It’s not enough that family-owned bakeries bow to the gay marriage crowd. Now they’re the target of the social justice mafia.
At my alma mater, radical Oberlin College in Ohio (whose alumni include the ill-fated Baltimore mayor and riot master Stephanie Rawlings Blake and the weird feminist actress and false rape accuser Lena Dunham), the owners of a small bakery are under siege by vengeful students and administrators who are trying to crush them under the wheels of a racist wagon. The real victim in this latest tale of political correctness gone wild is Gibson’s Bakery, a quaint shop founded in 1885 that still bakes all of its goods according to its original recipes.
On November 9, according to a city police report I obtained, store employee Allyn Gibson caught a 19-year-old Oberlin College student who allegedly stole two bottles of wine and hid them under his shirt. As officers approached the scene, Oberlin Police Sergeant (Victor) Ortiz and Officer (Raymond) Feuerstein testified that they saw Gibson lying on his back with several people kneeling over him, punching and kicking him, and several other people nearby. Officers attempted to control the situation and were met with resistance from several different individuals.
Allyn Gibson tried to stop the alleged shoplifter, Jonathan Aladin, from leaving the store and tried to take a picture of him as he fled. Gibson was hit in the face with his own phone. Aladin reportedly fled by throwing two bottles of wine on the floor, becoming “aggressive” and “grabbing and punching Allyn.” Aladin ran out with two women who were with him in the store. Gibson followed him and tried to stop the alleged shoplifter again on the street.
Gibson’s right as a store employee to detain a shoplifting suspect with probable cause until police arrive is protected by Ohio statute. As the women punched and kicked him, police officers who arrived on the scene during the beating wrote:
“Allyn had several abrasions and minor injuries, including what appeared to be a swollen lip, abrasions to his arms and wrists, and a small laceration to his neck.”
Aladin has been charged with robbery and criminal damage and will go on trial this week. Two women, Endia Lawrence and Cecelia Whettstone, have been charged with assault.
You can guess what happened next. Aladin, who is black, became the new poster boy for institutional racism and oppression. Students staged protests and shouted “racial profiling,” claiming the bakery had a history of discriminating against customers “of color.”
It’s worse. Leading the charge in the latest war on small-business bakeries is Oberlin College Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo, who joined the screaming crowd to intimidate the Gibson family. She distributed flyers slandering the claim that Gibson’s is “a racist establishment with a long history of racial profiling and discrimination.” Sentenced by the crazy court of public opinion, Oberlin College refused to renew its longtime daily order of doughnuts and bagels. For a small business with razor-thin margins, losing that order can be devastating.
Never mind that the “racism” charge is a blatant lie. The police department said there have been four robberies at the store since 2011, including Aladdin’s, “and he was the only black person. Over the five-year period, 40 adults were arrested for shoplifting, 32 of whom were white. Six black adult suspects and two Asians were arrested, and 33 of those 40 were college students.”
And never mind that Trey James, a Gibson employee who is black, bluntly told the student newspaper that race had nothing to do with the incident. “If you get caught shoplifting, you end up getting arrested,” he told the Oberlin Review. “When you shoplift, it doesn’t matter what color you are. You can be purple, blue, green, if you shoplift, you get caught, you get arrested.”
Never mind that Oberlin has been ground zero for false hate crime allegations—from the infamous 2013 sighting of a “KKK-clad” man on campus who turned out to be a student in a blanket to Lena Dunham’s shameful attempt to blame a college Republican for sexually assaulting her, a story she retracted after Breitbart.com blogger John Nolte and others in new media exposed the hoax.
In the 1990s, Asian American students claimed that a phantom racist had spray-painted anti-Asian racial epithets on a rock that is a campus landmark. It turned out to be a perverted Asian American student who had committed the sullied deed. While I was there, a black student accused the older Mr. Gibson of racism after he told a female student that she was not allowed to sit at an outside table because she had not purchased anything from his store.
Ohio radio host Bob Frantz, who has mobilized well, decent, hard-working community members to support the Gibson family, told me that the Facebook page supporting the bakery has been censored by Facebook. (No wonder: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a staunch, fact-hating supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.)
It’s time for true justice to triumph over truth-sabotaging, violence-fuelling, thug-coddling social justice. If you’re not actively fighting the mob, you’re supporting it.
