Sometimes people pushing a narrative for political reasons push too hard and too obviously. For instance, THIS NEWS STORY.
Ropes hanging from trees at a park in Oakland, CA, were reported to the local authorities who determined them to be nooses, a racist threat based on a long-passed history of lynchings. The FBI has been called in to help investigate. The Mayor is up in arms.
A few small problems:
1: Locals say that they know that the ropes were actually hung there, months ago, to serve exercise and recreational purposes.
2: There are apparently videos of them being used for that purpose.
3: A guy came forward to say that *he* hung the ropes for those purposes.
4: The guy is black.
So, in a rational world, this would be the end of it. Everyone officially involved would have a good, nervous chuckle and move on quietly, hoping that the story would quickly fade away. But then the mayor (Libby Schaaf) says this:
Schaaf said officials must “start with the assumption that these are hate crimes.” However, the mayor and Nicholas Williams, the city’s director of parks recreation, also said it didn’t matter whether the ropes were meant to send a racist message.
“Intentions don’t matter when it comes to terrorizing the public,” Schaaf said. “It is incumbent on all of us to know the actual history of racial violence, of terrorism, that a noose represents and that we as a city must remove these terrorizing symbols from the public view.”
“The symbolism of the rope hanging in the tree is malicious regardless of intent. It’s evil, and it symbolizes hatred,” Williams said.
Umm. I’m kinda sure that intentions *do* matter. We’ve all heard stories about someone carrying a golf club or a camera tripod and getting reported to the police by someone with bad eyesight for brandishing a rifle; under the good Mayors reckoning that person with the tripod would *still* be charge with “disturbing the peace” or some such. Under the Mayors system, people would live in constant fear of being ratted on by paranoid nuts, idiots, malicious jokesters. Every swing in the nation would have to be taken down, every vine hanging from a tree would have to be stripped away, lest some busybody decide to get offended.