“He Should Have Complied.”

The clarion call of a specific class of pop culture observer.

Ted Bauer
4 min readApr 15, 2024

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We have a new “case of the moment” out of Chicago: Dexter Reed. He was a 24 year-old black man. He got pulled over by cops, apparently for failure to use a seat belt. They told him, “Roll down the window.” He did, then he started to roll the window up. They had guns drawn. He seems to have fired first, potentially finishing an 11-shot clip in the process, and eventually he was shot and later died at a local hospital. I will give you a Megyn Kelly clip on this — not because I per se agree with the discourse, but because it has the most context of things I’ve seen and isn’t instantly ideological (although it does get there).

Well, 2024 is an election year — as was 2020 — so instantly we have a massive panic that something might happen here that “shakes the election” or “changes the election.” You will see any number of headlines regarding Dexter Reed saying, “They want to make this into the new George Floyd.” I see the argument, but George Floyd also happened two months into COVID and right after the Central…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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