I saw the videos. He didn’t “drive into” anyone. Some idiots stepped in the path of a moving vehicle. Some, apparently, deliberately in order to get bumped, so that they could play the victim.
Surrounding a vehicle purposely impeding their exit path is by itself enough for me to generally side with the person being impeded. Further, if it also includes harassing and intimidating them, I refuse to agree that this behavior is acceptable and just write it off as protected speech like the author does. People have a fundamental responsibility to protect themselves, when forced into a situation like this. I remember watching the attack on Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riots and if you haven't seen that but agree with the author of this article, go watch what happened to Reginald Denny. This behavior of harassing drivers should not be normalized as acceptable in society. People that choose to do this and end up getting hurt, basically asked for it.
The description reminds me of the Renée Good shooting. Both highly videotaped, intentional blocking of a departing vehicle, an official inexplicably releasing what many say is self-damning video, but people tend to see only what they already believed in the videos.
Yeah, I sympathize with the cause of the protesters (the clampdown on pro-palestinian activists in particular and free speech in general is obvious) and I also sympathize with the idea of confronting the dean and showing the obvious hypocrisy of his statements - but making this about getting run over is a bit absurd. If you surround the car with the intention of blocking escape, you can expect that the driver will push back.
At least this is how it sounds to me from the article's description, without seeing the videos.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] threadPosting here before this politicized content gets autoremoved.
At least this is how it sounds to me from the article's description, without seeing the videos.