From Rabble-Rousing to Rabble Snoozing

Journalists do whatever the narrative requires at the moment, but does it still work?

One of the things we’ve learned over the years is that the press can rile people up about pretty much anything. Not long ago, a pro-life high-schooler, Nicholas Sandmann, who had the temerity to smile uncomfortably at a leftist agitator who got in his face was tarred nationally as a racist, at least until he started suing (and recovering).

George Floyd, a not very savory fellow who died questionably while struggling with police became a martyr, with protests in his name blowing through Covid restrictions and, for a while at least, remaking institutions. (His longest-lasting impact may be the utter discrediting of public health authorities, whose turn-on-a-dime shift for draconian lockdowns to endorsement of mass public gatherings destroyed their credibility with the vast majority of the public.)

The “trans” fad, now winding down, also remade many institutions, which are now trying to recover. For a while, pronouns were in, “gender affirming care” was unchallengeable, and anyone who dared criticize the fad was in danger of cancellation. All of these fads were mediated, and to some degree outright created, by the press.

But while rabble-rousing is the most obvious exercise of press power, rabble-snoozing — the power to keep a news story dormant and out of the general public’s notice — is undoubtedly a bigger one. And we see that exercised again:

Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was killed on a Charlotte commuter rail train by a crazed black man, Decarlos Brown, Jr. He sat down behind her, and then, for no obvious reason, pulled out a knife and began stabbing her in the throat. There was blood everywhere.

And there’s video, which the Charlotte town officials tried and failed to keep secret. But the national press is, as noted above, not simply downplaying it, but ignoring it.

They’re not even making excuses. They might say that violence on commuter trains isn’t news — though I don’t know if that’s true when you’re talking Charlotte instead of the Bronx. They might say that black on white violence isn’t news, though that’s kind of an iffy position. Everyone knows, and DOJ statistics demonstrate, that’s it’s much more common than white on black, but do they want to invoke that as a justification? Maybe they don’t want to encourage random violence by crazy people? But they cover that all the time.

The truth is, this story just hurts the narrative. The black-on-white angle hurts, but the real problem is that Decarlos Brown, Jr., is a repeat violent offender who has spun through the revolving door of the criminal justice system for years, a man with 14 arrests, many for violent crimes such as larceny, armed robbery, and violent threats. But despite being regularly arrested, he was repeatedly released.

Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles said that you can’t arrest your way out of these problems. Well, not if you keep letting people go, anyway:

The reason why the story is being snoozed is that the press doesn’t want to support President Trump’s national program against violent urban crime, which involves swift arrests and prosecution, with substantial penalties. This approach flies in the face of the mild “no cash bail”/ “restorative justice” approach being pushed in many big blue cities, which has had predictable results. Blue cities send social workers; Trump sends the National Guard.

Trump’s approach seems actually to be pretty popular with black people who actually live in high-crime neighborhoods. But it’s drawn protests from — naturally — white Boomer leftists who mostly live in safe suburban zones. No diversity there:

There’s more diversity at a Klan rally, these days.

Since the number one rule for the legacy media is “thou shalt not support anything Trump does,” naturally the Zarutska murder can’t be covered. And it won’t be, unless they can find — or manufacture — some alternative angle that will make Trump look bad. So far, they’ve come up a dry hole.

So nothing.

Well, that’s what they do. The press has much less power than it used to have, as people have caught on to the game, and as X has provided a potent alternative outlet. (For another example of attempted rabble-snoozing, see the British press’s non-coverage of the flag protests across the UK, which has also gotten virtually all of its traction via X.)

Nonetheless, the political establishment, which is incestually joined to the legacy media, still tends to use their coverage as a measure of public sentiment. That has led the establishment to be blind-sided repeatedly, and this may be another case in which popular sentiment far outruns the establishment’s perception of popular feelings. The consequences, I suspect, will be fun to watch.

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