Bari Weiss Substack:
Megan Phelps-Roper
Amy Cooper was not the internet’s first “Karen” — the pejorative used for a demanding, entitled white woman. But as the Central Park dog walker who called the police on a black birdwatcher last year, she quickly became the paragon of the archetype.
In a video that went instantly viral, we watch as she summons law enforcement to protect her from the man, whose race she mentions three times in a matter of moments: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life.”
Just over a minute long, the video flooded social media alongside a second one filmed that same day: the horrifying footage of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a man named George Floyd.
The conflation of these two stories in the public imagination began almost immediately — and not without cause. The Central Park video looked really bad.
Many accused Amy Cooper of “weaponizing white tears.” They said she was deliberately attempting to sic racist cops on the birdwatcher, Christian Cooper (no relation). Comparisons to Emmett Till were instant.
“It’s important for us to remember that what happened to George Floyd is what Amy Cooper would have wanted to happen to Christian Cooper,” as one YouTuber put it, reflecting a sentiment echoed broadly across Twitter and beyond.
The outcry was overwhelming, and it was supercharged by the mainstream press. The New York Times ran a dozen stories, letters, and Op-Eds in the first week alone. A rattled Gayle King said it felt like “open season” on black men, with Amy “nearly strangling her dog to falsely accuse another black man.” Trevor Noah said that Amy “blatantly knew how to use the power of her whiteness to threaten the life of another man and his blackness.”
By the next day, Amy Cooper had been doxxed, had surrendered her dog, had lost her job, and had issued a half-hearted defense followed by an abject apology. Christian Cooper would go on to become a minor celebrity, penning a story for D.C. Comics inspired by the incident, heralded across the media and even by Joe Biden. “You made an incredible contribution at a very important moment,” the future president said. MORE
And despite the fact that every rational ‘white person’ (or every rational human) piled on the Karen, who is clearly a leftist, leftists used it to insist that all whites are racist.
They spin to win, no matter what.
The problem with any video is you don’t get to see what happened before or after and even the angle often can tell a different story. No one cares what really happens, just what narrative you can spin.
“Media complicity” almost makes it sound as if the media are on the periphery of these events..
That is wrong. They are among the leaders.
When this story first came out I mentioned he had threatened to steal her dog and asked a couple of other questions.
The general public has destroyed itself with social media. Made it so easy to just jump on the edited down version of the first person’s account of what happened instead of asking for whole story.
The first time I realized you can’t trust video was with Rodney King.
Written by a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church… okay.
…I got a new car that texts me at work just to tell me I’m not meeting her needs (“my fuel is low” or “my doors aren’t locked”, stuff like that), has sensors that turn on little symbols in the mirrors if I don’t look in my blind spot, has a lane minder thing that bitches if I cross a line without the turn signal on, even has a thing that tells me to “get a coffee” if it thinks I’m not paying enough attention to driving her.
She did my wife even better. It called her out for driving the wrong way in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
I’ve driven a dozen or so cars I actually owned, and another couple dozen special purpose vehicles from wildland pickup trucks to 100 foot hydraulic ladder Quints, and never named one or called it ‘she’.
Until now.
THIS one, I gave a female name.
“Karen”.
For obvious reasons.
What’s this have to do with this woke chick and the Wokiez Blacks she offended?
Not much, other than the name.
Everone involved here is an asshole. They made this shit sandwich, now they can choke on it.
Fuck them all. I hope they eat each other.
I had heard the audio of Him calling out to her initially (his audio) within the first day of the incident, then it went missing.
When I first heard it, it sounded clearly to me like he was going to do something to the dog.
But then the media took over, and she went on to the apology wheel. What she needs to do is sue him, her employer, & possibly something with the police department for not investigating properly, & initially indicating that she was being investigated.
All the world’s a joke…
…The people it’s punchlines.
People, with 7 billion and counting, why do you act so surprised when you come across another person throughout the course of your day?
There is no such thing as a black bird watcher, if there is it’s more rare than an Ivory Billed Woodpecker. He was on the down low looking for his punk.
Yeah but the guy later admitting that he DID threaten her dog.