrand beating in Saint Paul.  Now, to be clear, there’s no evidence that it was a “hate crime”, per se; in other words, there’s no evidence that any of the youths stood on a soapbox and bellowed “I’m doing this because I Hate Whitey”.  And for purposes of charging that brutal assault, evidence is what is needed.

But you can see, feel and hear the nervousness in official Saint Paul and Minneapolis government circles; as crime as dropped in most parts of the Twin Cities, it’s stayed steadily well above average on the East Side, the North End, the North Side, Phillips.  Parts of the East Side have been deteriorating before our eyes over the past decade, in a city that is generally mostly just stagnant. 

And yet nobody in offical Twin Cities circles will call the elephant what it is.  They hold official observances for the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” misery-exploitation caravan – which exists to protest the deaths of children who look like the children of NPR executives – and studiously ignore the fact that black on black crime in the Twin Cities is astronomically higher than any other rate in the state.

7 thoughts on “Uncommon Bravery, All-Too-Common Narrative

  1. Now wait a second Merg-
    I saw Mayor Chris (Non-Monkey’s bro) Coleman say on the news last night that “these acts will not be tolerated”. Well, given that more than 500 people showed up to voice their concern about the repetitive nature of ‘these acts’, sounds like you are ‘tolerating’ these acts. According to Non-Monkey’s Bro, local government can stop ‘thuggish’ behavior by having “…the top leadership of the city of St. Paul here.”
    The best though was the police chief holding up his cell phone and blaming it for helping to coordinate “flash mobs”. As if gangs didn’t gather and beat the living crap out of people before twitter. If that’s the case, why don’t you already have an officer monitoring social media? You have 40 officers not responding to 911 calls now, get them a second screen to monitor social media. Instead your plan is to hassle some property owners (the few left) and have your prosecutor claim his office will prosecute ‘these people’ to the fullest extent of the law. Maybe they’ll put some ads designed by a ‘Hip-Hop’ Artiste on the new light rail line that will speak to the ‘youths’ about how vewy-vewy bad it is to beat down and boot stomp some poor schmuck with bad timing and worse luck.
    Take a lesson (once again) constituents of Non-Monkey’s Bro, Dim-Bulb Betty and the DFL – you are on your own. Don’t worry, St Paul could never turn into another Detroit – we’re Minnesotan and we’re better than that. Heh.

  2. This entire post is nonsense.
    The mass media is owned by giant corporations, so it is has to be conservative in every sense of the word,

  3. Finally – PM cuts thru the clutter of theories & hypotheticals & mitigating circumstances with a clear and concise statement which eliminates all need for further discussion. Just not sure how you beat that other guy to it ………

  4. I rank “will not be tolerated”, “dialogue on racism,” and the recent but predictable anti-gang rallies up there with the trite, shallow, and overly dramatic words and gestures that Mr. Berg bemoaned in a recent post.

    What say you?

    I honestly have not heard anything about the hate beating in Saint Paul while perusing the MSM local news venues lately. Were I not a follower of this blog, I would be unaware of it. I’ve proven I’m no genius, but I try to follow the news, and crime stories in particular. I did see some rally coverage, but it was presented as a generic, run of the mill Mad Dad’s type of social event.

    The racial divide widens as much from such biased journalism as it does from the recent assault.

  5. I’m sure the mans color served to inflame the crowd, as any hood rat will tell you there’s nothing so satisfying as putting a Nike Air through a cracka’s face, but the truth is these young savages are just as willing to prey among themselves.

    When it comes to barbarism, today’s urban youth have transcended race.

  6. You have to include the bully Alec Baldwin as one of the great pass receivers of all time. Earlier this summer he made blatant homophopic remarks (hate speech if uttered by a conservative) on twitter about a British reporter who Baldwin alleged insulted his wife. A couple years ago he made similar twitter remarks about a coffee shop server (an “uptight queen”) who displeased him.

    The “uptight queen” remark seemes to have been brushed off as “Alec just being Alec.” GLAAD fell all over itself defending Baldwin’s recent ant-gay rant based on his alleged previous good works in support of the Gay community. However, even Anderson Cooper cried foul on that. None the less, MSNBC will be welcoming Baldwin soon to their stellar line-up.

    Again, it’s so common that it’s hardly worth mentioning. However, I hope that supporters of GLAAD, gay or not, will not let it pass. Kind of late for that wish to come true though …

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.