Dear Kirk Herbstreit…Wake Up!

Dear Kirk Herbstreit…Wake Up!

Count us among your fans for your work as a college football analyst.  You’re knowledgeable, insightful, articulate and passionate—you and Chris Fowler as ESPN’s #1 announcing team were always a pleasure to look forward to and listen to in the biggest games of the fall season.

You also radiate a certain heartland decency and goodness; the hometown football star grown up into a TV celebrity while still the All-American, feet-on-the-ground family man we’d be happy to have join us for the backyard barbecue.

So it’s especially sad to watch you tear up on national TV in the midst of a me-too social justice ramble—showing yourself to be a naïve, manipulable fool that the ruling class puppetmasters just relish being able to pull the strings on.

You refer semi-obliquely to some pitiable young black man in a hoodie, with ‘hands at ten and two’ yet facing random death at the hands of out-of-control police.

Presumably your allusion is to an amalgamation of Trayvon Martin with his hoodie and Michael Brown with the narrative of ‘hands up, don’t shoot’.

Kirk, both of these stories are phony ‘narratives’; they are utterly and demonstrably and inarguably FALSE.  They did not happen in the ways or for the reasons you have been led to believe.

Please bring yourself up to speed on the truth.  Read this, and inform your pro athlete friends.

Trayvon Martin was high on ‘lean’’; his judgment clearly impaired when he jumped a Hispanic man, got him to the ground, and was beating the Hispanic man’s head into a concrete curb, likely on his way to killing him—when George Zimmerman, on the ground, skull bleeding, and about to be killed, found his pistol and shot Martin.  Simple self-defense.

Trayvon Martin was not an innocent teenager wearing a hoodie and skipping on the sidewalk eating Skittles when arbitrarily shot.  He wasn’t shot by a police officer, and he wasn’t shot by a white man.

And Michael Brown never had his hands up saying ‘don’t shoot’.  Eric Holder’s Justice Department effectively said so when they declined to bring charges against the officer.  Do you really think Eric Holder would not bring charges if a white officer shot a black man who was standing innocently with his hands up, saying ‘don’t shoot’?  Holder should bring charges if that were the truth.

While we’re at it, Kirk, here’s a few more facts to think about in the current ‘news’.

George Floyd had a criminal record that included pointing a gun at a pregnant black woman’s stomach to keep her under control while Floyd’s colleagues robbed her.  Did you know that?

Floyd’s autopsy showed he had in his body more than twice the amount of fentanyl that is considered fatal.  Video at the scene shows he was delusional, resisting arrest and short of breath (even saying “I can’t breathe” while standing up with no one touching him) before Derek Chauvin took any action.  George Floyd was effectively a dead man walking.  Do we really know everything we ought to know about he came to be in that condition on the day he died?

(As an aside, do you ever ask—where did Floyd get the fentanyl?  The default narrative is to say ‘duh, he’s a druggie; he got it from a dealer’—but what dealer?  Why fentanyl?  How did it happen that Floyd took so much of it that day?  Just a typical druggie’s mistake?)

Jacob Blake had an arrest warrant issued against him for sexual assault at the time he was shot.  Read the complaint of the black woman he assaulted to familiarize yourself with the vile and disgusting details.  Then recognize the fact that the Kenosha police were called by the black woman victim of Blake’s sexual assault to get Blake away from her because he was violating the terms of a restraining order issued against him.

Video shows he was resisting arrest; he had a knife; he was going to his car with a purpose when the officer shot him, and there is exactly zero basis to believe Blake’s purpose was benign.

Kirk, you don’t get to default into “well, I’ve heard differently” or “all of that is just a conservative perspective”.  NO.  It’s not a perspective at all.  There is only one set of facts as to what happened with Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and George Floyd and Jacob Blake.  Inform yourself as to what those facts are.

You are still free to believe police are ‘too [whatever]’; you are free to believe changes need to be made in police procedures; you are free to cry about whatever you want to cry about.  But don’t believe or start from lies.  Form your opinions in light of the truth.  Determine where to stand for moral courage in relation to the truth.

You are being played.  You believe every ‘elite’ authority figure is as good and decent and upstanding as you.  And so you believe the NYT would never lie.  You believe Barack Obama would never lead an effort to frame an innocent man, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.  You believe John Brennan and James Comey had reason to believe Donald Trump was a Russian agent.  You believe the Democrat impeachment effort was based on facts and evidence.   You believe Dr. Fauci would never have anything but the best interests of the health of the American people motivating him.  You believe hydroxychloroquine, budesonide and oleandrin are dangerous and could kill people, and that’s the only reason Dr. Fauci would act to suppress them.  You believe George Floyd and Jacob Blake are righteous martyrs in a systemically racist nation.

Everything on that list of narratives you believe is false, a lie.

You may be right about one thing, and that is that there are many in the black community who are hurting and afraid, and that is truly tragic.  But it is truly tragic because their hurt and fear results from being played and manipulated, just like you.  They are being fed lies to lead them to believe they live in the most hateful and bigoted society on earth, with uniformed officers just waiting to mow them down for no reason—instead of living in the freest, least racist, most integrated society in the history of mankind.

If you’re not a felon, not resisting arrest and not high on drugs—what exactly is the evidence that you are in mortal danger of the police in America?

The black community is being fed lies because the liars don’t respect them and believe they can make them believe lies in order to get them to vote for Democrats.

Is there any hope that you, Kirk Herbstreit, and so many others can awake from being played?

_______________

That’s the momentous question facing Herbstreit and all of the American people in 2020.  We have been exposed to a coordinated, deliberate run of elitist lying, perhaps on a scale never before seen or comprehended.  We have millions of younger Americans of every gender and skin color with not the slightest clue of what truth is or how to discern it from lies.  And sadly for Kirk Herbstreit, he lives in a bubble/echo chamber of lockstep leftwing sports media who will be loading ‘attaboys’ and pats on the back to Herbstreit for his supreme virtue signal of ’empathy’. Affirming lies that hold people down is the opposite of empathy; it’s the perpetuation of tyranny.  But it’s hard to wake up when everyone around you says you’re fully woke already.

We prefer to live in hope.  That was the message of Christ Jesus in the Bible.  That was the foundation of the American Revolution and the nation that sprang from it.  That is what produces the initial character, authenticity and likability of a Kirk Herbstreit.

So yes, there’s still hope.  Just got to wake up from believing lies.

Eric Georgatos blogs at America Can We Talk?