June 16, 2015
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Putting on the old “Professor of Journalism 101″ hat, I reminded Benavides, “I think it’s prudent before trying to get someone fired that actual “confirmation” of actions is achieved. The kind of confirmation that comes from objective statements and/or investigations. What you have is one-sided testimony that, while potentially correct, certainly does not rise to the standard of “confirmation,” at least not in the journalistic sense.”
The professor hat works every time. Benavides admitted, “No. There are no objective statements in this situation. From either side.”
In other words, no “confirmation” in any reputable journalistic sense. Yet the lie was repeated and a woman was suspended. Making the entire thing funnier (and why shouldn”t a piece that began with feeding humans to lions end on a lighter note?), Benavides himself copped to beating the hell out of a fellow “progressive” during an Occupy event in 2011. According to the police report, Benavides charged Occupy Dallas activist Glynn Wilcox, unprovoked, and beat him about the head and neck before choking him nearly unconscious, all the while screaming, “I am a revolutionary!” After being arrested, Benavides defended his actions as a blow against “white middle-class males.” The charges would later be dropped after Benavides apologized to Wilcox and blamed emotional stress resulting from his brother’s recent murder. For the record, the brother was killed not by a “white male,” but by an illegal immigrant and accused rapist who was put back on the street when the federal government mysteriously halted the deportation process.
Okay, so maybe I”m not ending on a lighter note after all. I asked Benavides why, as someone who had excused his own act of senseless violence, he didn”t at least try to find out Carver-Allbritton’s side of the story before “doxing” her. He refused to answer.
All right, here’s a happier note upon which to exit: The U.S. is not South Africa. We”re not that far gone. If we were, George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson would be in prison along with the Ferguson convenience-store owner (for the crime of assaulting Michael Brown’s hands with his shirt collar). Even the hardened leftists at the Daily Kos spoke out against Benavides” extrajudicial tactics, leaving comments like “She might be an awful person but doxing is coming very close to mob justice and mob justice gets their targets wrong many many times.”
Not that far gone indeed.
