The other day I talked briefly about the murder of Ryan Carson. He’s the 32-year-old reported Antifa activist who was stabbed to death around 4:00 a.m. in Brooklyn on Monday. I said that, among other things, his killing shows the importance of knowing your surroundings and taking proactive steps to protect yourself and your family. Leftists can call it whatever they want — stereotyping, racial profiling, white supremacy, whatever. The truth is that it’s common sense to get out of a situation when you assess that you’re unsafe. If an agitated young male in a hoodie starts kicking mopeds and ranting and raving in front of you, as Ryan Carson’s killer did, then you don’t stare at him. You don’t tell him to “chill” or shove him several times in the chest. Especially when he says “I’ll kill you,” you need to get yourself and your loved ones as far away as you can. If someone calls you racist because of that, then that’s their problem. Better to be alive and “racist” than dead and tolerant.
Over the last 48 hours, though, it’s become very clear that the murder of Ryan Carson is about much more than what Ryan Carson did, or failed to do, at 4:00 a.m. on Monday morning in Brooklyn. The response to Carson’s killing, from all corners of the Left — from Carson’s friends, to local politicians, to the media — doesn’t simply tell us that leftists are hopelessly naive and ignorant of very real threats to their lives. This is a lot bigger than that.
The response to Ryan Carson’s killing also makes it clear that leftists simply don’t care about human life, or humanity in general. We know that because they’re not even going through the motions of demonstrating some pretense of concern for Carson, much less the policies that led directly to his death. What this means is that leftism is collectivism in every sense and at every level. It views its own adherents not as people, but as replaceable, fungible cogs in the revolution. It uses its own followers as cannon fodder in the culture war. One death is irrelevant.
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We can debate when this began, or whether it’s always been the case. But it’s impossible to dispute that the Left is openly admitting this now. Consider the fact that within hours of Ryan Carson’s death, his Left-wing friends set up a GoFundMe. But they didn’t create this GoFundMe to cover funeral costs, or to help Carson’s family. Instead, Carson’s friends set up this GoFundMe so that people would pay them to skip work. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s precisely what they wrote.
Here’s the pitch: “We are a collective of Ryan’s close friends, reeling from a brutal loss. We are asking for your help on behalf of his partner in easing the burden and stress of this horrifying situation so that we can have space and time to grieve, and remember Ryan. Immediate needs are to offset the costs of working class people taking time off of work to properly mourn.”
They want to take a vacation. They need to crowdfund some bereavement leave, even though they’re not even related to the guy. Forget the family, forget the funeral, just pay them to sit around and “mourn.” Their friend died and the very first thing they thought to do was raise funds for themselves. But Ryan’s comrades didn’t stop there. For good measure, they also told media outlets that, if he were alive, Ryan would feel bad for his killer. As The Daily Mail reported, “Brooklyn activist Ryan Thoresen Carson would feel SORRY for the violent teenager who stabbed him to death and think of him as a victim of a broken system, say friends.”
If we’re being completely honest, his friends are probably right. On social media before his death, Carson celebrated violence directed at police officers. He called the torching of a Minneapolis police station, “really good.” He cheered when Rush Limbaugh died, saying “hell yeah.” He also threatened an elected official, saying he wanted to “shove this little f-ing nerd in the locker where he belongs.” At the same time, Carson pretended to be a compassionate person when he was talking about violent thugs and drug addicts, who he wanted to have constant, state-funded access to narcotics. So the criminals who terrorize entire cities are the good guys, according to Ryan Carson. The talk radio hosts and politicians who disagree with him, on the other hand, deserve to die.
As depraved an ideology as that is, it’s what resonates on the Left now. Carson’s friends value that ideology more than the memory of their dead friend. They want to promote the very same policies — defunding the police, legalizing injection sites, putting the mentally ill homeless on the streets — that got Carson killed. That’s because they don’t care about him. They care about the revolution.
You might have heard claims on social media that Carson’s girlfriend, Claudia, wasn’t cooperative with police in the hours after her boyfriend’s death. We can’t confirm that. Certainly, if it’s true, it’d be in keeping with Claudia’s social media posts, where she says that all cops are “bastards.” But here’s what we do know. According to the New York Daily News, Claudia somehow “mis-picked” her boyfriend’s killer in a lineup. She’s the only eyewitness to the crime. She saw it happen in front of her, from just a few feet away. But she misidentified the person who did it. Now, without seeing all the people in the lineup, it’s hard to make anything out of this. Eye witnesses are also notoriously unreliable. But this is another interesting detail to note, all the same.
Politicians in New York don’t appear to be interested in getting to the bottom of any of this, though. Like Carson’s friends, they’re motivated solely by ideology. Take a look at so-called “tributes” to Ryan Carson from New York state Senator Julia Salazar, or public advocate Jumaane Williams, or council member Sandy Nurse, or state senator Jabari Brisport, or state Representative Emily Gallagher. None of them talk about how exactly Carson died. Instead, they all mindlessly tell people to continue practicing his brand of Left-wing activism. Salazar, for example, eulogized Carson by talking about the importance of “humane drug policy.” Williams went on about the need for “environmental justice.” They’re skipping over any form of self-reflection about why Ryan Carson is dead, in favor of repeating their talking points. Callous and craven doesn’t begin to describe this.
Of course, wherever there’s callous and craven behavior, there’s corporate media. And they’ve also been working overtime to obscure as many facts as possible about this reported Antifa foot-soldier’s unfortunate demise. In the hours after Carson’s murder, several outlets, including the New York Daily News and the New York Post, refused to provide any kind of description for the suspect. The NY Daily News, for example, called the killer an “unhinged stranger.” The article later describes the murderer as a “belligerent stranger.” But there’s no mention of any kind of description, even though the article cites police sources who have clearly seen the surveillance footage showing the murder. This is deliberate. Either the police, or the media, or Carson’s girlfriend decided to hide information here, there’s no getting around that.
And as incredible as that is, it gets worse.
Somehow, in a development that’s unprecedented in New York’s storied history of perp walks, this coverup continued even after police arrested Carson’s alleged killer. Yesterday, when police arrested the suspect, CBS News made the “editorial decision” to blur the alleged killer’s face. They deliberately hid his identity. Watch:
CBS is now BLURRING OUT the face of the black man who killed Ryan Carson pic.twitter.com/UIVVAoj0MG
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 5, 2023
To be clear, the suspect that police arrested is an 18-year-old adult by the name of Brian Dowling. There is no conceivable reason to blur his face in this context. The excuse from CBS — which appears to be, “well, this adult murder suspect hasn’t been formally charged yet; therefore you don’t get to see his face” — has never been used by any major media outlet in the history of this country, as far as we can tell. It has never been used by CBS. It certainly didn’t apply to Daniel Penny. Daniel Penny didn’t kill anyone in cold blood. He saved people on a subway car from getting violently attacked. But even before he was charged with any crimes, news outlets had no problem putting his face everywhere. What explains the different treatment?
Of course, Daniel Penny is white and Brian Dowling is black. That shouldn’t matter, but when corporate media makes everything about race, it’s hard not to notice. And more to the point, Daniel Penny was a law-abiding citizen. He served his country in the Marines. And then, he exercised his constitutional right of self-defense. So naturally they want to shame him at every opportunity. Brian Dowling, on the other hand, did exactly what leftists wanted him to do, if what authorities are saying is true. He contributed nothing to society. Instead, he committed a bunch of crimes, behaved like a lunatic, and terrorized everyone around him. In fact, shortly before he murdered the Antifa poet in Brooklyn, Dowling was allegedly terrorizing everyone around him. Watch:
Instead of throwing Brian Dowling in an asylum, where he apparently belonged, leftist policies ensured he wouldn’t spend a day in an institution. The fact he may have killed a leftist is unfortunate in their eyes, but they really don’t care. It’s a little bit of friendly fire, in their view. But shouldn’t distract from the agenda.
We’ve been seeing this a lot lately. The other day I mentioned the brutal murder of a 26-year-old white Left-wing tech CEO in her luxury apartment building in Baltimore. This CEO, named Pava LaPere, was an avowed leftist. She had BLM propaganda all over her social media feeds. She seemed to really harbor an irrational hatred towards white men. How did she die? She let a black guy she didn’t know into her apartment building, and then she got into an elevator with him. The surveillance footage proves it.
LaPere’s mangled, dead body was found on the rooftop of the apartment building a few days later.
If you were covering this story — and pretty much every news station in the Baltimore area was — then you’d think you’d at least want to inform viewers of exactly how LaPere was murdered. But that’s not what happened. Here’s one example of local news coverage of LaPere’s death. This is from Fox – St. Louis. Notice what’s *not* mentioned:
A lot of reports are like this. They say she was killed in her apartment building. But they don’t tell you how the killer got inside. And that’s a curious omission, when you think about it. If you really cared about Pava LaPere — or even if you just cared about accuracy in journalism, frankly — you’d think that would be one of the first things you mention. Pava LaPere let this alleged killer into her building. She died because she was too welcoming, too trusting, too tolerant, too naive. She died because she DIDN’T make stereotypical assumptions. Why not tell that story to the public?
This omission is particularly notable given recent history. It wasn’t long ago that the media told us that, unless we allow every random black guy into our apartment buildings, then we’re racist and we should lose our jobs. Here’s a story that you almost certainly don’t remember. It’s from the dark ages of 2018. That year, a white woman named Hilary Thornton decided to block a black man from entering her apartment building. Hilary had cracked the door to let her dog out, when an unknown black guy tried to enter the building. Hilary said she wouldn’t allow him inside. What happened next? The entire national news media branded Hilary Thornton as a racist. She was fired from her job. Watch:
Hilary Thornton’s life was destroyed because she did the right thing. She did what her condo association told her to do. She did what common sense told her to do. Pava LaPere, on the other hand, did what the Left and corporate media demanded. And now she’s dead because of it. And none of the activists who gave her that horrible advice — none of the media outlets that relentlessly attacked Hilary Thornton — are acknowledging that. Like Ryan Carson’s friends, they don’t care. They’re worried instead about the revolution. They don’t care about the innocent people who die as a result.
You might have noticed that there have been several other prominent examples of leftist activists dying horrible deaths because of Left-wing policies in recent days. This is becoming more and more common. And with every new tragic example, the response from the Left is always the same. It’s detached, it’s self-absorbed, and it’s completely focused on politics. All of them — corporate media, politicians, the foot-soldiers in Brooklyn — they all want their ideology to win. That’s all they care about. People do not matter to them. Human life does not matter to them. The higher the body count, the more forcefully they’ll clamor for “social justice.” Every fatality is more evidence that they’re right, somehow. What they’ll never admit is that Ryan Carson and Pava LaPere, and many more victims like them, have already experienced the inevitable consequences of their ideology. And precisely for that reason, no one will ever hear from them again.