Reality dysfunction.

Cannon Hinnant’s murder shocked America last week. A 5-year-old boy murdered in front of his home is a horror few can comprehend. Why would a man execute a child riding a bike, especially one with whom he had broken bread just the night before? Yet, only conservative media seems interested in the story.

The racial dynamics of the murder explain why it’s largely ignored: the alleged killer is black and the victim is white. No one doubts this would be the number one story in America, if not the world, if the races were reversed.

The relative lack of attention implies this horror is just an ordinary part of life in modern America. It’s a sad tragedy, but there’s nothing you can do about it. The media and political elites tell you to move on and hope the justice system delivers the right punishment. It’s a very different attitude than their typical response to a police-involved killing or a minority’s claim of discrimination. Unlike Hinnant’s death, those are treated as grave injustices our society cannot abide. 

Hinnant’s senseless murder is not an ordinary crime and we shouldn’t shrug it off as a sad, but typical tragedy in modern America. That’s the mindset that smothers us into apathy and acceptance of things we should never tolerate.

His death is certainly more relevant to crime trends than George Floyd’s death or the “noose” discovered by NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace. Both of those widely covered events were treated as representative of the discrimination all blacks suffer in America. Unarmed blacks, we were expected to believe, are at an incredible risk of being murdered by cops, as Floyd’s death allegedly proves. And blacks can suffer horrible discrimination and harassment regardless of their income, as Wallace’s phony hate hoax allegedly showed.

Both of those narratives are more important to the Left than the death of an innocent child. The first narrative is based on false assumptions. Only 10 unarmed blacks died at the hands of police in 2019; most of the cases were ruled justifiable homicides. The cases included a black man who attacked and stole a police officer’s taser before being shot and another man who drove his car into police.

But those 10 cases, we are assured, amount to a “genocide” and justify rioting, anarchy, looting, the destruction of American heritage, and defunding the police.

In contrast, and in fact, crimes like the Hinnant murder are far more common. There were 514 black-on-white murders committed in 2018. That’s more than two times higher than the number of white-on-black murders. That same year saw more than 500,000 black-on-white violent incidents; just under 60,000 white-on-black violent incidents occurred in 2018. Blacks are only 13 percent of the population, yet commit the majority of interracial violence.

Blacks themselves live under much greater threat from black-on-black violence than they do from murder-by-cop. There were 2,600 black-on-black murders in 2018, a much higher figure than the number of unarmed blacks killed by police.

If the facts are inconvenient to the advancement of the Left’s agenda, then the facts must be ignored. Trouble is, the facts always ARE inconvenient for them.