CONSERVATIVE HYPOCRISY AND THE ORIGINS OF A GAME THAT MAY NOT EXIST: MEET JOE DONOVAN

Like many journalists I have written off the concept of the Knockout Game being a national trend. Instead I believe it is another in a long line of recent moral panics spread by the very instrument I am using right now; the Internet and the power of blogs and other social media to spread information at lightning pace. Conservatives like to use the concept of the Knockout Game to both spread fear and justify their bigotry against blacks and Latinos. This is also nothing new. In the age of digital communication and the 24 hour news cycle both on cable and satellite and here in the briers of the world wide web coupled with an easily cowed white conservative middle class and a conservative white elderly class such moral panics can become explosive.

Ciu Cava daelth Nixhot, our ombudsman here at The Dis Brimstone Daily Pitchfork, has pointed out to me numerous times that the ever screaming white right has called for those caught as perpetrators of the Knockout Game should go to prison for life or worse. I do not believe as some ultraLiberals both black and white have said that this violence against whites is some sort of cultural balancing of the transgression done to and against blacks during the Jim Crow era and even beyond. Two wrongs never make a right. Conservatives would be quick to lock up a teen, simply because he was black, and throw away the key for participating in a random act of violence. I imagine the aging conservative religious white population has to do something to have hope of slowing the pace of the browning of America.

Fred Schwartz pointed me to this article written by Michale Brick for Esquire magazine yesterday that points to the origins of the current moral panic. It details the story of a young white kid named Joe Donovan who punched an MIT exchange student from Norway Yngve Raustein in the face knocking him to the ground with three of his friends who robbed him. One of those friends at the time 15 year old Shon McHugh stabbed Raustein in the chest killing him. Joe Donovan, then 17 suffered the fate that conservatives want for the black and Latino perps of this moral panic; Donovan got life in prison. McHugh on the other hand served 11 years in jail.

All of this has left me wondering a very simple thing; where are all the calls from white conservatives to keep Joe Donovan in prison to serve the sentence they feel someone who punches a person in the face deserves?

Qu’ul cuda praedex nihil!

Sarah Bloch, D.S.V.J., J.F., O.Q.H [Jur.]
Amici Bax Demvolu Comnu
Politics & Culture Wars Managing Editor
The Dis Brimstone-Daily Pitchfork
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