It takes a brave man to attack a dead police officer.
Via HuffPo:
Last week five Dallas cops were killed by Micah Xavier Johnson, a Black man who was allegedly motivated to take such drastic action after continually watching the US legal system refuse to hold killer cops to account. Naturally, bootlickers across the globe are unquestioningly celebrating the slain officers as heroes, innocents, and protectors. But what if one of those dead cops was a white supremacist—is he still a hero? And I don’t mean a white supremacist in the sense that all cops are enforcers of a classist white supremacist order, which they are. No, I mean the more common use of the term. The one we associate with Klansmen, neo-Nazis, Skinheads, and your average Brownshirt wannabe.
Meet Lorne Ahrens.
Ahrens was one of the five Dallas cops killed last week. While mainstream media presented him as a family man, gushed over his imposing size, his sense of humor, and otherwise went to great lengths to humanize and memorialize him as a hero, a band of international Internet sleuths came together to research something the press failed to notice: Ahrens’ affinity for imagery associated with white supremacists. Right in one of the main pictures journalists and editors were sharing with stories about Ahrens, is an Iron Cross tattooed on his finger. With this tipping them off, the Internet sleuths jumped into action and quickly turned up more evidence of Ahrens’ white supremacist leanings. […]
I know what a lot of other people are thinking. Why shouldn’t I sully his name; after all, journalists routinely drag the names of Black victims of police brutality through the mud. I get it, but honestly dislike that comparison. White supremacists are hateful. They want me dead or out of what they believe to be their country, along with every other Jew, Black person, person of color, LGBTQ person, and anyone else they don’t deem pure (not mutually exclusive categories). A white supremacist cop, handed a badge and a gun and empowered to enforce our already racialized, classist, ableist laws, is a clear and present danger. Or in this case, was. Unlike someone who chooses to be a white supremacist, criminal records—the typical subject raised by media in efforts to dehumanize victims of police violence—stem from a lot of things; not the least of which being the racialized legacy of policing, housing, access to employment, loans, and education, the racialized nature of the war on drugs, the cyclical nature of poverty, recidivism, and a host of other things often outside one’s individual control. Being a white supremacist simply isn’t comparable. And it’s certainly far worse than selling CD’s, cigarettes, playing in a park, legally carrying a firearm, or the myriad of other police killings of Black people many whites find frighteningly easy to justify.
HT: American Lookout