Evil is alive and well in America.
And it has many faces.
There is the evil of Darrell Brooks, who drove his vehicle through 8 blocks of a Christmas parade, killing six and injuring almost 70.
After his killing spree Brooks, captured on a Ring camera, knocked on a good samaritans door saying he needed help getting an Uber, and calmly ate a sandwich.
His propensity to violence was known… it included running over the mother of his child (earlier this month and out on $1,000 bail) and previously shooting at his nephew. Over a cell phone.
He was convicted of statutory sexual seduction of a minor (the relationship was consensual - but the girl was only 15 and conceived a child). He has charges open in Nevada for failure to obey sex offender laws.
His social media, before it was wiped from the internet, was filled with rap music where he claimed “yeh we terrorists” and “killers in the city”. He glorified violence against police and exclaimed “F*ck Donald Trump”.
Not nearly as edgy as it was five years ago.
He talked about knocking down white people, even old white people on his now deleted Twitter account.
This kind of evil is easy to recognize and denounce. Especially in its aftermath.
Less easy to recognize is the evil that allowed this thug to terrorize the good people of Wisconsin over and over. Or name the activists and non-profits, prosecutors and politicians who allowed this man to walk free when he should have been remanded into custody awaiting trial.
It’s harder to call out these other types of evil, especially when the popular opinion pushes those evils as virtuous and a societal good.
501c3’s like The Bail Project - the same group that was boosted in social medial posts by then candidate Kamala Harris during the 2020 riots - listed a fundraiser on Go Fund Me with a goal of $5 million for Milwaukee Black Lives Matter (since the original posting it changed to $4 million and listed as Great Lakes Black Lives Matter raising the money, and was then completely taken down by Go Fund Me when it was highlighted on social media).
Shocking no one who pays attention, that exact amount of $5,000,000 in cash is required to spring Brooks from his current state appointed cell.
Convenient, that.
Also convenient, the panoply of organizations that the left has access to when attempting (and usually succeeding) to undermine the American system. Trying to nail these groups down is like trying to play a drunken round of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
These fundraisers were organized by Holly Zoller, a name not unfamiliar when discussing left wing agitation. Zoller is a member of the George Soros backed The Bail Project as a “bail disruptor” and has been a member of the Louisville (Kentucky) ARA - (Anti-Rascist Action) an AntiFa type left wing action group. This isn’t Zoller’s first foray into the national spotlight, after she was unmasked as the person renting a U-Haul that provided weapons and shields to rioters in Louisville in September 2020.
No, these evils are to be celebrated as progressive, moral and righting the wrongs of history.
Gone is the prevailing wisdom that we managed to learn around Kindergarten… two wrongs don’t make a right.
And gone are the days that good people had the ability to call evil out publicly, and demand equal justice without being castigated not just as racist, which seems to now be passé, but as white nationalists - complexion and melanin content be damned.
Demanding hate crime investigations, or charges under federal domestic terrorism statutes shouldn’t be surprising, or unexpected, especially calls from those in and around Waukesha.
But more than a few of our elected officials, from both sides of the aisle, and much of the national media would rather everyone just move on.
Especially if you’ve been paying attention.
In fact, Wisconsin’s two senators, Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin released a joint statement Saturday “calling on outside groups and individuals to ‘cease and desist’ using the SUV ambush… ‘for their own political purposes’.”
A noble gesture, and one that won’t be repeated when someone white and nominally Republican purportedly commits a heinous act. James Fields comes to mind.
It wasn’t that long ago that every left leaning pundit and academic along with quite a few Democrat politicians and interest groups spewed about the collective white privilege of self defense and the implications of cases such as Kyle Rittenhouse’s. Or absolute racism and wrong group association of the Charlottesville protests in the case of Fields.
More than a few of these same pundits (and regional Democrat party committee members) were making jokes in the immediate aftermath of the Waukesha attack… about the car obviously acting in self defense while Brooks’s victims were still lying in the middle of the parade route.
A few of the supposed comedians might still have their jobs, but most were disavowed and summarily fired. (I refuse to link even one of these garbage takes, or promote garbage people)
We’ve had think pieces and op-ed’s promoting and pushing for an end to whiteness, cable news segments on working class voters and their fragility resulting in a “whitelash” against Democrats and corporate and academic symposiums touting the Great Replacement as a foregone and already concluded net good. (Notice any commonalities for these ideas? Then you’re definitely a conspiracy theorist to boot.)
And you can not say that the man accused of mowing down Dancing Grannies, teen performers and children hoping to get a glimpse of Santa was a black supremacist. Or at a minimum portrayed one in music and on social media.
Now the national media will give him, and these extremist ideologies cover. With the help of the people elected to represent those most victimized by this evil.
All of it adds up, and leads us to where we find ourselves now.
The blame can be laid just as much of the feet of those promoting and paying for it as it can at those doing it.
And maybe, there’s a bit of blame to be laid at the feet of those who continue to remain silent.
A continuing battle against evil
Should it surprise anyone that this incident has already been memory holed? And the joint statement against “politicizing” this incident — how rich in this post-Floyd world where any incident the other direction is immediately dissected for maximum politicization. If this had been a white man who ran down that crowd, we’d still be hearing about “yet again, this illustrates the dangers angry white men pose to society” from the Don Lemons, Sunny Hostins, and Joy Reids with not a peep from Ron Johnson.