Tears for Tianna Arata

September 6, 2020

OPINION by ANDY CALDWELL

When I consider Tianna Arata, I don’t see a Martin Luther King in the making, not yet anyway, despite what the BLM spin doctors have to say. Instead, I see a young kid who got inebriated with a sense of power, hubris, and celebrity only to wake up to find herself charged with 13 misdemeanors, which she has now discovered is “terribly inconvenient”.

Who is to blame for her predicament? Let’s start with Tianna herself. Like many people her age, she is shocked to learn that her actions have consequences. The allegations against her have to do with leading followers onto the U.S. 101 freeway which by definition created a “hostage-type” situation for motorists.

The freeway was blocked on two separate occasions. Many believe a third attempt was only thwarted by riot officers and tear gas. Regardless, enough was enough.

Tianna’s big mistake was that she picked the wrong town to launch a career as a rising star in the BLM movement. At this point in the story, we need to start naming the other people who are to blame for her predicament, namely SLO’s Heidi Harmon, the worst mayor on the Central Coast, and the soon-to-depart SLO police chief, Deanna Cantrell. These two woke progressives gave the young and naive Tianna way too much latitude for her own good.

In this age of the coronavirus shutdown, Heidi Harmon herself took part in rallies and marches that served to shut down downtown SLO. And, it is more than apparent, that the police chief did not bother to charge Tianna or others for any of her previous actions except during the apparent failed attempt to storm the freeway a third time. This soft approach to enforcing the law led Tianna to build up a sense of hubris until the city, the motorists, the merchants, and the residents finally had enough.

The biggest blame for the tears of Tianna falls to the leadership of BLM. It is certainly legitimate for citizens to hold a genuinely peaceful rally in cities that actually have a record of conflict, including cases of brutality, between the police and the black community. It is another thing altogether to try and score political points and create a ruckus in communities that have little to no record of such conflict, and in a community which doesn’t have much of a black population to begin with.

That is, the black population on the Central Coast runs about 2 percent of the total population and most all of these residents, except for the gang bangers, lead upstanding lives meaning they have had little to no contact with law enforcement to begin with, unless of course they work in law enforcement.

Regardless, when Sheriff Ian Parkinson tried to attest to this lack of race-based controversy surrounding local law enforcement, he was attacked as a denier!

SLO also happens to be one of the few progressive jurisdictions that is not served by a George Soros hand-picked District Attorney at the ready to dismiss any and all charges against illegal activities associated with “peaceful” protests. Moreover, the attempt to pressure, threaten and dissuade District Attorney Dan Dow from doing his job of administering justice for the people, whose rights were violated during the “peaceful” protest, is simply adding insult to injury.

Hopefully, somebody with a modicum of wisdom and righteousness will inform Tianna that Martin Luther King was successful because he drew the sympathies and compassion of the general public to the plight of black people in America. For a near perfect rebuke of the organization BLM by a man who has history in Dr. King’s movement, see this recent speech by Tennessee State Representative John J. Deberry Jr here:

I have actually been involved in a genuine Black Lives Matter movement for over 40 years. It started with my three black roommates in college, my studies at the college that focused on what was then called “minority studies”, a seven year prison ministry, and a life of calling out the significant pathologies in the black community that are mostly responsible for destroying black lives. Specifically, genocidal abortion rates, fatherless families, the school to prison pipeline, the double whammy of rejecting anything resembling “acting white” which the Smithsonian just resurrected in grand style along with the abysmal unbelief that cycles of poverty and despair can be broken, the prevalence of gangs and the street code that rejects cooperation with law authorities, and finally, drugs, alcohol, high unemployment and drop out rates and associated generational dependency on welfare which guarantees perpetual poverty.

Moreover, there are several articles that have been published on the BLM movement which indicate that the name of the organization is pure marketing genius for a Trojan horse of Marxism whose purpose is destruction of America institutions including the nuclear family and belief in God, along with other foundations of Western Civilization.

As a point of reference, I have interviewed David Horowitz a number of times over the years. David was a pioneer Marxist revolutionary in the 1960’s who was also involved with the original Black Panthers. His associate at the David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, John Perazzo, who I recently interviewed, wrote an excellent expose on BLM,

In conclusion, Tianna, spitting and stomping on our flag while dropping f* bombs at the police, our country and our flag, and everyone else who came within earshot, is not how you win friends and influence people, and it does absolutely nothing to improve black lives. Additionally, blocking freeways is not a winning strategy to encourage people to listen to what you have to say with an open heart and mind. There surely is a better way.

Andy Caldwell is an advocate for Black Lives and a candidate for Congress.