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The shameful silence on the Waukesha massacre
Identity politics has corroded the humanity of the elites.
Is silence still violence? If it is, then a whole lot
of people, from the Hollywood set to the virtue-signalling left, are
guilty of some serious violence right now. Their silence on the Waukesha massacre,
on the slaughter of six innocents by a man wielding his SUV as a deadly
weapon, is deafening. More than that, it is sinister. Dancing grannies,
an eight-year-old boy, people singing and cheering at a Christmas
parade, all mown down. Six killed, 62 injured, in what police are
treating as a suspected act of intentional homicide. That is, mass
murder. And yet there’s been nothing from Hollywood stars who normally
love to hold forth on terrible acts of violence. Influencers seem to
have been struck dumb. There are no blacked-out squares on Instagram.
The big woke corporations aren’t pumping out pained, concerned press
releases. It’s just tumbleweed, everywhere.
This is the case of the brutal vehicular attack that took place at a
Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Sunday. The death toll was
grim. Three members of the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies were killed, their
ages 79, 71 and 52. An 81-year-old man succumbed to terrible injuries.
Two brothers – 12-year-old Tucker Sparks and eight-year-old Jackson
Sparks – were struck. Tucker survived, Jackson did not.
The driver of the SUV was Darrell Brooks. We still don’t know why he
did what he did, though the initial reports that he was simply driving
very fast to get away from a knife fight appear, unsurprisingly, to have
fallen apart. Who flees a fight by driving at high speed into a tightly
packed crowd of people? Brooks has now been charged with five counts of
intentional homicide. A sixth may soon be added, following the death of
eight-year-old Jackson on Tuesday after undergoing brain surgery for
his injuries.
Where is the anger over this? The social-media solidarity? The woke
left’s ferociously tweeted concern about a rising tide of extremist
violence? Even here in the UK the left and the Twitterati are able to
rattle off the names of the three people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse
– even while conveniently forgetting that one of them was a convicted
paedophile – but I bet they couldn’t name a single victim of the far
larger, seemingly more intentional act of violence carried out in
Waukesha. The right-on remember and mourn the horrific killing of one
woman by a far-right man who used his car as a weapon in Charlottesville
in 2017, and yet already they’re staring awkwardly at the ground,
virtually shrugging their shoulders, over the killing of six people by a
man using his SUV as a weapon in Waukesha. Is this act of violence less
important? Less horrific? Why?
Yes, the wretched events in Waukesha are being covered in the media.
Of course they are. But there is unquestionably something missing – the
something that always, without fail, follows acts of violence carried
out by white nationalists or increasingly, if we’re being frank, white
people full stop. What’s missing are the angry talking heads on
‘liberal’ news outlets. The ceaseless tweeting about the scourge of
violence in modern-day America. The ostentatious IG posts about the
relentless rise of hate in our society. The frenzied efforts to pin the
blame for this suspected act of mass murder on a politician or a
commentator, on anyone who has ever said something too heated, too
allegedly prejudiced. We saw that in relation to Rittenhouse. There was
an explosion of it after Charlottesville. But now? All those folks are
schtum.
Even the media coverage is radically different to the kind of
reporting we see in the wake of other forms of violence. It is passive,
treating the massacre almost as a natural disaster. Or as the evil
handiwork of the SUV itself. ‘Here’s what we know so far on the sequence
of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by [an] SUV’, said the Washington Post. Caused by an SUV.
The agency of the suspect is diminished. The problem, it seems, is
killer SUVs. We seem to be witnessing in the wake of the Waukesha
massacre the same kind of attempted manipulation of the emotional
response that we see after acts of Islamist terrorism. It’s sad,
regrettable, awful even, but don’t look back in anger. Don’t obsess over
it. These things happen.
It falls to the police, and then the courts and a jury, to work out
why Darrell Brooks did what he did, and whether this was, indeed,
intentional homicide. But there are things we already know about Mr
Brooks that make the silence of the woke elites even more curious, and
shameful. We know he posted invective against white people
on social media. He wrote about ‘knokkin white ppl TF out’. He shared
commentary on the problem of ‘white privilege’. There seem to have been
flashes of anti-Semitism in his thinking, too. He shared an image of
Hitler and a meme saying the Jews in Israel are ‘false white Jews’. He
appeared to be echoing the eccentric black-nationalist belief that
African-Americans are the true descendants of Israelites. Shouldn’t this
be more widely discussed – the fact that a man suspected of
intentionally slaughtering six white people at a Christmas parade had
posted anti-white comments online?
To see how perverse the woke set’s relative silence on Waukesha is,
just do this simple thought experiment. Imagine if a white man drove a
car into a crowd of mostly black Christmas revellers and killed six of
them. Imagine if it was discovered that this white man had posted
social-media comments saying we should knock black people the fuck out.
Imagine if he had dabbled in white-nationalist thought experiments
online. What do you think would be happening right now? It would be the only
issue in media and political discussion – and rightly so. The left
would galvanise itself. Marches would take place. There would be stern
and frequent condemnations from the White House, rather than the quite
perfunctory statements it has issued on Waukesha. It would be swiftly
institutionalised as a turning-point act in modern America – proof of
the existence of white supremacy, proof of the need for all-out change.
But after Waukesha? As I say, tumbleweed. The problem here, the cause of this selective outrage – of this racially selective outrage – is identity politics.
The poisonous nature of the identitarian worldview has made itself
crystal clear in the wake of Waukesha. Identitarianism is now so
entrenched as an elite consensus opinion, everywhere from newsrooms to
universities, from the radical left to the White House, that these
people now even judge the worthiness of victims by their
identity and the identity of the person who attacked or killed them. The
killing of six white people by a black man interferes with the
identitarian narrative crafted by the woke elites. It muddies what has
become the core claim and organising principle of the new establishment –
namely, that white supremacy is rife, that white people are a problem,
and that black people are victims who require our sympathy, our tears
and our knee-taking. Much of the woke modern media is far more concerned
with narrative rather than facts, far more interested in propagating
the ‘correct’ view of the world than in telling readers and viewers what
is happening in the world. Which means even reporters now
eschew objectivity, instead focusing on world events that fortify their
sacred identitarian narrative while diminishing or treating passively
world events that call it into question.
On the day before the Waukesha massacre, CNN published an article
headlined ‘There’s nothing more frightening in America today than an
angry white man’. It was all about the problem of white privilege, white
violence, the ‘white male id’. I put it to you that if a media outlet
had published an article on the scourge of ‘angry black men’, on the
arrogance and violence of blacks, and if on the same day someone had
attacked a happy gathering of black people, we would not hear the end of
it. It would become a global flashpoint of political debate. But
today’s pathologisation of whiteness gets a free pass, and a man who
posted anti-white comments before going on to kill a large number of
white people a few years later is not subjected to very much media
investigation or condemnation.
Truly, identity politics has rotted the soul of the new elites. It
has corroded their humanity. It has caused them to view everything
through the racial hierarchies they have constructed, where whites and
Jews are privileged, and therefore iffy, while black people and Muslims
are oppressed, and thus deserving of softer treatment and concerned
infantilisation. Racism upon racism. We will discover, soon enough, why
Darrell Brooks carried out this atrocious act. But already, right now,
we know from the Waukesha horror that the media elites have abandoned
truth and reason for the corrosive certainties of the dogma of
identitarianism.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy |
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