TwitterZone: Does Context Matter in Police Homicides Any More?

Each week Liberty Nation straps on its Personal Protective Equipment and dives into the TwitterZone to bring you the biggest news, the most outlandish arguments, and the real Zeitgeist of what is taking place in the internet's wildest frontier.

After a breathtaking week in American history, during which cities throughout the nation boarded up to prepare for potential violence that would have put the 1992 Los Angeles riots to shame, the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin seemed poised to cool tensions, at least for a time. But this assumption was dashed by none other than woke basketball superstar LeBron James, hellbent on igniting another crusade against police when an officer protected a teen-ager from being stabbed with a knife.

Fabrications immediately followed James' condemnation, in which a police officer kneeling on the neck of a nonviolent suspect for nine long minutes was equal to a policeman taking down a rampaging assailant with a large knife who attempted to stab more than one person. Despite the clear contrast between these two situations, context has been lost on the radical left. Racial activists on Twitter such as Bree Newsome took the opportunity to tweet out that "teenagers have been having fights involving knives for eons," as if this justified the actions of the knife-wielding Ma'khia Bryant. Newsome once again used her platform to call for the defunding and abolishment of law enforcement across the country, the real agenda being promoted by so many racial activists today.

Context matters in every incident of police homicide. Figures such as Newsome, Al Sharpton, and prominent Black Lives Matter activists use their platforms to foment racial strife, no matter the details of the police homicides. In a more stunning turn of events, CNN's Don Lemon perfectly encapsulated the importance of context in potentially racially motivated police homicides, pulling the curtain back on the hysteria and madness public figures seem to display the instant a white police officer is involved in the shooting of a black or brown person.

Recent events have shown that the left will stop at nothing in its quest for vengeance. The conviction of Chauvin demonstrated the ability of the justice system to expose actions contrary to police training and protocol and hold criminally liable those who do not follow the rules. Still, it seems the radical left is willing to extend that trial's precedent to other police homicides, no matter the context. James' reactionary tweet in response to the Bryant shooting might seem like a hasty reaction to a controversial police shooting, but racial activists now associate the Chauvin verdict with any law enforcement shooting to condemn police departments throughout the country.

Some conservatives who hold a "blue no matter who" attitude, closing their eyes to legitimate misconduct in a blind defense of the police, are not helpful in this volatile situation.  But that mirrors the posture of the radical activists who paint every police shooting involving a minority as indefensible. Those moderate Democrats who want to take a more realistic approach to assessing these incidents lack the power the radicals seem to have over public policy. The content of the Twitter echo chamber indicates we would do well to keep our eyes on far-left racial activists seeking to expand their power in the guise of legal justice.

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Read more from Jose Backer.