No matter how transparently insane it may seem to normal people, nothing covered in today’s corporate leftist media surprises me these days. Indeed, it often seems like insanity is the point. I spend a good deal of time as a writer just reporting on the myriad deceptions found in supposedly “mainstream” newspapers and news sites, and I have no fear that I will ever get close to exhausting the existing examples.

But watching the coverage of Karmelo Anthony case—the 17-year-old who stabbed another teen, Austin Metcalf, in the heart at a Texas track meet, made clear that there’s more at work than just a simple desire of the media to promote insanity. Indeed, Newsweek’s coverage of the story made it clear what the media considers its main mission today: To convince the public that blacks are endlessly victimized by monstrous whites, who always escape any consequences for their malicious actions, because (naturally) the institutions at the heights of our society are white supremacist and designed to protect them.

The Newsweek story begins by pretending to be simply reporting on the beliefs of others: “To supporters of Anthony … there is a clear racial double standard.” But it’s not just Anthony’s supporters who make this claim. The authors of the Newsweek article do, too. Boiled down to a sentence, the argument is that white Americans, who are (for a bit longer, anyway) the majority in American society, are incapable of adequately considering the role fear plays in violent conflict when the fearful individual is black rather than white and that this incapacity is a direct result of their innate hostility to black people.

Anthony, the argument goes, perhaps reasonably feared for his safety, and even his life. We are supposed to believe this even though the dispute with Metcalf happened in the context of a high school sporting event where Metcalf was clearly unarmed and had announced, according to witnesses, that he had no intention of attacking Anthony but merely to make sure that Anthony vacated a tented area that was reserved for members of Metcalf’s team. Anthony’s fear for his safety was so great, the Newsweek writers would have us believe, that it needed to be weighed as a significant mitigating factor in the judging the outcome of the interaction, which ended with Anthony, fatally, thrusting a knife through Metcalf’s chest.

But, of course, the authors insist, Anthony’s legitimate fear was not adequately considered because white jurors are incapable of understanding the real fear of black individuals. They simply ignored Anthony’s reasonable fear because they dehumanized him in advance. Needless to say, there is zero evidence of this happening in the courtroom during that case, and precious little of it even in the online responses to the verdict.

Worse, they try to discredit the verdict by comparing it to the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, where Rittenhouse was acquitted for defending himself and others who were attacked by rioters and looters during the 2020 “Summer of Love” riots in Minnesota following George Floyd’s death. Rittenhouse’s case is so radically different from Anthony’s that there is no comparison.

When Rittenhouse shot those rioters, he was not in the warm embrace of a high school sporting event, surrounded by the protective social order and authority that characterizes such events. Instead, he was thrust into an urban riot, where he was trying to protect property from the tender attentions of arsonists and less than innocent bystanders. Rittenhouse was not merely pushed by an unarmed fellow high school athlete trying to get him to leave an area where he was not supposed to be and had been asked to vacate. Instead, he was being pursued by a gang of rioters who kicked him while he was on the ground, struck him with fists and skateboards and, in at least one case, aimed a gun at him. Earlier, one of the rioters had shouted his intention to kill Rittenhouse, who had every reason to believe this is precisely what those pursuing him wanted their kicks and blows from skateboards and guns to accomplish.

What level of fear would a normal person, of any race, have felt in Rittenhouse’s situation, as compared to Anthony’s? Newsweek wants you to believe that these levels are approximately the same, or at least so close as to turn the comparison into compelling journalism.

In fact, these two cases are comparable in terms of the objective grounds of their defendants’ claims of self-defense in precisely the same way that circles are comparable to triangles. Both are shapes one can draw with a pencil. Yet someone incapable of recognizing the clear differences between a circle and a triangle would be tested for deficiencies of sight, and perhaps of cognition as well.

Cognitive failure is perhaps one of the reasons that people like the Newsweek authors, editors, and their intended audience fail to see why Anthony’s case has nothing in common   with Rittenhouse’s. But even more likely is a moral deficiency at work here. A failure of moral imagination is apparent in those who deny the clear differences in these cases. They are indulging in the empty game of seeing blacks as helpless victims and whites as demonic victimizers. Those who  playthis game can no longer distinguish right from wrong and our society should pay them no heed.