A guest post by Parker Beauregard of the Blue State Conservative.
In another lifetime, maybe I will be as clever as other writers who come up with some great nomenclature for the corrupt, psy-optic forces in our world. Rush Limbaugh famously called them the Drive-By Media. A writer at Townhall wrote a book about Outrage, Inc. and a go-to reference for Covid, journalist Alex Berenson, has labeled them Team Apocalypse. It all amounts to the same thing and conveys a similar attitude toward their reality creation and curation through fixation on generating absolute hysteria.
Certain stories write themselves, and so it is with the tragic – and I do mean tragic – case of four-year-old Ariana Delane, the niece of the beatified and sainted George Floyd. What are the odds that the career criminal would witness, from wherever he is now, the violent attack on his helpless little niece. Of all the families in the world, this one keeps somehow finding trouble.
So what happened? Young Ariana appears to have been the victim of what is being reported as a random 3:00am shooting into her family’s apartment unit just a few days ago. Random? Maybe. Eh, on second thought, I doubt it. But sure. Let’s call it random.
The bigger story is the absence of the story. To be sure, it is getting headlines to highlight the public safety response, such as one that read “George Floyd’s 4-Year-Old Niece Was Shot, Waited 4 Hours For Help.” Fake headlines like this would communicate a lot more compassion if these same people didn’t also advocate for defunding the public safety apparatus. You can’t have less police and quicker response times in the same universe. It is one or the other.
So as it stands, there is no outrage or hysteria to be had as far as larger lessons to be learned. There is no drive-by media, just a very real drive-by that could have killed three kids. Of course, had she been breathed on inappropriately by this same gangbanger with Covid aerosols, you know we’d hear about it. See, kids are being hospitalized by Covid! As it stands, though, she is merely the latest – and certainly far from the last – young and innocent victim of urban gang violence specifically and cultural moral decay more broadly.
No one cares about young black kids being shot. Well, let me rephrase: I and many other morally-grounded Americans care very much about the seemingly endless stories of black kids being shot. I wrote a story last July after a spate of young black kids kept getting blitzed by a barrage of either errant or purpose-fired bullets in Minneapolis. I made the connection that, despite all of the fear mongering, these three young people constituted more deaths among children in the span of two weeks than Covid had in its entirety. It’s only gotten worse in the Twin Cities. But the media doesn’t care. It does not care that young black kids are shot; that is merely the price to be paid to allow for fomenting race essentialism in American culture. Our site has showcased this insanity several times, also in the case of Chicago eight-year-old Dajore Wilson.
In a justice-oriented world, there would be far more outrage over shootings like the one that happened to Ariana than there would be over the sad-but-avoidable (and invited) death of her more famous uncle. What kind of society lets harm befall their kids? What is the purpose of civilization if not to leave it to the next generation? Rather than protect the Arianas of the world from harm, which would be done through partly by increasing our prison population with the many societal cancers roaming our streets, and which was certainly being done that unfortunate 25th of May, we instead ignore the plight of urban youth and romanticize the very people inflicting such cruelty. George Floyd might as well have fired those bullets into his niece’s house. He robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, remember? People just like him did this.
Sadly, while monuments and murals to her unworthy uncle dot our national landscape and Democrat leadership once kneeled in appropriated garb, there will be no such grief or reflection for young Ariana. Indeed, were she not related to George would this shooting have gotten any attention? I only heard about it because the name George Floyd popped up. While it is good to be highlighting the daily violence in urban communities, it also highlights the nearly invisible coverage at all.
Say her name? They’ve never heard of her. And they intend to keep it that way.