Correcting the Record: Letter to the Editor of Salon

On March 2, 2021, an article in Salon mischaracterized “Radical Lives Matter,” a report by CRC president Scott Walter. Walter sent a letter asking for a correction to a rather serious error. What follows is his letter to the editor, the original paragraph in the Salon article with the mistake in red, and the amended paragraph with the change in blue.

Letter to the Editor

Dear Alex,

I read your Salon piece and appreciate your mentioning my article “Radical Lives Matter.” But you claim the article “mocked the idea of police brutality.”

That’s untrue. Neither there nor anywhere have I ever mocked police brutality. Police brutality is an ugly crime and a gruesome example of lawless government. My revulsion against that abuse of governmental power is bound up with my support of limited, Constitutional government and the rule of law.

So far from mocking the idea of police brutality, in the very article you cite I acknowledge the need for persons who are more expert than I in the details of policing to figure out “how best to improve American policing,” and I also “affirm that black lives matter.”

Will you please correct your article? (The other claims you make about the article and Capital Research Center are also not quite correct, but I’m not a utopian so don’t expect perfect accuracy or fairness.)

Many thanks,

Scott Walter

Original Paragraph

The Capital Research Center, a right-wing “investigative think tank” and a member of the State Policy Network, has an ongoing series that attempts to discredit BLM. One “special report” titled “Radical Lives Matter” connected BLM with looting and mocked the idea of police brutality. The Capital Research Center is heavily funded by the Bradley Foundation, one of the top funders of right-wing, state-based groups.

Amended Paragraph

The Capital Research Center, a right-wing “investigative think tank” and a member of the State Policy Network, has an ongoing series that attempts to discredit BLM. One “special report” titled “Radical Lives Matter” connected BLM with looting and radical leftist and cult violence, and compared last year’s incidents of police brutality to “a bogus martyrdom-by-police” narrative “invented by Eldridge Cleaver” to be “fed” to the mainstream media. The Capital Research Center is heavily funded by the Bradley Foundation, one of the top funders of right-wing, state-based groups.