Remembering George Floyd

The Tuesday Talking Points

With a nod to French philosopher Peter Abelard's classic treatise "Sic et Non," translated from the Latin as "Yes and No," Ol' Hobbs is back to answer questions from the hottest headlines!

1. Will the George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill pass before the end of summer?

No! Today marks the anniversary of George Floyd's death, a murder caught on videotape that still sends chills down my spine when I think of the nine plus minutes that former police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his (Floyd's) neck while onlookers taped every macabre second of the deplorable deed. 

RIP George Floyd

It would certainly be significant if a bipartisan measure like the Floyd Bill gets passed today—or even this month. But I don't think that it will happen simply because like almost everything else in America, this issue is so politically charged that rational police reform is truly a hard sell.

As if on cue, the progressive slogan "Defund the Police" has emboldened some conservatives in Congress who were looking for an excuse to do nothing while saying, "see, the Libs want criminals to just commit crimes and not be held accountable." This detestable lie brushes past the truth that the overwhelming majority of Democrats, including President Joe Biden, do not support the defunding or whole-scale dismantling of the police. As the son of an officer and as a former prosecutor myself, I have never advocated the full end of all policing. But what I and the majority of Democrats do advocate is for officers who kill unarmed Black people to be charged and tried in courts of law for their criminal acts. Which, essentially, lies the rub because there are far too many politicians who do not believe that officers who kneel on the necks of Black folks (Floyd), choke out Black folks (Eric Garner), Taser Black folks while cuffed and on the ground (Ronald Greene), or break into Black folks homes looking for suspects who arent even there and blaze away--killing the owner in the process (Breonna Taylor), should be found guilty of anything! 

George Floyd's life mattered; no million dollar settlements will assuage his family's loss or ameliorate the tragic reality that policing in America is separate, unequal, and oft deadly for people of color. This in a nation where from the very first slave patrols, far too many people in the majority were and remain accustomed to being indifferent about the deaths of Black people killed "under the color of authority." 

2. Is the crime and punishment stereotype the main reason why conservatives refuse to reform the police?

Yes! Dating back to my old days as a founding member of the Morehouse College Republican determined to bring unapologetically Black voices to the GOP table (a Sisyphean labor and failed experiment), I realize that with the exception of former Florida Republican Governor (turned Democrat) Charlie Crist, if you spend five minutes with even the most well meaning conservative, if Black constituents are raised, the chatter turns to crime and punishment. For years I have told such conservatives in private meetings, public forums, and in my articles and blogs that it is beyond offensive to begin every single discussion about the Black community with "criminal justice reform." But these conservatives act as if white men and women are not being charged with murder, rape, drug trafficking, theft, welfare fraud, child abuse, and everything in between each and every day; trust me, they are so charged! Not to mention that there are millions of Black voters who have never spent even a moment in a police car—let alone a jail—in their entire lives. 

So I remind conservatives, once again, to stop projecting your biases and blindness to the true wiles of a system that was enacted by your conservative forebears to disproportionately impact Black people. Yes, criminal justice is important, but no more so than wealth creation, health, and educational concerns that fully mitigate the need to build jails and prisons in the first place.

3. Has the politicization of news reporting and sharing stunted meaningful justice reform in America?

Yes! Last week on Facebook, I posted the question "what was the first major news event that you remember from your youth" and it made me smile to see that one of my best friends from my youth living in Maryland, David Brown, remarked that his earliest memory was the gas shortages of the 1970s and the long lines that forced kids in our era to wait for "odd" and "even" days (according to our parents car tags) in order to fill up. I smiled because that was my very first major news memory, too, as I watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News tell us the latest happenings with the OPEC oil embargo and the subsequent fallout.

CBS News’ Dan Rather (left) and Walter Cronkite

Back in the day, whether one was a Cronkite or Dan Rather devotee, a Peter Jennings of ABC News fan, or a Tom Brokaw of NBC News follower, we simply watched the news—not left wing news, moderate news, or right wing news. Those days are no more, and as one who by law school training is adept at seeing (and arguing) either side of an issue, I sometimes click on news sites and from the headlines alone, I can tell the ideological bent of the publication. To my chagrin, some upstart news sites these days lack even the slightest bit of journalistic integrity as they will publish lies and pass them off as facts despite little to no fact checking or proper attribution of quotes. I avoid the latter sites like the plague, but even as a center-left leaning moderate, I admit that I frequent more historically reputable conservative news sites like National Review and the Wall Street Journal so that when I analyze matters for my own site, I have the benefit of knowing perspectives from the right, left, and middle since such are times in which we live!

Still, whenever I see headlines like "The (Democratic) Squad is the Hamas Caucus,” I ask myself what's really at play with the misinformation and more crucially, what can others who click on such bait do to gather the truth to combat such fiction? 

At this juncture, I am open to suggestions....

4. Will Florida Gov. Ron Desantis' newly signed social media law be upheld?

No, absolutely not! Ever since former President Donald Trump's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media pages were suspended this past winter following the January 6th rebellion at the Capitol Complex, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis (R) has vocally pushed for restrictions on what private social media companies can do to regulate content and users on their sites. 

Gov. Desantis was once a lawyer and knows full well that Florida's new law will be struck down as unconstitutional based upon the First Amendment, but this provides a teachable moment this morning in an era in which far too many people have forgotten (or never learned) how the First Amendment works! 

Florida Gov. Ron Desantis (R)

So, I admit that I chuckle at times when someone writes on one of my posts that Facebook or Twitter are infringing upon Citizen Trump's free speech rights. Um, no, Facebook, Twitter, and even the Hobbservation Point Newsletter are private businesses, which means that each can regulate who can patronize our platform—and remove folks who do not abide by our rules. Meaning, if someone subscribes to this newsletter and comes on a post and offends me, with a nod to former President George W. Bush, "I'm the Decider" and reserve the right to block said poster from my platform!

Conversely, local, state, and the federal government can not play the role of "Decider" due to the First Amendment! A measure ratified by the Framers who understood that King George III and the British Parliament had usurped speech rights, assembly rights, and free exercise of religion rights so intolerably that their very first order of business was to prevent any American governmental entity from doing the same!

Gov. Desantis was a lawyer long before entering politics, and he has some really smart lawyers with whom I am very familiar advising him who surely know better, too. But this rule is a political ruse to inspire a conservative base that misses Donald Trump's Tweets so that should Desantis mount his own run for president (assuming that Trump does not seek a second term in Grover Cleveland like fashion), that he will inspire loyalty from Trump fans. 

Ultimately, I sense that this summer won't end before some Federal District Judge in Florida rules the law invalid, thus beginning a journey that could lead all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where even with its conservative split, the majority will be hard pressed to allow such a blatant disregard to over two centuries of jurisprudence on free speech to stand.

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