"Ohio Police Fatally Shoot Pregnant Woman"

In Other News, Wokeness Drags the Left Off a Cliff

This headline appeared in my news feed this morning: Ohio Police Fatally Shoot Pregnant Woman. The reader obviously is led to expect a story of police excess. The actual story tells, well, a different story:

Police in a Columbus suburb fatally shot a pregnant woman in an Ohio supermarket parking lot after she accelerated her car toward an officer, police officials said. Ta'Kiya Young, 21, of Columbus, died Thursday evening in Blendon, the AP reports. A supermarket employee told officers who were at the store on an unrelated matter that multiple people were fleeing from the store with stolen items, Blendon Police Chief John Belford said. That included Young, who had allegedly taken multiple bottles of alcohol. One officer went to the driver's side of Young's car and told her to stop, Belford said, while the other officer moved in front of the vehicle.

Young then put the car in gear and accelerated forward, Belford said, and the officer directly in the vehicle's path fired one shot through the front windshield. Young's car then traveled about 50 feet before coming to a stop on the sidewalk outside the store. She was pronounced dead a short time later. Young was due to give birth in November, her family told the Columbus Dispatch. Her unborn daughter did not survive the shooting. Young was the mother of two sons, ages 6 and 3. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is leading the investigation into the fatal shooting, Belford said. Young's family told the Columbus Dispatch they have many questions about the shooting, mainly why she was deemed a lethal threat.

The article was published by Newser, which is rated as “Left-Center biased based on story selection and editorial positions” and “High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record.”¹ It’s a typical rating, as most news media is slightly left of center. This is what slightly left of center means nowadays. And the staff at Newser did their absolute best to try to follow the narrative on this one, including a picture of Young’s friends celebrating her life at a vigil afterwards, and a desperate attempt to personalize her unborn baby by giving it a sex—her “unborn daughter.”

But the comment section reveals no one is fooled by any of this:

Brad Cummings

You just have to love newsers headlines, they start slapping down so many cards you dont know which card to pick up first? How about doing an article on woman tries to kill officer? or pregnant woman steals alcohol to drink?

Fetterman Follower

21 years [old] with a six and a three year old. Pregnant again. Looting a store. Tried to run over a cop. Society will not miss her.

I wish the left would stop trying to push when it can’t win. If there really were a story here about some pregnant woman minding her own business before being fatally shot by police, well at least that actually fits the narrative, and if you really must push that narrative, OK. But what are conservatives and moderates supposed to conclude here except that leftists are crazy, and being even slightly left of center means you have a religious obsession that compels you to interpret every event through a woke lens, even when that event obviously counteracts your narrative?

Woke liberals, for their part, cheerfully ignore everyone else. They’re so married to their not-at-all-a-religion that they assume the narrative is totally invincible. It isn’t. Though Americans are as divided as ever on the term, more now already interpret the woke label as an insult than a compliment.² Kathy Young, writing for the Cato Institute, notes that clinging to the woke narrative is “driving many people to the right — as evidenced by the shift toward Republicans in New York State politics and by recent polls that show a rise in conservative views among young people. If liberals and progressives refuse to talk about these excesses and continue to dismiss them as a myth, this will only empower the right‐​wing anti‐​woke backlash.”³

The view below a cliff is better when you’re not falling into it

What is it with you, Apple Pie? Why do you always complain about Wokeness?

This kind of grasping, dogmatic insistence on following the narrative over a cliff would be just fine with me, if I had all the things I wanted out of liberalism. But I don’t. I’d like a 32 hour work week. I’d like decriminalized psilocybin, legalized prostitution, less income inequality, and better environmental protection. I’d like to see the 2nd amendment abolished—let’s agree that we’re already infringing on the rights of people to bear firearms, and that it’s actually a good thing. I’d like fewer abortion restrictions, which I’m not even going to spin by calling it “pro choice.” Related to that, I wish someone would notice the fact that religious conservatives are so prolific that they’ll soon inherit the Earth. I really want better awareness of existential threats to our long term survival as a species, which generally don’t include Communism or pedophiles. I’d even like more tolerance for the transgendered, when it comes down to it—but I can’t talk about any of these things before I’m immediately drawn into a vortex of “Yes, global warming is the greatest threat to humanity since XYZ” (it isn’t) and “Yes, parents should be held criminally liable for refusing to use their children’s preferred pronouns” (sheesh, they already are).

Conservatives and moderates don’t always yell at me when they find out my political beliefs. Occasionally, we actually talk. There’s at least a possibility for a give and take. But as soon as the woke enter the room I need to be “educated” (my master’s degree wasn’t enough, evidently) or my positions are “surreal.” But worst of all—I can’t even admit to being left of center to anyone else without them thinking I’m one of those people.

Dear woke persons: Go ahead! Jump off a cliff if you want to! Whatever! Please stop dragging me with you! That’s reason number 6 for why I am done with wokeness.

1. “Daily Source Bias Check: Newser.” Media Bias/Fact Check, 12 June 2023, https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/2023/06/12/daily-source-bias-check-newser/#google_vignette. Accessed 29 August 2023.

2. “Americans divided on whether "woke" is a compliment or insult.” Ipsos, 8 March 2023, https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/americans-divided-whether-woke-compliment-or-insult. Accessed 30 August 2023.

3. Young, Cathy. “The Pushback against 'Wokeness' Is Legitimate.” Cato Institute, 8 June 2023, https://www.cato.org/commentary/pushback-against-wokeness-legitimate#. Accessed 30 August 2023.