The stories are chilling–conjuring a world of senseless, alien violence as incomprehensible as it is reprehensible. Rightfully, we are mortified and outraged and we fear for a country in which A Clockwork Orange ultra-violence finds life in our streets. The analysis of many pundits is startling: these attacks are racially motivated hate crimes against whites by black youths and the media and our politicians refuse to identify these racist motives out of political correctness.
What goes mostly unspoken in these commentaries on the “knockout game” is the idea that these assaults are racially motivated and so white people should be wary of groups of black men. Some take this further and blame the “liberal media” for the violence, since the media allegedly hid the “truth” about the race of the criminals. If only the media would tell us when black people attack white people, we’d know to not trust them and we’d be safe, the logic goes.
But are these pundits correct? Are these crimes committed by roaming packs of black “savages” against white people?
Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s new, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, CNN from claiming that it is “spreading,” or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.” Most sources claim that it is spreading, and a number of sources claim that it is racially motivated. But how do they know? Where are they getting their data from?