Walter Olsen, whose
Overlawyered blog is on my sidebar, today comes to us with a
Storify link to his tweets of
Sunday's takeover by Black Lives Matter protesters. The most disturbing part is
Black Lives Matters was asked to lead the parade:
"BLM said they did not tell organizers about their plan to hijack the
parade, an act that has since been called a “win” by the group, but
widely criticized by many others.
Pride president Mathieu Chantelois called BLM's hijacking of the event the mere opening of negotiations:
“Yesterday, we agreed to have a conversation about this. We agreed that
we will bring this to the community and to the membership, but at the
end of the day, if my membership says no way, we want to have police
floats, they decide.”
Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a
flood of hate mail aimed at BLM, whose behavior is simply inexcusable and childish. BLM went on to complain about this as
"pink-washing":
Relations between the petulant BLM protesters and city hall appear to be still surprisingly good, as the city planned on giving them a
race relations award, part of a pattern of collapse in the face of organized protest, no matter how childish.
The short history of Black Lives Matter in Toronto proves that so long
as you’re the victim group du jour, bullying and intimidation can win
you obeisance from officials, to say nothing of reverential coverage in
the media. When they staged a sit-in outside police headquarters to
protest police racism, the Toronto Star depicted them as freedom
fighters. After they demonstrated outside the home of Ontario Premier
Kathleen Wynne, she met them on the steps of Queen’s Park and declared,
“I believe we still have systemic racism in our society.” When they
accused the city of racism for shortening
the schedule of an African music festival (the neighbours had
complained about the noise), the city hurriedly restored it. In response
to their demands, both the city and the province have called for
investigations into the racist practices of the police – despite the
obvious fact that Toronto is one of the most racially peaceable cities
in all of North America.
As much as I'd like to think the Pride organizers will win this one over time, I'm not entirely convinced.
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