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When Motives Aren’t Hidden . . .

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, there was a debate over showing violent footage on television. It might provoke anger against Muslims. The National Interestran an article last September 12 saying that there had been too much media coverage, and it drove Americans into an “angry,” warlike mood.

Most people understand that showing people violent acts against their own people will make them angry. The media provoke moral panics about certain events to promote a storyline. This creates the moral climate in which people understand future events. Journalists downplay other events, often more important or interesting, if they don’t fit the storyline.

Here’s how it works. Last week, a black immigrant, Winston Glynn, murdered Burger King employee Kristal Bayron-Nieves, a Puerto Rican. You could call her a white Hispanic. Mr. Glynn isn’t ashamed for what he did. When reporters took pictures as he was being moved out of a police building, he screamed, “F*ck you all!” adding, “Where’s our reparations for four hundred years of f*cking slavery?” Hispanic onlookers cursed him in Spanish. Mr. Glynn shouted back that this would start a race war between blacks and Hispanics. “America is gonna burn!” he yelled.

Winston Glynn

It’s already burning, partially because Mr. Glynn’s opinions are mainstream. Some states and localities are already paying reparations to blacks, and many congressional Democrats like the idea. While few political leaders would openly endorse “burning” America, the policies that have helped unleash the current crime wave were considered crazy not long ago.

Some district attorneys are deliberately not prosecuting certain crimes — often because blacks commit them disproportionately. It was President Donald Trump, whom some journalists called a “white nationalist,” who signed a bill that let prisoners out early. Winston Glynn was on the street because his lengthy criminal record evidently wasn’t serious enough for him to be held in jail for very long. That record included death threats, weapons offenses, and a fight.

The case of Winston Glynn and Kristal Bayron-Nieves hasn’t had much attention. It may have been in the news only because the victim was Hispanic and her family was willing to denounce the suspect.

Kristal Bayron-Nieves

You may recall Tessa Majors. She was a white teenager and an aspiring journalist/musician. A group of black teenagers, two under age 18, robbed her. One then stabbed her to death. A court just gave him the minimum sentence. There is little public outrage or speculation about whether they killed her because she was white. The parents cried, and that was the end of that.

Tessa Majors

In Los Angeles, Shawn Laval Smith, a black man, stabbed Brianna Kupfer to death. She was working alone in a furniture store when he walked in and Kupfer texted a friend that he was “giving her a bad vibe.” Her “profiling” was correct. Mr. Smith’s criminal record is so long that his mug shots, taken after crimes committed coast-to-coast, could make a short movie if you showed them in sequence.

Brianna Kupfer

A Los Angeles prosecutor blamed current District Attorney George Gascon’s liberal policies for this and other crimes. Yet there is no Kupfer “movement” like the one that sprang up for George Floyd. Terrible policies lead to her death, but George Gascon probably doesn’t need to worry about re-election. He certainly won’t be demonized like Derek Chauvin.

Sometimes, a case can go either way. Earlier this week, a hostage-taking at a synagogue seemed to be the biggest story in the world. A gunman took several Jews hostage, including the rabbi. This was like the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting by Robert Bowers. After that case, media organizations lavished attention on Bowers’s political views and the social media he used. Some even blamed President Donald Trump for the attack. The attack became a political event.

In the more recent case, no one was killed except the gunman. The Independentcalled him a “British man from Blackburn.” In fact, Malik Faisal Akram is the son of Pakistani immigrants. British intelligence monitored him because of his radical Islamic views. He was on an MI5 “watch list,” but American border security let him in. This is a minor political scandal, but hasn’t created moral outrage among most journalists, and thus, the public.

Malik Faisal Akram

The suspect’s motives aren’t of much interest. The Jewish Chronicleobtained his last phone call to his brother. His brother tries to talk him out of violence and the suspect essentially calls his brother a coward, unwilling to fight for Allah. Akram demanded the release of an al-Qaeda affiliate and swore to bring “the war” to America. Interestingly, despite being a “British citizen,” he makes a clear distinction between “their countries” and “our countries.” He memorably “asked” his brother:

They come into our f*cking countries, rape our women and f*ck our kids and we can’t come in their countries and f*ck with them?

The media call him a “British man.” He didn’t see himself as one. This case doesn’t fit with the Biden Administration obsession with white “domestic terrorists.” The suspect’s failed jihadism hasn’t spawned a campaign for a renewed fight against Islamic terrorism.

The Waukesha Massacre is also not of much interest anymore, if it ever was. Suspect Darrell Brooks urged violence against whites, but this isn’t being treated as a hate crime. There’s no media hysteria over what may have “radicalized” Mr. Brooks. The answer would be the dominant media culture.

Darrell Brooks

Mr. Brooks’s rap songs, including an anti-white tribute to Malcolm X, are still on YouTube. His Malcolm X song is also on Soundcloud. “F*ck Donald Trump,” he says, after a lengthy excerpt from Malcolm X. He raps a list of charges against America about ghettos, the unwillingness of whites to talk about race, and whether there is a “small town somewhere hanging n*ggers.” Maybe that was going through his mind when he drove through Waukesha.

Mr. Brooks’s views are conventional. “Let’s face the fact that my people really built this nation,” he raps, “after you [whites] stole it from the natives, you [whites] the truest haters.” He’s more restrained than Brittney Cooper. This is the mainstream view.

Mr. Brooks may be a little confused. The famous photograph of Malcolm X holding a gun was originally directed against the Nation of Islam. However, Mr. Brooks’s seems to think it is a symbol of black militancy, and brandishing guns is that “Malcolm X Sh*t.” This is what Malcolm X represents to many blacks. He has streets named for him in several cities.

There are other homicides in which there may have been a racial motive, but not one was interested.

  • In 2015, black journalist Vester Lee Flanagan killed two co-workers on air. He tweeted that one of the victims had made “racist comments.” He also sent a rambling manifesto that vaguely blamed racism and homophobia.
  • In May 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter hysteria, black man Sheldon Francis shot two white octogenarians visiting their son’s grave. He was reportedly worried about COVID-19 and had set up a tent in the woods with weapons and body armor. This was the best the police could offer as a motive. The murder took place just after the Ahmaud Arbery killing. There was some online gossip that he may have posted messages about it on social media, but I haven’t seen any confirmed. The media weren’t interested.
  • Last year, a Kenyan illegal immigrant, Billy Chemirmir, went on trial for killing more than a dozen elderly victims, overwhelmingly whites (no blacks I can see). The case ended in a mistrial, leaving the victims’ families “devastated.” One juror reportedly would not change his vote, no matter what. The case involving what could be one of the biggest serial killers in history drew little interest.

“If it bleeds, it leads,” they say, but I suspect there will be no movies, television shows, public campaigns for new legislation, or public sympathy for the victims’ families. These cases had no media significance and thus no political significance.

Billy Chemirmir

From innocent women butchered at their workplace to a mass cull of elderly whites by a foreign sociopath, America is full of terrors. In many of these stories, there is an undercurrent of black racial resentment against whites. In Waukesha, it was open and obvious. In other cases, it wasn’t investigated.

Journalists don’t want to investigate or talk much about certain criminals’ motives. Crimes are hyped if they’re useful, dropped if they’re not. These cases shock us, but to the media they are less important than “micro-aggressions.” A “Karen” who calls the police on a black birdwatcher stirs more moral outrage than a black man who murders a white woman in cold blood.