The sound of screams replaced the music as a red Ford Escape slammed into the crowd, killing six people and wounding more than 60 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Nov. 21. Amid the bloodbath that evening were dead and dying victims as old as 81 and as young as 8. Their killer, Darrell Brooks, a 39-year-old black man and Black Lives Matter supporter, had deliberately driven into them. The Christmas parade slaughter was everything that the establishment claims Charlottesville was.

The Waukesha bloodbath fell out of the news and down the memory hole overnight, presumably because it recalled too vividly the events in Charlottesville during the 2017 Unite the Right rally, and suggested unwelcome comparisons. While Waukesha did not elicit ruling class outrage, Charlottesville has become part of our national mythology, a day of shame for millions of Middle Americans. It has been used to justify destroying historic American national symbols and to further empower the regime that dominates our lives, lest we repeat that awful day.

The most obvious difference between the two incidents is also the most inconvenient one for an establishment built upon political correctness. James Fields, who was 20 when he drove into a crowd at Charlottesville, did not, though troubled, have a previous criminal history. He is also white.

Brooks, however, boasts a formidable list of criminal acts spanning two decades and across multiple states. When he struck in Wisconsin, Brooks had an outstanding warrant related to a sex offense in Nevada. And, in a video unearthed on Twitter, he admitted to impregnating a minor and to being a child sex trafficker. That’s just for starters.

Documents obtained by the Daily Mail reveal that Brooks shot his nephew in July 2020 in the heat of an argument over an old cell phone. His bail was initially set at $10,000, but Milwaukee County judge David Feiss lowered it to $500. Brooks was out by February 2021. According to Fox News, three months later while out on bail, Brooks was arrested in Georgia after he savagely beat the mother of his child.

Six months later, upon his release by Georgia authorities, Brooks capitalized on the charity of the criminal justice system when, on Nov. 2, he punched and ran over the same woman, this time in Milwaukee. Brooks was booked the next day, but prison wouldn’t hold him long, even though the red flags were flying. A pretrial risk assessment dated Nov. 5 certified him as a severe public threat. Nevertheless, he posted a $1,000 bond on Nov. 11, the same day he was scheduled for a plea and sentencing hearing related to the July 2020 incident.

Less than three weeks later, Brooks plowed into the crowd of mostly white parade goers in Waukesha, purposely aiming for people and avoiding vehicles. The town’s black police chief, Daniel Thompson, who helped lead a protest in Waukesha during which his officers knelt before Black Lives Matter demonstrators amid the June 2020 riots in that city, told the local press he was unsure about Brooks’ motive.

However, the killer’s political views and Facebook posts provide unmistakable clues. Brooks had posted about “knocking out white people” and enslaving them. He explicitly supported Black Lives Matter, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Hebrew Israelites, a black supremacist group. Brooks even bragged about being a “terrorist” in one of his rap songs.

Still, the authorities claim that Brooks was merely leaving the scene of his latest domestic dispute, although they admitted that police were not pursuing him at the time. They say he passed a side street which would have taken him around the parade, and that he intentionally penetrated barriers intended to stop traffic. Brooks showed no remorse after the slaughter.

In an open letter to the media, his mother blamed the system for his crimes. Brooks is mentally ill, she said, and should have received treatment, but instead got a “jail cell.” Had Brooks truly received what he deserved at the hands of Milwaukee County authorities, six people would still be alive and scores more would not have been seriously injured by Brooks’ Nov. 21 attack.

His mother’s statement also undermined Brooks’ appeals for sympathy. “Darrell did not come from a bad family like many people have said. He came from a loving Christian family and is the grandson of ministers,” she wrote. In other words, Brooks had been given every chance to succeed by his family and the justice system. Still, Brooks only pities himself. “I just feel like I’m being [made out to be a] monster—demonized” and “dehumanized,” he told Fox News Digital in his first jailhouse interview.

It took a slaughter of innocents for Court Commissioner Kevin Costello to slap Brooks with a $5 million cash bail, which the Milwaukee branch of Black Lives Matter attempted to raise to free Brooks. Costello assured the public that the “extraordinarily high” bail was warranted, as if he needed to explain himself for not giving Brooks his umpteenth chance, which is far more than what James Fields received.

Given Fields’ background, one would think he should have received the same compassionate touch with which the media has covered Brooks. In 1996, before Fields was born, a drunk driver killed his father. He grew up a quiet but troubled kid who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of six. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice by the time he was 10, diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder, and his social life was characterized by isolation and limited social interactions outside of his relationship with his disabled mother.

A high school teacher with whom he was close said Fields “was a very bright kid but very misguided and disillusioned.” He noted Fields’ flirtations with radical ideas: “I feel like I failed and that we all failed.” Fields’ mother reported fits of violence to the police when he was in the eighth and ninth grades. She told officers that he was on anger medication. But Fields quit taking those drugs when he learned that they would prevent him from joining the military—a recruiter reportedly explained that he needed to drop the medication.

After graduating in 2015, Fields managed to enlist but washed out a few months later. He worked as a security guard making $10.50 an hour when the Unite the Right rally was organized to prevent the removal of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville. Fields had been off his medication for two years by that time.

Skirmishes erupted on the first day of the rally, Aug. 11. The second and final day would be one of utter chaos, where right-wing protesters and left-wing counter-protesters were seemingly encouraged to fight. According to FactCheck.org, the ACLU of Virginia tweeted on the evening of Aug. 12 that the Charlottesville police had been ordered “not [to] intervene until given command to do so.” The president of a New York Black Lives Matter chapter told a CNN affiliate that the “police actually allowed” both sides to “square off against each other” while watching from afar. “It’s almost as if they wanted us to fight each other.”

In the aftermath, the city commissioned a report prepared by Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia, to review the mistakes made by law enforcement. It noted that on Aug. 12, just before Fields accelerated into the crowd of counter-protestors, the Charlottesville Police Department called medics to a parking lot where a militia member had been hit with a rock in the head. The police left the scene once the ambulance departed, and the militia members also prepared to leave as counter-protestors descended on them. “Aerial footage shows that one of their cars accelerated to flee the counter-protestors, nearly running one of them over,” the report states. “The crowd of counter-protestors reacted angrily, kicking and swinging objects at the car,” while others were seen “chasing on foot” as it sped away. The report mentions other instances of counter-protestors harassing rallygoers in their vehicles and blocking traffic while swarming the streets.

When Fields attempted to drive out of the area, he encountered a large crowd in the street between him and the intersection where two other cars were waiting. Footage of the incident shows Fields slowing down a bit on the approach, although a counter-protestor had previously confronted him with a rifle, which presumably had him on edge.

In a since-deleted Facebook post, Dwayne Dixon, a leftist UNC teaching assistant professor and an Antifa member, bragged: “I used this rifle to chase off James Fields from our block of 4th St. before he attacked the marchers to the south.” As Fields neared, the crowd appeared calm—until a counter-protestor hit the back of his Dodge Challenger with what appeared to be a baseball bat and Fields slammed down the accelerator. When the dust settled, one person would die alongside 35 wounded.

Unlike Brooks, Fields was immediately denied bail. Though he and much of the GOP have remained silent about Waukesha, South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott declared the Charlottesville crash “an act of domestic terror” within three days. Since Fields had no criminal record, the prosecution relied heavily on his political views and social media posts to establish motive—all things that have been deemed out of bounds in assessing Brooks’ motives.

Nor did Fields’ documented history of mental illness matter, though it has become central to the Brooks narrative. During Fields’ trial, as reported by The Hill, prosecutors stated, “In sum, any mental health concerns raised by the defendant do not overcome the defendant’s demonstrated lack of remorse and his prior history of substantial racial animus.” Mental illness is for violent nonwhites; peckerwoods are diagnosed with “white rage.”

In the end, Fields, a young first-time offender, received two life sentences without the possibility of parole and an additional 419 years on top of $480,000 in fines. A jury also found the rally organizers liable and put them on the hook for more than $25 million in damages.

Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, the man who admitted that Brooks’ bail was set “inappropriately low,” had, some years earlier, conceded that someday his liberal policies would get someone killed. “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet,” Chisholm told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. According to TMJ4 News, in 2021 alone, 10 other domestic abusers tried by Chisholm had cash bonds set at $1,000 and subsequently went on to commit additional felonies while awaiting trial, just like Brooks. A complaint to remove Chisholm was filed by Milwaukee County taxpayers in mid-December, which Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers promised to review.

Every society has myths that underpin its religious, moral, and social regulations. They explain why we must speak, think, and act a certain way. The myth of Charlottesville is intended to brand ordinary Americans with a mark of shame. It is by way of such shaming that the ruling elite gains power and legitimacy. A little thing like the Waukesha massacre cannot be allowed to undermine that.

Items left behind from the Christmas Parade in Waukesha following the attack by Darrell Brooks. Lightburst via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0