Ahmaud Arbery: Preliminary Thoughts

Dunno. I heard a couple of reports: both said that a perfectly innocent black man was just out for a jog and was chased down and murdered by two white guys. Despite knowing better, I kind of believed it, and thought Well, despite all the media lies about this sort of thing, I guess it does happen sometimes...

   After reading The Trayvon Hoax I should have known better.

   I went and found the video, and immediately it was apparent that it was nowhere near as simple as it had been represented. Even from the not-great video, it looks like Arbery attacks the guy in front of the truck. I had heard that he was "just trying to run around the truck to get away." Just watching the video once made it clear that that was a questionable characterization to say the least. Then it turns out that he may have robbed houses in the neighborhood previously, and there's actual video of him entering a house under construction and looking around. And anybody who's had experience with construction knows what the most natural explanation of that is. Also, as others have pointed out, he's not dressed like someone out for a run. He also has a criminal record--inter alia for having brought a gun to school (when he was in school).

   I don't know what the law says about the incident at the truck. And at crucial points, you can't really see what's going on. But what I'm saying is that even superficial investigation reveals that the emerging media tale is in no way clearly true. 

   In general, the progressive media seeks to play up cases like this, whereas they play down black-on-white violence. The former is exactly what happened in both the Trayvon and Michael Brown Cases. Black-on-white violence is far more common than white-on-black violence. But, of course, it isn't consistent with the progressive worldview. And even those who recognize the systematic progressive media lies are afraid to say it. When your life can be ruined with even completely groundless accusations of racism, it's perfectly understandable that people would be afraid to speak this particular truth. But when the left ceaselessly exaggerates and fabricates white racism...and academia goes so far as to try to re-define 'racism' to make 'white racism' redundant...and the country's newspaper of record pushes a demonstrably false conspiracy theory making racism the founding principle of the country...and 4500 schools adopt it as part of their curriculum.... Well, exaggerating white-on-black crime and playing down black-on-white crime would hardly be unlikely. If you have any doubts that this happens, by all means, read The Trayvon Hoax. No matter how bad you think the media's actions were in that case, it was worse.

   None of this means that the guys in the truck acted wisely: they would have been wiser to wait for the cops, obviously. And if they were going to bring guns into it, they shouldn't have let him get that close. They should have made it clear, while he was still at distance, that they were willing to use them. Of course, that's all easy to say when you've never been in such a situation. For all I know, the law says they were in the wrong. But what's amazing is that anyone can look at the evidence available to us currently and claim that this is a clear and simple case of murder. That judgment simply can't be sustained.