By Rick Fuentes
Selectively reporting or downright ignoring crime based upon race is a dangerous gambit in the hands of a partisan media with a political ax to grind. The Associated Press Stylebook cautions journalists against identifying race in crime reporting once a suspect is found or apprehended; however, there is an escape clause that suggests that race can be injected into a story if a reporter believes it plays a part in a particular demonstration or criminal act. That opens the door to gaslighting and editorializing upon the factual circumstances of an event for political purposes.
On January 6th, no sooner had the pepper spray fog lifted from Capitol Hill, leaving all to lick their wounds, than NPR had already leveled blame for the melee on majority-white Trump voters, Trump supporters, and an assortment of right-wing fringe groups. Subsequent testimonial evidence of the involvement of Antifa decked out in full black bloc, along with credible reports of federal provocateurs acting as crowd agitators, none of whom have been arrested or handed House commission subpoenas, has drawn little interest from liberal commentators still exulting over the prolonged and isolated imprisonment of protesters charged with low-level crimes.
Similarly, media reporting in the immediate aftermath of the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings, to include Democrat celebrities and Joe Biden, immediately opened a false front by christening him a white supremacist. Creating an inference that his shooting victims were black, neither Rosenbaum, Huber, nor Grosskreutz, were identified as white males with villainous histories.
Media tongues suddenly stopped wagging after a young black man drove his car into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring dozens. Darrell Edward Brooks, a career criminal with a forty-four page vitae of lawbreaking, deliberately plowed his car through a marching group and onlookers in what many considered a blatant and premeditated act of domestic terror. Brooks effectively made that case in his own social media postings, characterizing himself as a child abusing, Hitler-coddling anti-Semite and BLM acolyte with a predilection to run down elderly whites.
Suddenly faced with an incident at odds with the progressive race narrative and no white scapegoats in sight, CNN, MSNBC, and liberal newspaper outlets cashiered all arrest photographs of Brooks save one released by the police a day after the initial mugshot. In the updated close-up, Brooks appears bug-eyed and washed-out, the melanin drained from his face as if the strong lighting of an arrest processing room were all that was needed to flesh out the white supremacist from the black xenophobe.
MSNBC fabulists Joe Scarborough, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, and Chris Hayes gave Waukesha an outright cold shoulder. No link to the attack could be found on a scroll of their webpages still chock full of Machiavellian commentary on January 6 and the Rittenhouse verdict. Maddow eventually aired a segment on Waukesha without so much as a reference to Brooks, choosing instead to cast blame upon a red SUV that “inexplicably sped into the parade route.” Although Brooks several times veered his car into the path of paradegoers, NBC News made a de minimis issue of his intent by labeling the attack an accident, while ABC came close to blaming cops by alleging Brooks was fleeing a pursuit.
Censoring criminal misdeeds in matters where a particular skin color is unsuitable to one’s needs or political purposes is emblematic of today’s legacy media. MSNBC and CNN have chosen to shun awkward incidents of organized looting, an appellation promptly discarded in the belief that wordsmithing a crime might lessen a connotation to race. Flash mobs of larcenous young adults, many concealed in ski masks, hoodies, and packing handguns, arrive en masse to empty boutique shops of their wares, pepper-spraying and assaulting employees, and at times engaging in gun battles with police while escaping in convoys weighted down with booty. What began as a California phenomenon spurred on by the pro-thievery provisions of Proposition 47 has become hoodlum chic across the country.
The New York City Police compile data on crime and its characteristics as good as any major city department. Their data shows that 63 percent of all homicides were committed by blacks against 65 percent of all murder victims in 2020. In distant second at 26 percent were near identical rates of Hispanic-on-Hispanic victims and assailants. Citywide shootings and murder statistics for 2021 are tacking in the same direction, only worse. These results are transposable to many Democrat-run major cities, all with a calamitous impact upon black residents and inner-city neighborhoods.
NYPD has sought the public’s help in identifying mob looters caught on security cameras. Videos and photos unmistakably reveal inconvenient truths to those who ply their trade in racial obfuscations. From San Francisco to Minneapolis and Chicago to New York City the choreography is the same, rampaging troupes of mostly young black males plundering in blue cities with do-nothing policies towards crime and mayoral diktats that prevent cops from interfering with or investigating retail theft.
The media’s willingness to play along with progressives in their effort to mask black-on-black crime reveals artful deception. To date in 2021, in Chicago, over seven hundred people have been murdered by gun-toting assailants, an increase of more than fifty percent over the previous year. The victims are disproportionately black at a rate of 8 to 1 against all other races and ethnicities combined, with most of the shootings occurring in majority-black neighborhoods and attributed to known street gangs and their affiliates. In their 2020 annual crime report, the Chicago Police Department released information on the race and ethnicity of almost five hundred homicide victims but excluded that information for the more than two hundred known assailants, also a media practice more woke than informative in their day-to-day reporting of each individual shooting.
Black-on-black violence may be an irrefutable feature of city murder rates but should not be propagandized as an innate characteristic of race. Motives behind urban bloodshed are socioeconomic and involve a culture of gun violence by criminal street gangs running a wholesale and retail drug trade supplied by foreign drug cartels. The free flow of drugs across open borders feeds lucrative American drug markets. Laissez faire approaches to enforcement in the face of political largesse towards violent felons has led to a dramatic uptick in gang recruitment and gunplay aimed at eliminating competition at the local level. Internecine gang rivalries have given rise to a disturbing trend towards wild public shooting sprees rather than headshot street assassinations. Multiple innocents are now caught between indiscriminate gang fusillades and their intended targets, causing murder rates to skyrocket.
Overlooking race in reporting crime data chills the development of solutions that would strengthen the safety and welfare of inner-city neighborhoods, allow police to focus their efforts upon serial shooters and other violent offenders, and recommend high bail or pre-trial detention for recidivist felons who pose a legitimate danger to the community. Unfortunately, these remedies are of little interest within a liberal evangelism that has broad-brushed the word racist from a social pathology into a birth defect, putting a branding iron to more than three hundred million Americans born of a certain pallor and hammering home the message in grade schools, college campuses, the military, and corporate boardrooms.
Expect no mea culpa over the biased reporting of the Waukesha parade massacre, the Rittenhouse shootings, serial mob robberies, and racially-scrubbed city murder statistics, all necessary to advance the liberal canard on white fragility, supremacy, and systemic racism. Unfortunately for the well-being of the black community, keeping a focus upon intrinsic white racism brings about an ignorance of the elemental constructs of black-on-black crime.
