There was no way all the usual media suspects were going to avoid mentioning the racial angle of the unspeakably brutal attack on a mentally challenged man in Chicago. That’s because the four black geniuses who held the man (who was white) hostage and tortured him for nearly 24 hours live-streamed their demented actions on YouTube.
The video was promptly deleted from the social media site, which hastily posted a screen in its place containing this clearly unrelated boilerplate:
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But enough snippets of the original remain in circulation, many embedded within news reports, to give readers a vivid sense of what went down. Here’s Chicago “virtual channel” WGN:
What did go down, as noted at the outset, was inescapably racist. The tormenters are said to have repeatedly shouted “F*ck white people” and “F*ck Donald Trump” throughout the video, while inflicting bodily harm on their hostage. CNN retains on its website one of the most complete, though heavily edited collection of clips, which shows one of the assailants grinning and laughing:
With a crime this blatant, the story was too explosive for even the Washington Post and NPR to sidestep, although the WaPo withheld mention of the race of the victim and perpetrators until nine paragraphs in, NPR four paragraphs.
The story was also picked up by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which reported in an update a short time ago that Chicago Police “say race was not a motive”:
Chicago police don’t believe a man beaten in an assault broadcast live on Facebook was targeted because he was white despite profanities made by the accused assailants about white people and President-elect Donald Trump, a police spokesman said Thursday.
So what was the motive? From the same report:
[I]nvestigators believe the victim was targeted because he has “special needs,” not because of his race.
Much better.
