I will reply with respect, because I sense within you a semblance of reason, humanity, and intelligence, a quality this community would benefit from in far greater measure and commonplace.
If you examine the comments throughout this thread, you will encounter precisely the rot, ugliness, and breathtaking ignorance to which I alluded in my initial message to Mitch. These people don’t even realize how ignorant and daft they are - which is gaslighting by default.
I do not usually immerse myself in media or allow it to affect me deeply, yet this case has pierced me to the core. Having lost a friend years ago, I found myself identifying with it in ways that have upended my entire outlook. I have long regarded myself as grounded, solid, and reasonably intelligent, but this experience has left me profoundly altered.
I live in a predominantly poor, majority-black neighborhood. I chose to invest here because I saw genuine potential. Over the years I have volunteered, picked up trash on my days off, mentored children, attended community meetings, engaged with residents, and performed welding repairs for neighbors. After this case, I am leaving. Initially I attributed the problems to a handful of bad actors: the fringe, the typical agitators, the dregs of society…that was my first impression.
What the reactions to this specific case have revealed, however, is that those attitudes are far more prevalent and widespread than I ever imagined in the black community.
This was, by any objective measure, one of the most straightforward disprovals of a self-defense claim I can ever recollect. There was a clear timeline supported by multiple eyewitness accounts, including from black witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense, that aligned with Hunter’s description of events. What began as a minor confrontation escalated to lethal violence. This should have ended with a few punches, broken up by the many parents, coaches, staff, teachers, athletes, and siblings present that day, a story that, ten years later, might have been recounted with laughter as “Remember that time you got into it with the kid from the other school?” Instead, it descended into something far darker: a hood-mode horror show played out in an affluent suburb, scarring the community permanently.
What has shaken me most is the groundswell of people rallying around the killer and performing astonishing mental gymnastics to excuse what the evidence CLEARLY establishes, as murder. This isn’t just random people (although no shortage there) but prominent black voices reinforcing the nonsense: misconstruing facts, misrepresentation of case details, taking glee in the loss, etc.
As George Orwell observed, “the Party’s final and most essential command was to reject the evidence of one’s own eyes and ears.” Here, a significant cohort appears to obey that command with disturbing ease, extending sympathy to an overt murderer rather than acknowledging the plain facts of provocation and escalation.
This experience has therefore compelled me to a stark conclusion: I now see much of this demographic not as a diverse collection of individuals holding varied views, but as one that, in its dominant responses to such incidents, operates with the cohesion, tribalism, racial animus, and hostility of a hate group - prioritizing group loyalty over objective truth or basic justice.
This case has only confirmed the patterns I witness daily in the black community where I live: the casual degeneracy, the foul language casually directed around children, the pervasive littering and vandalism, the indifference to others’ property (a gutter can lie broken in the ground for months after a storm) the blaring of degenerate music until two in the morning, the shootings that claim 14-28 year olds (that come a d go without a fucking peep from anyone) and the broader disregard for basic standards of conduct and mutual respect.
After years of deliberate investment and effort, I have decided to leave.
Aside from the most basic of courtesies, I will be avoiding this demographic for the foreseeable future. I have already toured a home in the country and am making plans to divest all my investments here.
The demographic as a whole desperately needs a groundswell of voices like those of Mitch, Jason Whitlock, Andre Williams and others who speak with clarity and honesty. Yet such individuals are routinely attacked and dismissed as Uncle Toms or coons by the very people they seek to help.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. There is no fixing this from within when those who tell the truth are treated as traitors.
This elementary court case and the racial hatred it’s garnered - set against the backdrop of black ingratitude toward the very country that affords such opportunity and the men, frequently of other European ancestry who invented, built, and sustain its modern comforts - has sounded the final alarm for me.
youtu.be/z5PmpedOY3s?is=FLSO…