Nikole Hannah-Jones glorifies murder as long as it’s for a good cause and involves attractive young women.
Yes, the Times keeps breaking huuuge stories about Donald Trump and Iran, Joe Biden and immigration, and John Roberts and the “shadow docket”, but at the same time they keep pushing out disgraceful, deceitful misinformation/disinformation along the lines of Nikole’s latest, Assata Shakur Freedom came with shattering costs for her and her family., even though, strictly speaking, Assata Shakur was a cold-blooded criminal who escaped from prison and fled to Cuba. would be far more accurate. Assata Shakur was an active—extremely active—member of the “Black Liberation Army, which spent most of its time liberating money from banks and engaging in shoot-outs. Or planting bombs and murdering policemen, while never liberating anyone.
On May 2, 1973 Assata was riding in a car with two other BLA members on the New Jersey Turnpike when they were stopped by two policemen. A shoot out occurred, in which one policeman and one of the BLA members were killed and the other participants wounded. Assata had a purse containing several loaded magazines for an automatic pistol. Several automatics were recovered from the car. In 1977, Assata was convicted of a variety of crimes, including four counts of assault, one count of robbery, one count of armed robbery, one count of aiding and abetting a murder and sent to prison for a minimum of 26 years. In 1979 a group of BLA members broke her out of prison. She managed to escape to Cuba and lived there for the rest of her life.
Nikole “explains”: “Shakur came to believe in the necessity of a covert, armed revolution.” The first question would like to ask is “why?” and the second is “How did that turn out?”
Why would anyone believe that “covert, armed revolution” was “necessary”? The activities of the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army and other “armed, revolutionary” groups massively hampered the transition of the United States from a racist to a non-racist society. All the “revolutionaries” ever did was provoke the police, who never like being murdered, to commit crimes of their own. It was emphatically not “revolutionaries” like Assata Shakur who helped create the massive change, and massive improvement, in American attitudes towards race over the past 75 years. They massively retarded it instead and committed numberless crimes in doing so.
In the course of her article, Hannah-Jones quotes another black “heroine”, Communist Party member Angela Davis:
Angela Davis, the activist who was wrongly imprisoned during that same tumultuous period, told me women were the backbone of Black radical movements and “the government probably recognized more than even our own people did the power of Black women.”
The thing is, Angela Davis was not “wrongfully imprisoned”. She was wrongfully freed by a jury in a verdict that was as false as that of O. J. Simpson’s. In 1970, Davis was involved in an “incident” (quoting Wikipedia’s language in their entry for Davis):
Davis was a supporter of the Soledad Brothers, three inmates who were accused and charged with the killing of a prison guard at Soledad Prison.
On August 7, 1970, heavily armed 17-year-old African-American high-school student Jonathan Jackson, whose brother was George Jackson, one of the three Soledad Brothers, gained control of a courtroom in Marin County, California. He armed the Black defendants and took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary W. Thomas, and three female jurors as hostages. As Jackson transported the hostages and three black defendants away from the courtroom in a van, one of the defendants, James McClain, shot at the police. The police returned fire.
The judge and three of the men were killed in the melee.
By Davis’ own admission, she had purchased several of the weapons used in the kidnapping, including a shotgun that she bought two days before the event. But she insisted that she was somehow not involved in either the planning or commission of the kidnapping, even though she had been closely involved with all the participants in the crime. She could not pay her bail and spent a year in prison awaiting trial before wealthy, gullible supporters came up with the sum necessary to free her. Eventually, she was found not guilty, by a gullible (in my cranky old white guy opinion) all white jury.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has built her own “career” pretending to be another black heroine, denying that extraordinarily beneficent changes in racial relations in the U. S. have occurred, claiming instead that “nothing has changed,” that black “oppression” continues in the U.S. to this day. This is ridiculous, pathetic, deceitful nonsense, about which I have complained about extensively. Why the New York Times insists on publishing these lies—this “misinformation”, if you will—is beyond me.
In a recent post on Ta-Nehisi Coates I wrote
There is really a very simple “test” to determine if blacks are oppressed in America. If black Americans were really oppressed, they would try to leave. But there is no evidence that I could find that blacks are trying to leave the U.S. in appreciable numbers. Instead, they are coming here. According to Pew Research, about 10% of the black American population—some 4.6 million—consists of immigrants to this country. The largest number come from Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. Why do they come? Well, for many reasons I’m sure, but the black average household income of $56,880 might be one reason, for it compares favorably with such countries as Germany ($54,800), Israel ($54,650 ), Canada ($54,040), the United Kingdom ($47,700), and France ($45,180), not to mention, well, Haiti ($1,760) and Nigeria ($1,880). I couldn’t find data for Jamaica or Ethiopia. I’m giving “average” rather than “median” because I couldn’t find “median” for other countries. According to Statista, the black median household income for black Americans in 2023 was $56, 490, almost identical to the “average” figure.
Some “oppression”!
