A former ice cream shop owner, who has relocated to another state, has been ordered to pay $500 each to 9 “peaceful” Black Lives Matters protesters he’s accused of harassing under a recently-passed New York “anti-Karen” law (read story here).
The man’s actions were egregious: He allegedly threatened the protesters with a rifle, used racial epithets, and called police on them, falsely claiming they were armed and threatened him.
“Karen” has become a popular term to describe people who harass others, often because of their race, in incidents that frequently involved calling the police. There have been a rash of such incidents receiving a high level of publicity through You Tube videos and news reports in the last year or so.
There have been over 11,000 BLM protests since George Floyd’s murder, over 96% of them entirely peaceful, and much of the violence has come from white supremacists and other opponents, including over 40 terroristic car ramming attacks, a few of which resulted in deaths including one in Seattle, apparently inspired by the murder of a white anti-racist protester in Charlottesville, North Carolina. That attacker got life in prison.