Activist Actor Hijacks Closing Night of McAleer's 'Ferguson' Play

Nick Kangadis | November 8, 2017
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Liberals are very good at getting their message out to the masses. But what they excel at in propaganda, they lack in timing.

For people that dislike free speech when it’s speech they don’t agree with, they certainly have no filter when it comes to up-chucking falsehoods.

This was the case Sunday evening in Manhattan on the closing night of “FrackNation” director Phelim McAleer’s theater play, “Ferguson," which debuted in October.

Cedric Benjamin, an actor who portrayed Michael Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson in “Ferguson,” decided that closing curtain would be a good time to counter everything he’d been acting out in the play with skewed statistics and a media rhetoric narrative. Benjamin told the “standing room audience” to record him before accusing the play of being “unbalanced and biased.”

Benjamin even accused McAleer of “white arrogance" in a street conversation after the theater let out.

By the way, only “verbatim grand jury testimony” was used in the writing of the play. Not quite sure how that makes the play either “unbalanced” or “biased,” but I guess facts make someone guilty of “white arrogance” — whatever that is.

“This year, in the first six months, cops fatally shot 492 people -- 242 people were black, and half of that were unarmed,” Benjamin told the audience.

Benjamin also claimed that blacks represent only six percent of the population -- something he believes is the absolute truth.

It turns out that Benjamin’s "truth" exposes him as either misinformed or just a flat-out liar promoting a false narrative. According to the population estimates from the Census Bureau (as of July 1, 2016), 13.3 of the population in the U.S. is made up of “Black or African American alone.” That’s more than double the percentage that Benjamin claimed.

Benjamin must have reading some “fake news,” because even his statistics on how many black people that have been shot and killed by police were incorrect. Per the Washington Post Police Shooting Database, 194 black people have been shot and killed by police, but not just in the first six months of 2017. The numbers are updated as of November 5, or this past Sunday. That’s still less than the 242 number that Benjamin touted. In fact, most people who've been shot and killed by police have been white -- 396 of them in 2017, in fact.

Ironically enough, Benjamin's tirade was shut down by “Ferguson” Director Jerry Dixon, who is also a black man. Dixon didn’t discount Benjamin’s right to believe what he believes, but he did have a major problem with the avenue Benjamin took to espouse his talking points.

“This man is unprofessional,” Dixon told the audience in reference to Benjamin. “You have a brilliant mind, Cedric. Please don’t waste it on this b*lls**t.”

McAleer made his own statement regarding the outburst:

I’m tired of these activists spouting talking points. If they think my play FERGUSON misrepresents the Grand Jury testimony - they need to create their own play, but they never do because any reasonable fair reading of the transcripts show that Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown who was on a crime spree that day [...]

...the curtain call speech was breaking the agreement he had with the audience - FERGUSON is a verbatim play. I have told the audience that they will only hear what the Grand Jury heard. For Cedric Benjamin and others to suddenly introduce other statements to the theater is wrong, insulting to the audience and breaks a sacred bond with that audience. It was also totally unprofessional. I’m just sorry he spoiled the evening for the audience.

While McAleer professionally apologized to the audience, he shouldn’t be surprised that a “talking points liberal” spoiled the evening. That’s what they do.

For videos of the incident, watch below:

 

 

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