A couple of further points about the Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper confrontation in Central Park last year
I already wrote about the topic yesterday – and strongly suggested that you listen to this podcast about it. The discussion in the ensuing thread raised a bunch of interesting questions that I wanted to address, so here’s one more post about the deeper story of what happened that day in Central Park, and in particular its aftermath.
Commenter “huxley” notes that Bari Weiss, the interviewer in the podcast and former Times writer, writes in a Substack article that she only recently learned that Christian Cooper had written a Facebook account shortly after the incident, indicating that he threatened Cooper (“look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it”), and tried to lure the dog with a dog treat that he carried for “such intransigence.” [Correction: although the URL of the substack article says “bariweiss.substack.com, it was actually written by someone named Megan Phelps-Roper, so for the rest of this post I’ve substituted Roper’s name for Weiss’s when referring to the author of the substack piece, and eliminated a reference to the author of it being a reporter. Weiss is still the person in the podcast interview about the incident.] Phelps-Roper writes:
He threatened her, I thought, stunned. He says himself that he approached her — a woman alone in a wooded area. He tried to lure away her dog. How was this the first time I was reading these details? Had I just missed them in the other stories I’d read?
How had she missed them? I think it’s quite simple: first of all, they weren’t heavily covered even on the right. Although I didn’t write about the Cooper vs. Cooper incident – I was busy with the death of Floyd, which was contemporaneous, plus I felt from the start that there was something fishy about the Central Park story – I read early on (unfortunately, I no longer remember where) about that Facebook post of Christian Cooper’s. Thing is, a person had to read a lot to find it, and also had to read not just the MSM or blogs on the left, but had to dig into blogs on the right as well. The information was available, but it wasn’t easy to find.
But what’s more interesting to me is why (at least, if I’m remembering correctly) relatively few outlets on the right covered Christian Cooper’s Facebook admissions either. I recall that I didn’t cover the story because, as I said, I was thinking the facts were murky and so I would wait, and then I got distracted by the extreme furor around the death of George Floyd and pretty much forgot about the Coopers. But plenty of other bloggers wrote about it and didn’t really get into the details that might have explained Amy Cooper’s behavior.
I tried to search old articles about this in order to test whether my memory about the nature and content of the contemporaneous coverage on the right is correct, but it proved surprisingly difficult to locate and I didn’t have time to spend many hours in that quest right now. So at this point I’ll just say that’s the way I recall it, and if I’m correct about the avoidance of discussion of Christian Cooper’s Facebook admissions at the time, I think the general avoidance was because defending Amy Cooper seemed very risky and the video seemed to implicate her so strongly. And especially in the wake of the Floyd furor, not many people – even on the right – wanted to touch it.
Another point I’d like to make is that, according to Amy Cooper in that podcast, it was only when Soledad O’Brien tweeted about the Central Park video featuring Amy – a video that had been posted by Christian Cooper’s sister – that the story went truly viral and Amy Cooper began to get multiple and serious death threats. It happened quickly because O’Brien picked up on it very quickly and had “a million” followers (she has 1.3 million now).
O’Brien is a long-time and well-known journalist. Why did she think this story was one she should spread far and wide? I would guess she recognized at once that it had viral potential. Guilt by video has become a big journalistic approach, especially with incidents that involve supposedly racist actions or speech. So in my opinion it was really O’Brien, a newscaster, who was most responsible for the video getting such wide coverage.
O’Brien is of mixed racial background: her father is white (from Australia) and her mother is of what’s called “Afro-Cuban” descent, meaning that her mother is of mixed race including black. According to Wiki, when O’Brien’s parents wanted to be married, Maryland still had laws against miscegenation (an interesting map can be found here), and so her parents had to move to DC to marry. That’s certainly a searing history for O’Brien, and it wouldn’t be surprising if O’Brien became especially sensitive to racial issues in part as a result of that.
Even now, as I go to O’Brien’s Twitter page, I see this at the very top:
When my mom died I found this Letter to the Editor among her possessions. She’s calling out John Klein, the Town Supervisor in Smithtown LI, for his racist housing policies. I think it’s from the 1970s. It inspires me to name names, and call out BS. Don’t live afraid. pic.twitter.com/hdyL1zOZL9
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) August 6, 2019
And so my guess is that O’Brien felt the need to “call out” Amy Cooper by posting that video, even though Cooper’s behavior was as a private citizen rather than a public official in the course of his or her work duties. Whether or not O’Brien knew Amy Cooper’s name at that time, O’Brien had to know that her identity would be discovered and revealed in short order.
But O’Brien didn’t stop with that initial tweet. She kept up the pressure on Amy, stoking more anger and ridicule on her with a tweet such as this one.
If I’m not mistaken, this is O’Brien’s first tweet on the subject (Melody Cooper is apparently Christian Cooper’s brother, who had posted the video on social media of the confrontation):
In case you’re wondering if some people are willing to put the lives of others at risk by calling the cops on them, and lying about the threat. Imagine doing this KNOWING you are being recorded. https://t.co/XYEBhYHoNd
— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) May 25, 2020
So Amy Cooper was immediately described by O’Brien as a woman desiring to risk Christian Cooper’s life and essentially framing him (by “lying about the threat”), and being brazen enough to do it knowing she was being recorded. O’Brien doesn’t appear to have been the least bit curious (even though she’s a reporter) to know the whole story. She was apparently content to let the video fragment speak for itself and assumed she could interpret it to the world.
Which she did – and O’Brien’s truth about the incident, and about Amy Cooper herself, became The Truth for most of the world.
[NOTE: One relatively minor issue is whether Amy Cooper was at fault for letting her dog go unleashed in a part of the park that requires leashes. Yes, she was – but that hardly is an offense that should destroy a person’s life. In addition, if I’m recalling Amy Cooper’s story on the podcast correctly (I haven’t listened to it again to make sure, because I don’t know at what point she addresses the issue), she says that she had been in a part of the park that does allow unleashed dogs and then took a shortcut on a path that entered an area that requires leashes, but she didn’t realize that.]
We take our dog to the nearby state park, where leashes are required. And if there’s not much of anyone around, we let her off the leash. She’s voice-trained and stays close to us, and we ensure that she doesn’t bother people. My husband doesn’t take the dog to the park on Mondays, when there’s a ranger who does clean-up from the weekend who will harass him about the leash even when there’s absolutely no one else around. The ranger just doesn’t like dogs, evidently, and he’s kind of a jerk. This Christian Cooper is sounding more and more like this kind of jerk, plus racism.
O’Brien’s role in this is just plain evil.
I don’t think there are many prominent journalists who have any decency or integrity.
That having been said, someone at Franklin Templeton fired Amy Cooper and their corporate communications apparat then libeled her. And there are a mess of hiring managers at competing companies who will not consider her for employment. Cancel culture works because garbage people behave this way.
@Art Deco:
News Flash: Most people are Garbage People when push comes to shove.
Extra! Extra!: Proportion goes up as you go up the org chart.
Which is why he who rules must set and enforce the moral tone. And make sure that not too many pushes are permitted to reach the shoving stage. You don’t want people learning too much about their own characters or the characters of those around them if can at all be avoided. Not a Genie goes back in the bottle. Cannot be forgotten once seen.
Look at all the media types and elected officials that blatantly smeared the Covington kids within minutes of the event.
Twitter just allows these losers to do more damage than before because now they don’t even have to edit a story just grab the phone at fire off a hot take.
As I mentioned in the other comment section even were one to assign all the bad motives to Amy I still don’t see how her punishment matches that ‘crime’.
I don’t care how nice and kind you are at some point in time you have been in a bad mood and maybe treated a stranger poorly but that moment shouldn’t alter the entire trajectory of your life.
Griffin:
That’s what cancel culture and the left are all about. They’re not about fairness, or looking at the whole picture, or even about finding the truth. They’re about destroying those who step out of line or give the appearance of stepping out of line. It’s a warning to everyone else, and a demonstration of power as well.
neo,
I guess, but it bothers me more when it’s a private citizen just going about their life.
Lack of power I think is what gets me. There was nothing Amy could have done from the moment that happened where as some that have been cancelled have a high enough profile to fight back to some degree.
It bothers me intensely, as well.
Writing posts is all I can think of to do about it, and also sometimes trying to point things out the fuller story to friends and bring their attention to the injustice. But unless they’re willing to put in the time to read or listen to what I’m referring to, it’s probably wasted effort.
neo:
I forgot to mention it in my comment but the Bari Weiss substack article was written by Megan Phelps-Roper.
The first time I read it I assumed it was by Weiss too, but then I ran into these first-person comments about growing up in the infamous Westboro Church and I thought, “Wait a minute.”
huxley:
Thanks. I hadn’t looked back to check, but I’ll fix the post.
The name, Soledad, is a Spanish girl’s name, but I can’t help but wonder if in Soledad O’Brien’s case it’s a shout-out to the “Soledad Brothers,” three black inmates at Soledad Prison who killed a white guard and became a cause celebre on the revolutionary left.
Freeing the Soledad Brothers was the objective in an aborted kidnapping of Judge Haley at the Marin County courthouse in 1970 that left four dead, including the judge.
The weapons were recently purchased by Angela Davis. She was tried and found “not guilty.” She has gone on, naturally, to a distinguished academic career.
Sometime I feel a bit like Artfldgr, shouting at the traffic like Kevin McCarthy in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” about the history of the leftist body snatchers.
In 1980 who would have thought the New Left would win?
________________________________________________
You fools! Can’t you see you’re in danger? They’re after you! They’re after all of us. Our wives, our children, everyone. They’re here already! You’re next! YOU’RE NEXT! YOU’RE NEXT! YOU’RE NEXT!”
–Kevin McCarthy, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGJDSd7pNrk
Most people are Garbage People when push comes to shove.
Thanks for the projection. Always an education.
Art Deco:
He does that a lot. A feature he appears to be proud of.
When he was lecturing neo about his wisdom from third world cabbies a song from the 70’s came to mind: Z was “Looking for Love In All the Wrong Places.”
Soledad O’Brien came out of San Fran Bay Area local tv news and even while still in that capacity she was very race obsessed. I specifically recall a Soledad story about how St Patrick’s Day crowds being mainly Caucasian was somehow racist. She’s a piece of … work, and always has been. Also thick as a brick.
Oh.. *that* Soledad O’Brien. Back in the low tech days before hotel room TVs started showing a ‘Welcome Back, Gauleiter Zaphod!’ personalized welcome screen upon arrival, she’d be on the box jabbering away as I came through the door. But not for long.
I remember her on MSNBC back when that actually meant “Micro-Soft-NBC and she was the host on some show that was about computer tech. She wasn’t political on that as far as I remember but it’s been a lot of years.
I noticed huxley’s comment about the Facebook video on the first post and thought, “How could she have missed that?”
It was very prominent in the original reporting that I remember!
Neo’s speculation about why it was deep-sixed pronto are probably correct.
I did read about the threat C Cooper made to A Cooper as well as the prepared dog treats he was carrying pretty quickly after the story first came out, but no one I discussed it with seemed to care and were all quite eager to blame A Cooper as a racist who should be shunned from all society. It reminded me of how the lies about Zimmerman were so popular.
Yeah, Soledad O’Brien is a POS progressive activist with a megaphone, AKA “jOuRnALiSt” possibly THE most disgusting form of human on earth. They are literally the tip of the spear that allows decrepit and traitorous scum like Obama and Biden to escape any kind of honest evaluation. And I don’t give two figs about how terribly “rAcIsT” people were to her parents.
For their sake, they sure better hope things never truly go south, as people will not forget this kind of behavior.
That’s certainly a searing history for O’Brien
Yup. That’s almost as searing as Affirmative Action, minority set-aside, protected classes, forced busing, polar bear hunting, knockout games, differences in crime statistics….
If only Cooper were a Communist and had the kind of true friendship found in Hollywood. She could work under a transparent pseudonym, be given awards, then made into a heroine.
I’ve learned to have an open mind about these “civilian” videos. The camera is often turned on after some precipitating event such that vital context is missing. Context that very often casts a much different light on the situation.
This is the first I’ve heard of Mr Cooper’s FB post admitting making a threat. And I’m not surprised to find missing context. Once again I’m disheartened that so called “journalists” have failed at their jobs.
Moral of the story: Mainstream media is filth. And the people who read/watch CNN, AP, NYTimes, WaPo are complicit.
There are 3 antagonists in the story. The 2 obvious ones, and the much larger malignant hate-filled one, the American “mainstream” Media.
Not surprising, considering the drooling, vindictive gratification with which Ashli Babbit’s killing is justified. And this by nice church ladies who don’t think murder should carry the death penalty.
To think of this crowd as having any consistency except in cluelessness and anger is a waste of time.
When A. Cooper threatened to call the police, C. Cooper said, “Please, call the police!” In the podcast, the question is never asked: was C. Cooper bluffing or was he conscious that this situation was no threat to *him*? All the evidence indicates the latter to have been the case. It seems to follow that the whole controversy on the left has been artificial and hypocritical.
I first read this story at the New York Post. It included the threat/quote:
“look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it” & the part about the dog treats for he carried for “such intransigence”. It seems Wapo & NYT left that out.
I think it was aln over reaction to Amy Cooper and had the races been reversed and she was black and Christian Cooper was white we would never have heard of this incident. I’m sorry to see her life ruined and she probably will never get another job again or at least for a long time. If I was her I would sue my former employer.
The thing that stands out to me about this whole sad story is the expectation by so many that calling the police on C Cooper was tantamount to “risking his life,” as if ALL interactions by police with black persons would result in murder.
Do these folks even remember the Chris Rock “How Not to Get Your A** Kicked by the Police” instructional video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8)? Humorous yes, but absolutely true. Do what the police say, and you will be okay MOST of the time.
BrooklynBoy:
She is suing her former employer.
Terry Tannehill:
The NY Post is a news outlet that is on the right. There were indeed some papers on the right who covered it better such as that one; I had read some of the fuller story somewhere on the right very shortly after it happened. But the totality of the story didn’t emerge until later, and the majority of the MSM didn’t ever reveal it. What’s more – and again, I’m doing this from memory – a lot of blogs on the right came down hard initially on Amy Cooper. The video convinced them.