The Fallout from McKinney

By Ian Tuttle

Friday, June 12, 2015

Eric Casebolt is no longer a police officer in the city of McKinney, Texas. The now-viral video of Casebolt’s unprofessional conduct at a pool party run amok in a north Texas neighborhood all but guaranteed that he would not be long for his position. But since the video clearly shows that, among several officers who responded to the chaotic scene last Friday, Casebolt was alone in overreacting, the demonstrators who have flocked to McKinney can claim victory and return home now, right?

Hardly.

“Black Lives Matter” protesters — reduced now to a core band of itinerant malefactors — immediately condemned the incident in McKinney as yet another episode of racially motivated police violence.

For that reason Benet Embry, a local talk show host — who, by the by, is black — took to Facebook to protest the popular narrative:

Responses, needless to say, were less than polite.

Embry was not cowed. The next day he appeared on Fox News’s Hannity, where he reiterated his opposition to the demonstrators’ racialaccount.

Embry said that he was “disturbed” at the officer’s behavior, particularly toward a young, black woman, but he emphasized: “This is not Ferguson. This is not Baltimore. This is not Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner, or anything like that.”

For his outspokenness against the knee-jerk racial narrative, dozens of “activists” have contacted the Dallas-based video broadcast station where Embry works, demanding that he be fired.

Meanwhile, Dallas Communities Organizing for Change, a “racial justice” advocate helping stoke tensions in McKinney, has succeeded in getting Tracey Carver-Allbritton put on administrative leave for her role in a fight at the same pool party. Video of the fight between two teenage girls, one white and one black, begins in media res, and shows Carver-Allbritton at one point hitting the black teenager on the back of the head multiple times, clearly in an effort to break up the fight.

What prompted the fight is in question (claims that Carver-Allbritton was yelling racial slurs and instigated the fight are unsupported by any available evidence). But, naturally, the Daily Kos offers a theory about her presumed racism — based solely on Carver-Allbritton’s place of employment, CoreLogic Inc., a data firm and Bank of America vendor:

    CoreLogic has been providing various financial and home loan services to Bank of America since at least 2011, which is around the time the U.S. Department of Justice settled a $335 million suit for racially discriminating against African Americans and Latinos in home mortgage lending. While CoreLogic Inc. seems not to be directly responsible for the decision on whether or not to issue home mortgage loans or other financial products to individuals, they provide a comprehensive lender profile and all necessary information needed to make the decision. . . .

    The question still remains as to what her role exactly is with the financial data firm, whether or not she has direct decision making authority over the issuance of loans, and if so, how many African Americans and Latino’s [sic] may have been denied based on her personal racial bias.

Translation: There is no evidence that Tracey Carver-Allbritton is racist. There is no evidence that the firm she works for is racist. But obviously she’s racist.

She is on administrative leave pending an investigation.

And as if the hounding of Embry and Carver-Allbritton were not sufficient, the demands to conform to the racial narrative have, indeed, cost at least one bystander his job — not in the McKinney area, but 1,100 miles away, in Miami, Fla., where Alberto Iber, principal of North Miami Senior High School, has been removed for his comment on an online Miami Herald article about the McKinney incident. His offending opinion: “He [Casebolt] did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life. I commend him for his actions.”

Yes, that’s it.

Iber remains employed with the Miami-Dade County School District, but officials plan to reassign him, since he failed to conduct himself “in a manner that represents the school district’s core values,” officials said in a statement.

The fallout from McKinney is progressivism in a nutshell. First there was Casebolt, perhaps understandably. But Embry? Carver-Allbritton? Iber? This is not about “justice”; it’s about crushing the enemy beneath their holy heel. Progressives have chosen an ideology of total warfare. They aren’t satisfied with compromise. They aren’t satisfied with surrender. They aren’t satisfied until they are roaming the conquered countryside shooting survivors.

And since progressives’ battle lines are always bounding forward, eventually everyone will end up in the crosshairs.