Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There was a very disturbing event this past weekend in Cincinnati, Ohio. There was an altercation between two males, apparently.
Things were said. We don’t know what was said. We don’t know if anything untoward was said.
But they developed—that altercation expanded. And what was disturbing of it, there was a racial component—black, white—but more importantly, after this altercation expanded, it was all asymmetrical. The black group was much larger than the white group. It was much younger. Most of the people were males, maybe 50 or so. Most of their attackers in the second part of this altercation were young and black.
More importantly, once people hit the ground or were sucker punched, people from the crowd came in, stomped on them, body slammed them, and it was almost like a free-for-all, that people smelled blood and they wanted to go in for the kill. It was very disturbing.
And the other thing that was disturbing about it was they sucker punched a woman, knocked her unconscious, and then people continued to pelt her. More importantly, there were black females that joined in this ruckus, like it was a celebration. They were stomping people on the ground. And then the reaction of the crowd, it was almost people were celebrating it.
And what was the reaction to law enforcement? They said they’re going to investigate the people who were involved. But I guess a lot of the reaction is that none of the media covered it, at least the legacy media. It was on Fox News and the New York Post, etc., but not in the legacy media. It was almost as if they were saying, “This is a taboo subject.”
But if you go back, what they did cover, the media, they covered the Duke lacrosse incident. That was completely a hoax. There was no black stripper who was attacked by fraternity brothers. It was made up. The Covington kids. That was made up. The Tawana Brawley [rape hoax]. That was made up. The Jussie Smollett black/white incident. That was made up. The George Zimmerman—a lot of that was made up. The “hands up, don’t shoot.” That was made up.
This wasn’t made up. This was real. And when you look at it, you want to know what’s happened to our country when people would see middle-aged people on the ground, and then young people who outnumbered them would go in and try to destroy them, kill them, beat them up with no consequences. And then people who were filming it were laughing at it.
What’s the lesson that we can all learn? I think this country is a multiracial democracy, but when you look at other multiracial, large democracies—India, Brazil—they don’t work very well.
And the reason they don’t work very well, they don’t have a melting pot. They have a caste system or they have a tribal system. We have a melting pot, and yet we’re rejecting it for this salad bowl, tribal identification. “I’m a victim. He’s a victimizer. I’m an oppressor. He’s an oppressed.” It doesn’t work.
And what the result is, when you give messages to people that there are no consequences or that there is a justification for violence—and apparently, people in this brawl thought that if they went in and stomped somebody on the ground of an opposite race, that they would be protected or they would not be prosecuted. It was similar to what these epidemics of looting and shoplifting are in our big blue cities’ municipalities and stores.
But the lesson for all of us is: No one is exempt from the law. This is the year 2025. We’re a multiracial society. We’re 65 years past the civil rights legislation, and it will not work if you have a tribal identity where you say that your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your ethnic background is essential, essential to who you are rather than incidental. And we saw an example of that in Cincinnati.
What needs to happen? The police need to identify every single person, white or black, who sucker punched somebody—and in this case, it was almost entirely black in the aftermath of the original altercation—stomped them on the ground, tried to hurt somebody who was a victim and defenseless, tried to beat up a woman and laughed about it and filmed it. And if you don’t do that, then you’ve lost all respect for the laws and deterrence.
Again, once a society goes down this pathway of racial essentialism or tribalism, and you send the message that you as an individual are not responsible for your own behavior, but you’re part of a victimized collective, and then you have repertory or justification rights to commit a crime and without the expectation of punishment, the result is civilizational declining chaos.
And so, we need to remedy this and to show people that if they wanna stomp on some helpless victim on the ground, they’re gonna pay a high price.
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