The current dominant narrative on race has me confused. According to much of the MSM and at least one congresswoman, Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. They say so despite having literally no evidence for the proposition and a great deal tending to refute it. The “logic” of the argument has it that, because the riots in Kenosha resulted from the police shooting of a black man and Rittenhouse went to Kenosha to try to defend people and property and ended up slaying two men and injuring a third, his actions must have been racially motivated so he must be a white supremacist. It doesn’t make any sense, but there it is.
Then we come to the Ahmaud Arbery case in which a jury of 11 whites and one black convicted three white men of 24 counts related to their slaying of a black man, and, in the process, spurning the defense’s grotesque appeals to race. So far, I’ve not seen anyone in the leftist press admit that the criminal justice system worked perfectly well and that the whites on the jury may not be racists after all. That’s true despite the fact that, prior to the start of evidence, the MSM was replete with claims that a white jury in rural Georgia was inherently suspect. Comparisons were made to jurors who, in 1955, acquitted white men of Emmett Till’s slaying. Interestingly, after the Arbery verdict was read, those comparisons have vanished from the liberal media. Southern jurors may not be the racists the Left prefers them to be, a fact that much of the press prefers to ignore.
At this point, perhaps we can conclude that progressive leftists simply desire the outcome they desire – for white defendants to be convicted and punished regardless of the facts. Certainly that explains their responses to the Rittenhouse and Arbery verdicts and of course the Derek Chauvin one as well. Fortunately, it seems that jurors, black and white alike, take their duty more seriously. It’s just barely possible that jurors in those cases weighed the evidence adduced in court and applied the law in an evenhanded manner. Crazy, I know, but still possible.
Finally we have the Darrell Brooks case. Brooks of course is the man who’s alleged to have driven his SUV into a crowd of revelers celebrating Christmas in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The result was the death of six people including an eight-year-old boy and the injury of many more. Multiple police tried to get him to stop, but Brooks allegedly ignored them, never applying his brakes and swerving in order to hit more people.
Plus, it appears that Brooks, who has a 20-year rap sheet that includes multiple incidents of violence using a motor vehicle, acted out of race hatred of whites. Various social media posts by him indicate his desire to kill or injure white people as well as his notion that “Hitler was right” and “did the world a favor by killing Jews.” All those who’ve died at the Waukesha parade were white.
But, as Jason Riley reports, Brooks’s virulent racism has barely been mentioned by the leftist press.
The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white. Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters. Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind.
Indeed.
Here, for example, is how Politico finesses the inconvenient truth:
Brooks included links on social media to his songs, several of which seemingly celebrate violence and call police “pigs.”
Not a word about his desire to (referring to white people) “KNOKK DEM TF OUT!!” Needless to say, Riley’s right; if a white man with a history of anti-black rants had plowed his automobile into a crowd of peaceful blacks, the leftist press would never stop screaming.
Now, given Brooks’s history, I think we can expect progressives to forget the whole awful case as quickly as possible. The otherwise-requisite lionizing of such a thug looks just too difficult. And certainly Brooks’s lawyers will want to cut a plea deal if at all possible. They’ll hope for life imprisonment and likely get it. Absent a trial, the case will fade from public view without the need for the left-wing of the MSM to come publicly to grips with who it calls a racist and who it doesn’t.
Still, for those of us who keep an eye on such things, the question will persist. If a young white man who kills two white men is a white supremacist, but a black man who calls for injuring or killing white people and then goes out and does exactly that is not a racist, then confusion reigns. When mostly white juries convict one white police officer and three white civilians of murder are not racists, but the one that exonerated a white man charged with the deaths of two white men are racists, then the “definition” of “racist” seems increasingly like an ad hoc business.
But, against the backdrop of utterly inconsistent rhetoric, We the People soldier on. In the form of juries, in the form of parents protesting at school board meetings, in the form of voters rejecting woke extremism, everyday folks look more and more like the rock on which society is built, the ones who remember what our nation is supposed to be and who still strive to make it that way.
Will extremist elites come to heel?
This originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
