I appreciate the time and thoughtfulness you devoted to the podcast. I fear, however, you’re being far too generous to Bari Weiss. The podcast would never have been released if she hadn’t succeeded in making the white woman, who exploited racial identity in an objectively dangerous manner, the victim and the black man the villain. She makes her living being a noisy, self-righteous opponent of “identity “ and “cancel culture,” all while being a notorious abuser of both, often with herself as the star victim. The script is always written in advance - the Jewish person is the unfair victim of the Palestinian activist, the white person the unfair victim of the black person. We’ve watched her produce the same movie over and over. “Honestly” we don’t need any sequels, but because the NYT handled both her hiring and departure in a catastrophic manner, she became a “heroine” of ”liberal values” in the “wokeness” battles. It’s now her grift, so we’re stuck with her polluting The Discourse for decades to come.
Once the NYT hired Bari and she decided to take this course with her career I'm not sure they could have handled her departure in a way where she didn't play the "victim". She seemed to be aiming at getting fired and becoming a "woke martyr". I'm not sure many people could live stream internal meetings at a company while publicly disparaging colleagues on social media and not be fired. Once the NYT didn't fire her she quit (incidentally I'm 50 yo and have read or followed the NYT for close to 40 years and theIr op-ed writers tend to be the living embodiment of "can never leave" from the Eagles' "Hotel California") and still attempted to claim the mantle of "woke martyrdom".
My take away from the podcast is that this has little to do with race, blame, villain, victim. It more about narrative, full view perspective and journalistic integrity (or lack thereof) of mainstream media today. The type of dialogue, critique and consideration of nuance happening in this very comment section is what I think Kmele (and perhaps Weiss) were going for. I know a lot of attention and feedback (good and bad) have been directed at Bari. I don't think that's fair. While she may have had a journalistic hand in this, it is very clear this podcast and the work that went into it belongs to Kmele. I follow Kmele on twitter, listen to his 5th column podcast, read his work...while he certainly hold a perspective on current events that is not particularly popular, he's incredibly smart. His work is usually very nuanced, driven by facts and good (not necessarily popular) information. But now I sound super biased...so I'll stop here. But thank you all for such insightful discourse. Keep it up!
I'm not familiar with Kmele Foster's work, but I am VERY familiar with Bari Weiss, from her days trying to get pro-Palestinian professors fired from Columbia University when she was a student there, to her championing of alt-right racists and anti-semites (including the racist Charles Murray) as part of an "intellectual dark web," to her inexplicable hiring as an op-ed writer and editor at the New York Times, until she flounced off to the $greener$ pastures of Substack (largely because she didn't get along with her black colleagues at the Times, who she disparaged on Twitter). She has consistently argued in bad faith, and pretends to be a brave truth-teller and "intellectual dissident", when in fact she is simply a promoter of standard-issue conservative talking points and status quo thinking. As Nathan J. Robinson wrote, Weiss "embodies a kind of elite obliviousness to the actual facts of the world, and demonstrates a total lack of interest in understanding what her critics are actually saying," as can be seen in her current reactions to people criticizing her for her one-side "reporting" on the Cooper/Cooper story. So, I am not surprised that she views this story as one of a scared of a scared white female reacting to a situation with nothing but pure motives, rather than yet another story of white entitlement and privilege.
You are so deep in the cult that you think reciting tired smears against Bari and Kmele are going to persuade. Seek help soon Mr.! You don’t sound well or very intelligent, just like a cog in a wheel of a machine you don’t understand. Perform obeisance to Bari and Kmele now and we will forgive you.
THANK YOU for calling out Foster and Weiss (and Amy Cooper) in such a thoughtful, constructive way. You are so on point. The “Central Park Karen” story WAS a media frenzy, and I am always wary when that happens. I never want to be involved in a public stoning or condemn someone without knowing the facts, and during a frenzy it’s hard to ascertain fact from fiction. I appreciated that you linked to so many other articles so I could read myriad accounts of what happened. The fact is, I was with Foster and Weiss in the beginning — because it’s right to go beyond salacious details the media love to spotlight and try to ascertain what really happened, as accurately as possible. But, for all the reasons you pointed out, they lost me quickly. So many things you mention ring true to me, but particularly what you said about women fearing men. I am a rape survivor. One out of every six women have survived rape or attempted rape. I know the fear Amy Cooper has, deep in her bones. Most women, rape survivors or not, know that fear. If she were truly afraid of him, she would NOT have advanced on him. She certainly wouldn’t have tried to rip his phone away. She would have walked away while calling the police or someone she trusted because was afraid of being attacked. She would have walked away as fast as possible. She. Would. Have. Walked. Away. Instead, she walked toward him and HE stepped back. Instead, she weaponized her whiteness to try and make HIM afraid. You are 100% right: Foster and Weiss couldn’t be accurate because it wouldn’t fit their narrative. They weren’t objective, try as they might to sound that way. Instead, they had a hypotheses, and then they found the data to fit their narrative and make their hypothesis true, instead of the other way around. That’s not good reporting; that’s feeding the frenzy.
Thanks for your insight. I still think it is a story about 2 people making poor decisions. There is not a moral equivalency, but they both failed. After the mistakes a mob rushed in and that is our failing as a society. Going forward we all need to kook for our better angels and to judge less.
Why can’t you just disagree with the neoracist prof? You can’t listen to the podcast simply say they both failed. The media failed. You failed. An innocent woman was declared once and forever more as merely a bigoted racist of the worst kind: the new bits add so much more to the story to believe that now. On top of that, my former professor said he zero empathy after learning new info: most people are now like whoa, don’t believe everything you see you might misjudge people, he is like she is as racist as I thought she was despite the new info. This is ideology. This is CRT: this is wokeness. I’m jbailey is an embarrassment.
This has got to be getting up there along your worst takes. Give it a break, your embarrassing yourself and the woke community. You are simply the woke damage control guy and you are ducking retarded.
We can't know for sure what exactly happened before the video started, and Amy Cooper was in the wrong here. What she did was toxic, racist and dangerous.
But Christian Cooper shouldn't have tried to lure her dog away. That's not okay. Imagine being a woman alone in the park with a strange man who tries to lure away your dog. Do you confront this person, who, to quote Mr. Cooper "can do whatever I want and you might not like it?" Or do you run away, and risk losing your dog? Whether she was behaving shitty is not in question. She was. She should have had her dog on a leash. Calling the cops... and the manner in which she did it, was dangerous.
Her reaction, her behavior, how she handled the aftermath once she'd retrieved her dog, was all bad. But that she might have felt threatened and frightened though, should not be considered surprising. I think a lot of women would have. Of any race.
I agree with you completely but I must admit I didn't read your entire article just as I did not read the entire Weiss/Kemele article. I ran across the Weiss/Kemele piece the other day and am always interested in getting more facts and context but their article did not add anything new. The "you aren't going to like it" conversation had already been reported. In my view Christian did nothin to warrant Amy's calling the police. Nothing he did could reasonably be interpreted as a threat. She may have subjectively felt threatened but that is not on him. Admittedly I'm a dude and do not like off leash dogs.
At the time I felt sorry for her and appreciated Christian being cool about it. The Wiess piece just adds nothing and makes me despair of people taking responsibility for their actions. It also drops both Weiss & Kemel in my esteem.
What? Kmele writes the whole story and because it wasn’t the narrative you lapped up with your god spoon you gonna blame Bari and be big mad? Go live with antifa in a tent somewhere.
Good points and thorough response. I didn't come away feeling like Weiss and Foster tried to make Mr Cooper the villain... mostly that he was doing a routine he'd done before, which had led to previous altercations. Jerome Lockett, one of the others who had encountered Cooper, said his actions could be seen as threatening and someone wanting to call the cops might be an understandable reaction.
Yes, they should have noted in the episode Ms Cooper's own history of negative encounters (maybe they didn't want to reiterate too many details already covered in major news accounts?) and I don't think they mentioned her second call to the police in which she repeated the allegation of attempted assault. I think Foster was far too lenient! I came away thinking Mr Cooper was righteously indignant about dog owners being disrespectful in the park, and thinking that starting an already anxious woman, alone in a park, was a shitty situation waiting to happen. He did say a vaguely threatening thing, which had a very different meaning for him than for her. Also, her instincts and biases as revealed by her reaction makes me think she has a lot to work on.
But two final points: "If Amy Cooper was so scared, so terrified that Christian Cooper might hit her with a bicycle helmet...that she went up to him, repeatedly? Why did she approach him even as he was moving backwards?"
According to their telling in the podcast, after Mr Cooper started recording the video, his tone changed dramatically. That might be why her behavior changed.
"Foster and Weiss also made a point and claimed that had the roles been reversed, Amy Cooper would still have been viewed as the villain."
I think they were saying if she had been a birdwatcher in the park trying to lure unleashed dogs over with sketchy treats and trying to have the authorities make sure dog walkers behaved according to park rules etc, she would be considered to be exhibiting Karen behaviors. I don't think they were saying anything about a black dude calling a cop on a white woman. But anyway, all your additional context is helpful. Everyone who followed mainstream news, listened to the podcast, and read your response has a more complete picture of the events.
Sorry, I disagree. If she was terrified, she wouldn't have gone towards him before, during or after the video. She would have wanted to get away - the opposite of what she did. And as I stated in the piece, the main reason this became a national issue is because she weaponized race and threatened him that way. Had she not done that, no one outside of those two would have given much of a darn about the turf war between dog walkers and birdwatchers. That's the heart of this entire thing. And the podcast did not have a good answer for that - because there is none. She's had weird run-ins with people before this, so has he and none of those other interactions became national news. Her weaponizing race made this national.
I feel like it's a little dishonest to vague up the issue by talking about it in terms of a "turf war between dogwalkers and birdwatchers." A woman walking alone in central park came upon a man she didn't know, who tried to lure away her dog. That's... not okay. I'm not defending her reaction or behavior, but it's just not.
Yeah, it's a turf war that according to the reporting we have, each of them have participated in it before their encounter. As I pointed out in the piece, if that's all it ended up being, it would be national news. She made this national news when she weaponized her race. That's what made this a big story, not the dog walker vs. birdwatcher beef.
She most certainly did. Like I said. Not defending her behavior. But trying to lure away somebody's dog... he could have just as easily have been a dog thief instead of a birdwatcher for all she knew. Not okay.
Your trying to dissuade North Carolina’s formost woke fail janitor. Baileys job is to try to bend reality and make us eat it. If it’s not clear after this I don’t know what is. Also why the fuck wouldn’t you defend her behavior after knowing all the facts. When you call the cops, you describe the person who is before you.
Because I saw the video. He's right. After she'd retrieved her dog she became the aggressor. And she emphasized, before calling the cops, that she was going to tell the cops a black man was threatening her. Any blind idiot knows what that means in the real world, especially when you're talking about the NYPD. People get shot in situations like that. So no. Her behavior after the fact was not okay. Nobody's behavior was okay.
But you are assuming that in the moment all she was thinking about is racist motives instead of what Bari and Kmele made super clear, the fact is we will never always know the deeper motives but there are so many pieces of the story left out until now and it looks more and more likely that Christian is in fact the baddy. So the new woke rule for calling the police on a black man is to say nothing about race and in fact just don’t call. You describe the individual so that the cops know what’s going on. And people do not get shot like that, it’s highly unlikely and very rare indeed. It’s why Glen Loury has exhaustively laid out the case that police violence is certainly awful and in need of correction but the whole idea that all black people are always and
Forever shall be in immanent danger is false and dangerous. Christian was being an asshole and knowing the new bits of info cannot but change your view of this story. Bari Weiss and Kmele are winning and it’s all because wokeness is silly and destructive and so easily destroyed. Her behavior is not ok? Listen to the whole podcast, you didn’t. It’s a game changer. Smollet 2.0.
You are an ideologue. I purposely chose that name because it is irksome and funny and you weed out crazies like you much like pronouns in bio. Also why are you choosing sides? You cannot be smart and not antiwoke. Antiwokeness is the critical lense through which we abandon intersections of chaos and listening to stupid fat people.
I know I'm coming late to this, but I'm glad someone articulated what was so damn dishonest about the Kmele/Weiss "Two Coopers" report. First, the bullshit about how they're going to lay bare the WHOLE STORY that the media refused to report in their zeal to tell a neat narrative about a racist white woman. Then they proceeded to leave out the most crucial moment in the video: Ms. "You Scared Me" was so scared that she ran right up to her soon-to-be attacker and said ...What? "Please don't hurt me"? No: "Stop filming me." Wow. Those are clearly the words of a frightened survivor who's trying not to get hurt. I'm being sarcastic, of course. BUT KMELE AND WEISS LEFT THAT OUT!!! All the while telling us that theirs is the first report brave enough to give us the whole story.
“Foster spent a lot of time in the podcast criticizing the media for not providing the context of Christian Cooper’s other encounters and with the growing beef between dog owners and bird watchers. (I’ll let you and your Google search of stories decide how right or wrong he is on that.)”
After which you cite the NYT 2,000+ word piece that includes a rundown of what even the article admits could be post-hoc rationalization of testimony against Amy Cooper by neighbors, etc.
Meanwhile, no quotes from Jerome Lockett, a Black dog owner who strongly disagreed with Chris Cooper’s tactics. In fact, searching on Google News brings up *no* hits from any news source at that time, despite finding them now (thanks to this podcast). I know that there was, in fact, one NBC News article featuring Lockett at the time that I found, so this methodology is not perfect, but he was definitely not in the NY Times piece you link to, which was considered the most comprehensive.
So you have one of the most esteemed institutions of journalism publishing a piece to give a “more complete” picture of what happened, digging into previous altercations of one party, but not the other, when altercations by that party *match exactly* what they did in this one. That’s a mistake on their part, as well as every mainstream news outlet except for one, and I’m glad someone else is out there to pick up the slack.
Morally, Amy Cooper was still in the wrong, far more than Chris Cooper. But that’s for us to decide, not for a newspaper to guide us to by omitting certain details.
Why was Amy Cooper morally wrong? Your analysis was perfect until that bit of virtue signaling. Please enlighten us and be sure to not include that it’s because she described Christian accurately. K, thanks.
Isaac! For the love of God, please stop engaging in performative critical social justice politics that render these clownish takes. Kmele exposed your clownishness, everyone knows about your clown life and at this point no one trust a thing you say because you’ve made it clear dozens of blatant times that you don’t care about justice, just power. If only you weren’t so inept at basic morality and general knowledge, including how words work and such. You have zero credibility and are hereby cancelled. Have fun being a loser fake victim while sippin on your sweet tea, meanwhile the rest of us are not responsible for your diabeeteez or otherwise poor health. Will pray for your conversion to common sense and basic decency.
I find it strange that you attempt to downplay the threatening language, but refuse to type out the words he said. It really undercuts your argument.
Also the burden isn't on the sexual assault survivor to not call the police. The burden is on the police to not kill innocent people. You are advocating for sexual assault survivors to not seek help when they are threatened, which is pretty irresponsible
I appreciate the time and thoughtfulness you devoted to the podcast. I fear, however, you’re being far too generous to Bari Weiss. The podcast would never have been released if she hadn’t succeeded in making the white woman, who exploited racial identity in an objectively dangerous manner, the victim and the black man the villain. She makes her living being a noisy, self-righteous opponent of “identity “ and “cancel culture,” all while being a notorious abuser of both, often with herself as the star victim. The script is always written in advance - the Jewish person is the unfair victim of the Palestinian activist, the white person the unfair victim of the black person. We’ve watched her produce the same movie over and over. “Honestly” we don’t need any sequels, but because the NYT handled both her hiring and departure in a catastrophic manner, she became a “heroine” of ”liberal values” in the “wokeness” battles. It’s now her grift, so we’re stuck with her polluting The Discourse for decades to come.
It is kind of crazy that this keeps happening, unfortunately.
You both are ideologues. Plain and simple.
Once the NYT hired Bari and she decided to take this course with her career I'm not sure they could have handled her departure in a way where she didn't play the "victim". She seemed to be aiming at getting fired and becoming a "woke martyr". I'm not sure many people could live stream internal meetings at a company while publicly disparaging colleagues on social media and not be fired. Once the NYT didn't fire her she quit (incidentally I'm 50 yo and have read or followed the NYT for close to 40 years and theIr op-ed writers tend to be the living embodiment of "can never leave" from the Eagles' "Hotel California") and still attempted to claim the mantle of "woke martyrdom".
My take away from the podcast is that this has little to do with race, blame, villain, victim. It more about narrative, full view perspective and journalistic integrity (or lack thereof) of mainstream media today. The type of dialogue, critique and consideration of nuance happening in this very comment section is what I think Kmele (and perhaps Weiss) were going for. I know a lot of attention and feedback (good and bad) have been directed at Bari. I don't think that's fair. While she may have had a journalistic hand in this, it is very clear this podcast and the work that went into it belongs to Kmele. I follow Kmele on twitter, listen to his 5th column podcast, read his work...while he certainly hold a perspective on current events that is not particularly popular, he's incredibly smart. His work is usually very nuanced, driven by facts and good (not necessarily popular) information. But now I sound super biased...so I'll stop here. But thank you all for such insightful discourse. Keep it up!
Why are you undercutting what this grievance prof has said?
I'm not familiar with Kmele Foster's work, but I am VERY familiar with Bari Weiss, from her days trying to get pro-Palestinian professors fired from Columbia University when she was a student there, to her championing of alt-right racists and anti-semites (including the racist Charles Murray) as part of an "intellectual dark web," to her inexplicable hiring as an op-ed writer and editor at the New York Times, until she flounced off to the $greener$ pastures of Substack (largely because she didn't get along with her black colleagues at the Times, who she disparaged on Twitter). She has consistently argued in bad faith, and pretends to be a brave truth-teller and "intellectual dissident", when in fact she is simply a promoter of standard-issue conservative talking points and status quo thinking. As Nathan J. Robinson wrote, Weiss "embodies a kind of elite obliviousness to the actual facts of the world, and demonstrates a total lack of interest in understanding what her critics are actually saying," as can be seen in her current reactions to people criticizing her for her one-side "reporting" on the Cooper/Cooper story. So, I am not surprised that she views this story as one of a scared of a scared white female reacting to a situation with nothing but pure motives, rather than yet another story of white entitlement and privilege.
You are so deep in the cult that you think reciting tired smears against Bari and Kmele are going to persuade. Seek help soon Mr.! You don’t sound well or very intelligent, just like a cog in a wheel of a machine you don’t understand. Perform obeisance to Bari and Kmele now and we will forgive you.
Most Americans
Ah...now I know more about Kmele Foster: "...a telecom consultant who has found fame as Black man who caters to the anti-anti-racist crowd," per Jonathan M. Katz. https://katz.substack.com/p/letter-to-some-middle-aged-contrarians
THANK YOU for calling out Foster and Weiss (and Amy Cooper) in such a thoughtful, constructive way. You are so on point. The “Central Park Karen” story WAS a media frenzy, and I am always wary when that happens. I never want to be involved in a public stoning or condemn someone without knowing the facts, and during a frenzy it’s hard to ascertain fact from fiction. I appreciated that you linked to so many other articles so I could read myriad accounts of what happened. The fact is, I was with Foster and Weiss in the beginning — because it’s right to go beyond salacious details the media love to spotlight and try to ascertain what really happened, as accurately as possible. But, for all the reasons you pointed out, they lost me quickly. So many things you mention ring true to me, but particularly what you said about women fearing men. I am a rape survivor. One out of every six women have survived rape or attempted rape. I know the fear Amy Cooper has, deep in her bones. Most women, rape survivors or not, know that fear. If she were truly afraid of him, she would NOT have advanced on him. She certainly wouldn’t have tried to rip his phone away. She would have walked away while calling the police or someone she trusted because was afraid of being attacked. She would have walked away as fast as possible. She. Would. Have. Walked. Away. Instead, she walked toward him and HE stepped back. Instead, she weaponized her whiteness to try and make HIM afraid. You are 100% right: Foster and Weiss couldn’t be accurate because it wouldn’t fit their narrative. They weren’t objective, try as they might to sound that way. Instead, they had a hypotheses, and then they found the data to fit their narrative and make their hypothesis true, instead of the other way around. That’s not good reporting; that’s feeding the frenzy.
Thanks for your insight. I still think it is a story about 2 people making poor decisions. There is not a moral equivalency, but they both failed. After the mistakes a mob rushed in and that is our failing as a society. Going forward we all need to kook for our better angels and to judge less.
Why can’t you just disagree with the neoracist prof? You can’t listen to the podcast simply say they both failed. The media failed. You failed. An innocent woman was declared once and forever more as merely a bigoted racist of the worst kind: the new bits add so much more to the story to believe that now. On top of that, my former professor said he zero empathy after learning new info: most people are now like whoa, don’t believe everything you see you might misjudge people, he is like she is as racist as I thought she was despite the new info. This is ideology. This is CRT: this is wokeness. I’m jbailey is an embarrassment.
Whiteness can rationalize anything. Always.
Why’d you delete your other one bae?
You guys are digging your own demise with bs mental takes like this. Bye girl bye
This has got to be getting up there along your worst takes. Give it a break, your embarrassing yourself and the woke community. You are simply the woke damage control guy and you are ducking retarded.
You call yourself "wokewatch." Enough said.
It’s funny and apropos. You can’t dismiss us we are legion.
We can't know for sure what exactly happened before the video started, and Amy Cooper was in the wrong here. What she did was toxic, racist and dangerous.
But Christian Cooper shouldn't have tried to lure her dog away. That's not okay. Imagine being a woman alone in the park with a strange man who tries to lure away your dog. Do you confront this person, who, to quote Mr. Cooper "can do whatever I want and you might not like it?" Or do you run away, and risk losing your dog? Whether she was behaving shitty is not in question. She was. She should have had her dog on a leash. Calling the cops... and the manner in which she did it, was dangerous.
Her reaction, her behavior, how she handled the aftermath once she'd retrieved her dog, was all bad. But that she might have felt threatened and frightened though, should not be considered surprising. I think a lot of women would have. Of any race.
This is A low energetic Chomsky student who smokes too much pot.
This is wokeness folks. These people are mental, some psychopathic, some just very low energy with secret nazi wishes.
I agree with you completely but I must admit I didn't read your entire article just as I did not read the entire Weiss/Kemele article. I ran across the Weiss/Kemele piece the other day and am always interested in getting more facts and context but their article did not add anything new. The "you aren't going to like it" conversation had already been reported. In my view Christian did nothin to warrant Amy's calling the police. Nothing he did could reasonably be interpreted as a threat. She may have subjectively felt threatened but that is not on him. Admittedly I'm a dude and do not like off leash dogs.
At the time I felt sorry for her and appreciated Christian being cool about it. The Wiess piece just adds nothing and makes me despair of people taking responsibility for their actions. It also drops both Weiss & Kemel in my esteem.
What? Kmele writes the whole story and because it wasn’t the narrative you lapped up with your god spoon you gonna blame Bari and be big mad? Go live with antifa in a tent somewhere.
It would be better if there was a way to hide your posts...
Good points and thorough response. I didn't come away feeling like Weiss and Foster tried to make Mr Cooper the villain... mostly that he was doing a routine he'd done before, which had led to previous altercations. Jerome Lockett, one of the others who had encountered Cooper, said his actions could be seen as threatening and someone wanting to call the cops might be an understandable reaction.
Yes, they should have noted in the episode Ms Cooper's own history of negative encounters (maybe they didn't want to reiterate too many details already covered in major news accounts?) and I don't think they mentioned her second call to the police in which she repeated the allegation of attempted assault. I think Foster was far too lenient! I came away thinking Mr Cooper was righteously indignant about dog owners being disrespectful in the park, and thinking that starting an already anxious woman, alone in a park, was a shitty situation waiting to happen. He did say a vaguely threatening thing, which had a very different meaning for him than for her. Also, her instincts and biases as revealed by her reaction makes me think she has a lot to work on.
But two final points: "If Amy Cooper was so scared, so terrified that Christian Cooper might hit her with a bicycle helmet...that she went up to him, repeatedly? Why did she approach him even as he was moving backwards?"
According to their telling in the podcast, after Mr Cooper started recording the video, his tone changed dramatically. That might be why her behavior changed.
"Foster and Weiss also made a point and claimed that had the roles been reversed, Amy Cooper would still have been viewed as the villain."
I think they were saying if she had been a birdwatcher in the park trying to lure unleashed dogs over with sketchy treats and trying to have the authorities make sure dog walkers behaved according to park rules etc, she would be considered to be exhibiting Karen behaviors. I don't think they were saying anything about a black dude calling a cop on a white woman. But anyway, all your additional context is helpful. Everyone who followed mainstream news, listened to the podcast, and read your response has a more complete picture of the events.
Sorry, I disagree. If she was terrified, she wouldn't have gone towards him before, during or after the video. She would have wanted to get away - the opposite of what she did. And as I stated in the piece, the main reason this became a national issue is because she weaponized race and threatened him that way. Had she not done that, no one outside of those two would have given much of a darn about the turf war between dog walkers and birdwatchers. That's the heart of this entire thing. And the podcast did not have a good answer for that - because there is none. She's had weird run-ins with people before this, so has he and none of those other interactions became national news. Her weaponizing race made this national.
I feel like it's a little dishonest to vague up the issue by talking about it in terms of a "turf war between dogwalkers and birdwatchers." A woman walking alone in central park came upon a man she didn't know, who tried to lure away her dog. That's... not okay. I'm not defending her reaction or behavior, but it's just not.
Yeah, it's a turf war that according to the reporting we have, each of them have participated in it before their encounter. As I pointed out in the piece, if that's all it ended up being, it would be national news. She made this national news when she weaponized her race. That's what made this a big story, not the dog walker vs. birdwatcher beef.
Who threatened who? Also who had engaged in shady tactics before. Also Kmele is way smarter and better than you. Go be sad.
She most certainly did. Like I said. Not defending her behavior. But trying to lure away somebody's dog... he could have just as easily have been a dog thief instead of a birdwatcher for all she knew. Not okay.
Your trying to dissuade North Carolina’s formost woke fail janitor. Baileys job is to try to bend reality and make us eat it. If it’s not clear after this I don’t know what is. Also why the fuck wouldn’t you defend her behavior after knowing all the facts. When you call the cops, you describe the person who is before you.
Because I saw the video. He's right. After she'd retrieved her dog she became the aggressor. And she emphasized, before calling the cops, that she was going to tell the cops a black man was threatening her. Any blind idiot knows what that means in the real world, especially when you're talking about the NYPD. People get shot in situations like that. So no. Her behavior after the fact was not okay. Nobody's behavior was okay.
This is an example of a white ally who will March all the way to the gulag with their oppressor taking the abuse as they go.
I'll be fine, redhat. Go be the victim somewhere else.
But you are assuming that in the moment all she was thinking about is racist motives instead of what Bari and Kmele made super clear, the fact is we will never always know the deeper motives but there are so many pieces of the story left out until now and it looks more and more likely that Christian is in fact the baddy. So the new woke rule for calling the police on a black man is to say nothing about race and in fact just don’t call. You describe the individual so that the cops know what’s going on. And people do not get shot like that, it’s highly unlikely and very rare indeed. It’s why Glen Loury has exhaustively laid out the case that police violence is certainly awful and in need of correction but the whole idea that all black people are always and
Forever shall be in immanent danger is false and dangerous. Christian was being an asshole and knowing the new bits of info cannot but change your view of this story. Bari Weiss and Kmele are winning and it’s all because wokeness is silly and destructive and so easily destroyed. Her behavior is not ok? Listen to the whole podcast, you didn’t. It’s a game changer. Smollet 2.0.
Also, Mr. "Wokewatch", we're not on the same side. Bark up someone else's tree.
You are an ideologue. I purposely chose that name because it is irksome and funny and you weed out crazies like you much like pronouns in bio. Also why are you choosing sides? You cannot be smart and not antiwoke. Antiwokeness is the critical lense through which we abandon intersections of chaos and listening to stupid fat people.
Do you not see I being purposely over the top.
For the record, though. I agree with Christian Cooper when he said that Amy Cooper was wildly over-punished.
I know I'm coming late to this, but I'm glad someone articulated what was so damn dishonest about the Kmele/Weiss "Two Coopers" report. First, the bullshit about how they're going to lay bare the WHOLE STORY that the media refused to report in their zeal to tell a neat narrative about a racist white woman. Then they proceeded to leave out the most crucial moment in the video: Ms. "You Scared Me" was so scared that she ran right up to her soon-to-be attacker and said ...What? "Please don't hurt me"? No: "Stop filming me." Wow. Those are clearly the words of a frightened survivor who's trying not to get hurt. I'm being sarcastic, of course. BUT KMELE AND WEISS LEFT THAT OUT!!! All the while telling us that theirs is the first report brave enough to give us the whole story.
I appreciate this article, but:
“Foster spent a lot of time in the podcast criticizing the media for not providing the context of Christian Cooper’s other encounters and with the growing beef between dog owners and bird watchers. (I’ll let you and your Google search of stories decide how right or wrong he is on that.)”
After which you cite the NYT 2,000+ word piece that includes a rundown of what even the article admits could be post-hoc rationalization of testimony against Amy Cooper by neighbors, etc.
Meanwhile, no quotes from Jerome Lockett, a Black dog owner who strongly disagreed with Chris Cooper’s tactics. In fact, searching on Google News brings up *no* hits from any news source at that time, despite finding them now (thanks to this podcast). I know that there was, in fact, one NBC News article featuring Lockett at the time that I found, so this methodology is not perfect, but he was definitely not in the NY Times piece you link to, which was considered the most comprehensive.
So you have one of the most esteemed institutions of journalism publishing a piece to give a “more complete” picture of what happened, digging into previous altercations of one party, but not the other, when altercations by that party *match exactly* what they did in this one. That’s a mistake on their part, as well as every mainstream news outlet except for one, and I’m glad someone else is out there to pick up the slack.
Morally, Amy Cooper was still in the wrong, far more than Chris Cooper. But that’s for us to decide, not for a newspaper to guide us to by omitting certain details.
Why was Amy Cooper morally wrong? Your analysis was perfect until that bit of virtue signaling. Please enlighten us and be sure to not include that it’s because she described Christian accurately. K, thanks.
Isaac! For the love of God, please stop engaging in performative critical social justice politics that render these clownish takes. Kmele exposed your clownishness, everyone knows about your clown life and at this point no one trust a thing you say because you’ve made it clear dozens of blatant times that you don’t care about justice, just power. If only you weren’t so inept at basic morality and general knowledge, including how words work and such. You have zero credibility and are hereby cancelled. Have fun being a loser fake victim while sippin on your sweet tea, meanwhile the rest of us are not responsible for your diabeeteez or otherwise poor health. Will pray for your conversion to common sense and basic decency.
I find it strange that you attempt to downplay the threatening language, but refuse to type out the words he said. It really undercuts your argument.
Also the burden isn't on the sexual assault survivor to not call the police. The burden is on the police to not kill innocent people. You are advocating for sexual assault survivors to not seek help when they are threatened, which is pretty irresponsible
He is an ideologue of the worst variety. Nazis come in all shapes and sizes these days.
You have no shame.