No this is not justice

I saw it via Mayor Watermelon this morning.

https://twitter.com/MayorWatermelon/status/1275471363566755843

What man tracking what woman down? This man tracking this woman down.

It’s horrible to watch. He’s a bully. He would be a bully even if she had “flipped him off” but his claims about her are not even convincing. And hello, he’s a man, he followed her home in his car, and then stood there shouting at her and filming her while she screamed and cried.

It reminded me of the Central Park clash between Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper, except that Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper for no apparent reason, and Christian Cooper did not follow her home (or shout at her or keep escalating while she cried and shook).

Christian Cooper didn’t call Amy Cooper a Karen, either.

Ben Sixsmith in the Spectator US:

If you are on the internet you have no doubt heard of ‘Karens’. ‘Karens’ are middle-aged white women who have a fondness for reporting people, especially black people, to the authorities. ‘The archetypal “Karen”,’ says Vox in one of its invaluable explainers, ‘Is blonde, has multiple young kids, and is usually an anti-vaxxer.’ She ‘has a “can I speak to the manager” haircut and a controlling, superior attitude to go along with it.’

It sounds pretty fucking sexist right from the outset, doesn’t it, even before “Karen” has done much of anything. Oh no, she’s blonde. Oh no, she has kids. Oh no, I don’t like her haircut. Oh no, she talks in a way I would take for granted if a man were doing it. Sixsmith remarks:

In practice, calling someone a ‘Karen’ is generally an excuse to abuse a middle-aged white woman and make it seem woke.

Precisely.

Enter Karlos Dillard. Dillard is a young black man who was cut off while driving by a middle-aged white lady who then, according to him, showed him her middle finger. Mr Dillard followed her home and began to film her. Clearly, this woman had encountered the ‘Karen’ trend. She knew the rage of the internet could be turned on her, her family and her livelihood. She had what one can only describe as a breakdown, shaking, screaming and desperately trying to hide her face and her license plate.

Passers-by attempted to intervene to dissuade the young man from filming a woman in such obvious distress. Suddenly, Dillard insisted that she had called him the n-word. Really? Why he had not accused the woman herself of that is curious, given that no one would suggest that a raised middle finger is more hostile than the slur? Meanwhile, the woman continued to shake and cry.

Mr Dillard uploaded this video to Twitter, where he sports the unusual handle ‘wypipo_h8’. It took off, and has currently accrued 46,000 retweets and 97,000 likes. Commenters are laughing at the woman’s distress. ‘That’s extreme Karening,’ says one. ‘I wonder how they end up like this,’ says another, ‘Is it a defective gene or do they go for training?’

Yes, how dare women find it frightening if men follow them home. Nasty bitches with their haircuts and their attitude.

Edward Champion looks into the incident in more detail and doubts that Dillard is telling the truth about any of it.

Dillard claimed — in a series of Instagram stories — that he had the right of way to merge onto a street from Melrose Avenue in “Capitol Hill. Fucking Capitol Hill.” Dillard says that he was in the right lane. As the two lanes of the unspecified street were about to merge, Dillard says that the woman “freaked out and swung around me and got in front of me and slammed on her brakes and did a brake check.” He further claims that he nearly collided into the back of her car.

Well, you know, merges can be tricky. It’s not always clear what the other driver is planning and whether you should speed up or slow down or keep going at the same speed. It works fine when both parties are driving like adults, but there are assholes out there. Maybe it wasn’t “the Karen” who was being the asshole.

Dillard, a Trump supporter whose online record shows a clear angling for attention and online fame, saw an opportunity to go viral. So he chased the Geo Woman down in his car and confronted her, releasing the below video excerpt onto Twitter, which, as I write this, has been seen more than four million times.

He wants to be the next Christian Cooper, but here’s the problem: men following women home is not a social justice kind of look…at least it hasn’t been, and it shouldn’t be, but right now who knows, when the left has been so thoroughly steeped in angry misogyny by its trans wing that maybe now it is.

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