The shameful silence on the Waukesha massacre

Brendan O’Neill writes:

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.

Even worse, they are downplaying it.

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. 

It’s almost a parody – SUVs don’t kill people, drivers kill people. The murders were not caused by an SUV, but by a person.

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?

It would seem this should be at least worthy of discussion.

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 most famous story in the world, for months on end.