Granted, his trial never should have happened. Granted, his defense cost millions – something well out of the reach of other every day Good Samaritans – and upended his life. Granted, Alvin Bragg and his corrupt, murder apologist toady Dafna Yoran should be tossed out of office and, if possible, ridden out of Manhattan on a rail (and no, we don’t mean the subway, though that might be even more poetic). But still, Daniel Penny has walked free, into what will hopefully be a life of being held up as a defiant symbol of masculine virtue. He helped when no one else would, and now America must return the favor.
However, with Penny’s triumph, a new question rises: has the BLM era finally ended?
We hope so. Certainly, the early signs are encouraging. The NAACP already tried its usual rhetorical tricks in response to the verdict, and was Community Noted into oblivion for their trouble. This means that on social media, at least, impatience with the old BLM playbook has set in.
But elsewhere? Already, BLM has called for “black vigilantes” to take to the streets in New York and fight “oppressors” after the Penny verdict. “People want to jump up and choke us for being loud?” BLM leader Hank Newsome raged. “How about we do the same when they attempt to oppress us?” The fact that Jordan Neely, the vagrant who Penny put down, was doing sizably more than being loud – that he was, in fact, threatening an entire subway car of innocent people – seems lost on Newsome.
However, a BLM leader shooting his mouth off about a case going against his pet cause is nothing new. Like all hate groups, BLM supports its chosen race by behaving as if its members are “oppressed” unless they’re free to behave in the worst way possible, without consequence. They were always going to react to this case with nonsensical, bellicose posturing. However, Newsome’s call for racialized vigilantism may be more than overheated rhetoric, if such “vigilantes” do, indeed, rise and take the law into their own hands over specious ideas of “oppression.” This would be like the “knockout game” on steroids. What’s more, we know from Dafna Yaron’s own mouth that the New York District Attorney’s office will have no problem whatsoever letting such behavior slide in the name of “empathy.”
But national movements do not live or die by the whim of Soros prosecutors. Which leads us to the most important question: even supposing that such an epidemic of violence arises, will everyday citizens put up with it? More to the point, even if nothing happens this time, are normal Americans still susceptible to the moral blackmail which arose in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd? Will they surrender their conscience and common sense to the woke mob out of guilt again?
Unfortunately, we can’t really know unless another Floyd-level event comes along and the Left shoots their shot. Moreover, because such an event seems unlikely to materialize before President-elect Trump’s inauguration, and may even be deliberately designed to wreck his political honeymoon with riots and claims of “fascism” when he inevitably is forced to respond, it’s even harder to know whether BLM is dead or just saving its ammunition. If it is the latter, then we could be in for some truly nasty Leftist gaslighting over the next four years.
That said, if we had to speculate, we’d say that BLM faces some unprecedented headwinds if they do try to reawaken the old magic. And the first, and most important one, was summed up by the title of The Who’s classic song “won’t get fooled again.” George Floyd was a phenomenon on par with Rodney King, both united by the fact that video played such a key role in their lionization. Except that unlike with King, whose beating was amplified by traditional news networks, Floyd was the first black martyr of the social media era – an era which had been warming up to the idea of such a figure since at least the death of Trayvon Martin. With any social media-driven phenomenon, there’s one basic rule: you never forget your first. And in this case, Americans will definitely not forget the aftermath.
Who could? The Maoist cultural purges, the Stasi-esque culture of cancellation and snitching, the anarcho-tyrannical idea of “Defund the Police,” and every other malign invention of BLM is far more of a national trauma than Floyd’s death ever was. Indeed, even the words which BLM stands for – “Black Lives Matter” – have been exposed as a disingenuous attempt to hide radicalism behind the mask of common sense. But even that didn’t work, because everyone who agreed with the phrase in the wrong way – say, by saying that black lives matter because all lives matter – found out that what it really meant was something more like, “black lives matter more than yours, cracker.”
What this means, in practice, is that, as our Senior Contributor Charlie Kirk put it on Telegram, “the further we get from Floydapalooza and its ideological pathogens of DEI, BLM, and defund the police, the more the race-hustlers are on defense. The public knows that BLM's claims about ‘white supremacy’ and ‘systemic racism’ are hateful lies.” In this sense, time is on our side…for now.
But there will come a time when generations who don’t remember George Floyd can be seduced with the same claptrap, which brings us to the other, more enduring obstacle to a future “summer of love”: This time, people can disagree. Charlie Kirk again: “Daniel Penny would NOT have been acquitted in NYC if he were on trial in 2020 or 2021. The media and governmental pressure to convict would be unbelievable. If he'd somehow gotten off, the Biden Administration would have swooped in with trumped-up federal charges.”
And why would this media and governmental pressure have been so easy to maintain? Simple. Because George Floyd’s death happened in the age of pre-Musk Twitter. All dissent against the media and government narratives was foreclosed. But now, thanks to Elon Musk and the new era of social media freedom he’s ushered in by showing the tech sector the power of free speech as a business model, that kind of pressure no longer functions. Rather, it gets community noted, memed, and mocked into oblivion. And, given how thoroughly Musk has crushed his competitors despite the entire machinery of the woke state being bent against him, things are unlikely to revert to the pre-Musk status quo ante anytime soon. In short, so long as free speech prevails, BLM’s moral panics are that much less likely to catch on.
This is not to say that we can relax. Again, to quote Charlie Kirk, “Race Marxists care a lot more about hating white people than they do about helping blacks, and they're always looking for a new excuse to whip up that hatred.” We must remain vigilant precisely because of that eternally evil desire. But for now, at least, it appears to be struggling against previously unseen headwinds and has just been dealt a crushing blow not merely in the court of public opinion, but in a court of law. It is our duty as patriots to finish the job, and make sure BLM remains remembered with the same ignominy as another three-letter banner raised by resentful, racist rebels who used terror and social stigma to militate against union under a Republican president: the KKK.
