Posted on March 5, 2020

Is a Noose Worse Than Murder?

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, March 5, 2020

Some lives matter: Some victims become martyrs and symbols; others are forgotten. Those with power ignore victims who do not fit their political agenda. Sometimes, they even smear the dead.

On February 26, a black man, Anthony N. Ferrill, killed five co-workers at the Molson Coors brewery in Milwaukee before shooting himself. This was a mass shooting, but it did not dominate the news the way the El Paso or Christschurch shootings did.

Anthony Ferrill

However, journalists are suddenly reporting on the shooting again, telling the public that somebody put a noose on the shooter’s locker five years ago. This incident is evidently more newsworthy than the shooting itself.

“Current and former employees of the Molson Coors brewery here say there is a long-held culture of racism,” said the Washington Post, “including racist cartoons placed in workspaces, the n-word scrawled in break rooms and bathrooms and nooses hung at the facility — one on the locker of an employee who killed five co-workers there last week.”

USA Today ran the headline, “Noose found on Milwaukee shooter’s locker 5 years ago, company says.” The paper called Milwaukee “a city known for its racial disparities.” It also reported that Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor “has said some of the shooter’s co-workers have told her he was racially harassed at work, and said there were broad problems with racism at the company.”

CNN’s story pointed out that “the company has not been able to identify who placed [the noose] there.”

It’s tempting to think that the late Mr. Ferrill put it there himself. There have been several “noose” incidents that were either innocent misunderstandings or outright hoaxes, most famously in the Jussie Smollet case. However, the company said Mr. Ferrill was not working the day someone placed the noose, so it probably wasn’t him.

The stories above and many others stress the noose over the shooting. Company officials must now defend their brewery and its employees against “racism” charges in the days after their co-workers were murdered.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says there has been “little information provided by public officials” about the shooter’s motive. Perhaps we will eventually hear he was a victim of “racism.” Some on social media already believe this:

These are examples of lying without lying. The linked stories report that there’s no evidence “racism” motivated the killing. There’s no evidence the victims abused the killer. The noose incident was five years ago, so that doesn’t explain why the killer acted now.

However, because many people just read headlines, they conclude the noose did prompt the killings. Perhaps the victims even had it coming:

Mr. Ferrill shouldn’t have shot himself. After all, there’s precedent for alleged victims of “racism” getting special treatment from the justice system. In 2013, Terry Wilson killed a man. A jury convicted him of murder. However, a judge overturned the verdict because one juror allegedly said a racist word during deliberations. (The juror denies it.) Mr. Wilson is awaiting a new trial.

In 2017, a black man who killed a white man went free because the state dropped all charges. Joni Donley attacked David Grant after Grant allegedly called him “the n-word.”

If the killer in Milwaukee was motivated by racial anger, we may not find out about it anyway. In 2015, Bryce Williams murdered two white journalists on air before shooting himself. In a suicide note, he claimed Dylann Roof “sent [him] over the top,” but also admits to being “somewhat racist against whites, blacks and Latinos.” He even praised Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho.

The media reported this. However, there was no attempt to hold blacks collectively responsible. There were no mainstream media demands to ban anti-white content that incites hatred. Instead, one victim’s father demanded gun control.

Explaining why someone becomes a killer is rarely simple. It probably wasn’t just anti-white racism that sparked the Milwaukee killer’s rampage. Yet if that did contribute to it, I don’t think we will hear about it. While the mainstream media promote flawed data from the ADL blaming whites for extremist killings, there is almost no coverage of blacks killing whites because of their race. We are usually portrayed as oppressors, not victims. Even in cases where whites were victims, as in Milwaukee, the burden of guilt is still transferred to whites.

Let’s assume the worst-case scenario. Let’s grant that Mr. Ferrill suffered from systematic, overt, humiliating racial abuse for years. Does that justify murdering his co-workers? For some people, the answer might be “yes.”

On February 11, a Twitter thread featuring “racists getting their ass beat for black history month” got an astonishing 121.8K retweets and 341.7K likes. In several videos, there’s no evidence the whites were “racist” or “said the n-word.” They were just non-whites attacking whites, and thousands celebrated.

Even if these people did say or do something inappropriate, that shouldn’t mean blacks can just murder people. However, to many blacks, claims of racial abuse or the dreaded “n-word” are a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Now, after this Milwaukee shooting, Twitter personalities are smearing the company and its workers. There’s no evidence the dead did or said anything “racist,” but that’s not stopping journalists from linking them to a “long-held culture of racism.” The black killer becomes the sympathetic figure.

This is incitement. It’s stochastic terrorism. It’s an attack on the rule of law and on white people. It’s proof that in the eyes of some people, even death at black hands doesn’t absolve you of white privilege.

About Gregory Hood

View all posts by Gregory Hood
Mr. Hood is a staff writer for American Renaissance. He has been active in conservative groups in the US. You can follow him on Gab.