Thomas Sowell has spoken often about the role of community organizers is mobilizing grievances. If you’ve paid any attention to the social history of the United States for the past 15 years, you may have noticed something else that’s been mobilized at exponential levels. Having a community organizer for a president at a time when social media was exploding became the perfect storm mobilizing white guilt as a political weapon. The chain of events, emerging patterns, and aftermath is getting ugly.

The Trayvon Martin case became the test pattern. Take an event, use the media propaganda machine to creatively alter and present the facts surrounding the incident, and let the viral nature of social media run its course. In the new world of social media, immediate real time feedback became available to see how well a narrative was being received. In the Trayvon Martin case, the narrative was swallowed whole by a good chunk of the American public by the time Obama threw out the “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”. If you look at the state of racial grievance and intellectual dishonesty today and the property damage, loss of life, and manufactured stupidity left in its wake, Obama’s statement could have very well been the most destructive statement ever made by an American president.

As it turns out, part of the deception involved what Trayvon really did look like. Even though he had become a muscular, troubled teen who liked to fight, the pictures that circulated of him were of him as a young boy. The pictures of George Zimmerman (the man who shot him) that were presented by some news outlets actually went to the trouble to lighten Zimmerman’s (a man of Hispanic descent) skin.

Zimmerman was acquitted of murder charges because the evidence demanded it. But it didn’t matter. The stage had been set. The perfect model for stirring irrational levels of public outrage had been revealed. Media and social media sleuths/influencers set out on q quest to find the next “unarmed black man shot by a white cop” story.

A couple of years later Michael Brown was killed by a police officer and the “hands up, don’t shoot” hoax was born. Officer Darren Wilson was acquitted and Ferguson, Missouri erupted in chaos, violence, riots, looting, and property damage.

The following year Freddie Gray died in police custody and that became an excuse for rioting, looting, and violence in Baltimore. City leaders allowed it to happen and made silly excuses for inexcusable behavior.

And then came Covid, George Floyd, and the Summer of Love. The video footage of Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis was hard to watch. And it provided, not a spark, but an explosion for what has become what is likely the longest sustained period of willful and manufactured stupidity our country has ever seen. People who still don’t see what has happened still aren’t interested in being part of the correction.

At this point I don’t even think it matters if Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose or from Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck. But it does matter that mob rule made it impossible for Chauvin to receive a fair trial. Any jury member that believed him to be innocent would have had to live the rest of their life in hiding if they voted as such. That seems important.

But what was most important of all were the false assumptions that were dumped on the American public in the aftermath. Floyd’s treatment was emphatically because he was black, because of racism. Police bad. White people bad. America is a racist country. Any form of black underachievement shall be declared to be due to racism. And probably the most important of all-the model was firmly in place for manipulating the public into seeing events precisely as they are told to see them and to care about what they are told to care about.

There is a perfect phrase to describe what has been methodically going on through constant propaganda and manipulation…….redistribution of empathy. Formerly bible-believing churches and preachers have even veered off the course of preaching the gospel of Jesus to the gospel of “be nice and care about whatever the current thing is”, while condemning those who won’t follow the same path. The result is that a lot more people end up following a crowd that’s heading in the wrong direction because it’s framed as being empathetic. Yes, toxic empathy is real and it’s destructive.

But backing up to the time of Floyd’s death, Americans basically lost their collective minds. The death of a woman beating drug addict in police custody, instead of allowing any possible guilty parties face justice, became an acceptable reason to launch criminal behavior nationwide and launch the idea of collective guilt of a whole country that needs to be restructured from the ground up. Minneapolis suffered almost $1 billion in property damage while the mayor and the governor of Minnesota (who nearly became the next vice president) allowed it. Riots followed nationwide and leaders were too cowardly to condemn or stop them, even calling the riots “the voice of the unheard”. Remember being told that bricks and mortar can be replaced? How stupid was that?

White people ate it up. They wouldn’t dare oppose the George Floyd BLM movement. They were persuaded to see racism and discrimination where there was none. They started apologizing for wrongs they hadn’t committed. They started taking steps to prove they weren’t racist. Corporations spent billions to prove that they were on the right side of social justice history. Construction began on the massive DEI complex to combat the invisible hand of racism and combat racism with…….racism. People bought into the existence of systemic racism even though nobody could ever cite a specific system or institution that was racist. People bought up nonsense books like “How To Be an Antiracist” and “White Fragility” and the invented history of “The 1619 Project” made its way into hundreds of schools. President Biden told us that white supremacy was the biggest domestic terror threat and some of you swallowed it whole. We were told that black people can’t be racist and you bought that too (racism is a sin that any human can be tempted with).

Basically the public was bombarded with loads of nonsense and we were dared to speak against it. Most people went along. I recognized the silliness of it all but I’m still embarrassed when I go back and read things I wrote from that period and see how much I tempered my words instead of speaking boldly…….hesitant to fire up the mob against me. We let one incident define the condition of an entire country. The model lived on. We were told that combating racism was a top priority and we bought it.

One positive of it all was that it established a dividing line between those who are willing to play pretend (often to win the approval of people/culture) and those who are not.

For those who are willing to pretend, the beat has rolled on. Media and social media influencers have since provided an easy to spot ongoing pattern of “articles I want to write, facts be damned”. “Unarmed black man shot by cop” is always being scoured for. “Orange man bad” has been the steadiest one. After abortion bans began going down in some states, “woman dies after being unable to receive an abortion” became an article that many were dying to write. When Trump took office in 2025, “Person wrongfully deported’ topped the list for many jouranlists. The articles you’ll read on any of these subjects will have close to a 0% chance of being presented in a 100% factual way. But they will provide you with steady doses of opportunities for false moral and practical high ground.

Because you are constantly being told what to care about. You need to use people’s preferred pronouns. You need to call illegal aliens “undocumented immigrants. You need to call homeless people “unhoused people”. Your former definition of “love your neighbor” was twisted into wearing a mask, confessing your white guilt, supporting open borders, and believing that government social programs can solve all societal ills. You are constantly being tested. Do you follow the crowd or follow truth and reality?

Perhaps the thing that we’re being told to care about the most here in 2025 has exposed just how twisted our moral compsses have become. People who enter our country illegally, commit crimes, and know they are facing deportation can go to designated sanctuary cities that offer them an extra layer of protection from deportation. Providing incentives for criminals to come to your city seems like an obviously terrible strategy for making your city safer. But at some point, public safety stopped being the goal for many leftist leaders. It’s just another casualty of “replacing what works with what sounds good” (Sowell). And it may just be that cowardly actions in the face of evil is itself evil.

But every time you get drug into a “Maryland father of four wrongfully deported” or “Arizona grandmother who’s been here since 1999 deported” story, remember that you won’t be honestly told if Maryland man came here illegally, beats his wife, or engages in gang activity. Presenting facts is not the intent of the news story. The intent is to get you to look where you’re told to look and care about what you’re told to care about. Hey, who’s still got their Ukraine flag up?

But here’s what has obviously happened as more and more people have been dragged onto this path of being led around by emotions and manufactured guilt. The ability to recognize, confront, and restrain evil is quickly dying. If you look across the landscape of what happens daily in our country and in the world and the most evil thing you can see is Trump, your ability to recognize what’s truly evil may be deteriorating.

For every “Maryland Man” there is a Maryland mother of four raped and killed, and thousands more robberies, beatings, murders, DUI fatalities, and drugs sold by people who should not be in our country or have no business being outside of prison walls.

The recent stabbing death of a young Ukrainian lady on a train highlighted a lot of these points. Black man who should have been locked up kills white woman. Racism? Maybe. Probably equal evidence that he targeted her because she was white as there ever was that George Floyd’s treatment was due to racism.

Do we need to restructure our whole country based on this one event? Well, we kind of do. We at least need to stop following the crowd in the wrong direction. We kind of need to quit being led around by our noses by intellectually dishonest and cowardly people. And we need to let this be a reminder that mercy for the guilty often becomes punishment for the innocent. This time someone paid with their life. These the true preventable crimes. When the folks of modified “love your neighbor” say “the government needs to do something”, that something never seems to include putting more criminals in prison and keeping them there for longer periods, removing criminal illegal aliens from our country, or gaining firm control of who enters our country. As I write this, people in Washington D.C. and Chicago have somehow been led to believe they should protest the presence of ICE and National Guard sent there to help reduce crime.

Loving your neighbor means protecting them from evil. This cannot be done without sometimes physically removing evil people from their presence. Good parents know this. Good leaders know this. The number of national leaders who have the backbone to take necessary steps to make the city streets of America safer from acts of evil is apparently shrinking quickly. And it’s my belief that the public has been steadily deceived in recent years in their ability to even recognize evil. If you’ve found yourself more concerned about food stamp recipients being unable to get a 12-pack of Coke than you are about systems that allow people with 50 catch and release arrests finally killing somebody, you might consider seeking out some alternative sources for information.

Stay grounded in reality. Don’t be lured into worlds of make-believe (where they talk about birthing persons and such). And don’t be fooled into failing to recognize evil. Always be on the lookout for places where evil is being renamed instead of being boldly opposed. It always needs to be restrained.