The death of Cannon Hinnant and the existence of evil

Whether or not race was at the bottom of Cannon Hinnant’s horrible death, I still think the real issue is the profound evil that leftism injects into America.

A reader called me out for saying that I didn’t think that Cannon Hinnant died because of racism. I said, instead, that he died because of sheer evil. I think I ought to explain what I meant. You can still disagree with me, but at least he and others will be disagreeing with what I meant rather than a guess about what I meant.

To begin, last I read, we have no details about what motivated Darius Sessoms. According to the little girls who watched him execute their brother (and I can’t even imagine their trauma), Sessoms just walked over and shot the boy. In other words, you can’t impute anything to his actions because, other than the murder itself, there’s no evidence of racial animus or its absence.

There’s also the fact that Sessoms socialized with Hinnant’s family. Maybe he was sitting there all the time hating them for being white, but there’s no evidence of that either. The Hinnants were stunned that Sessoms would act that way.

There’s the fact that Sessoms didn’t seem to have any association with black rights groups.

In that informational vacuum, my thinking was that Sessoms was either drugged up, insane, or outright evil. And if he was drugged up, he was evil for taking the drugs. If he was completely insane — e.g., if he thought God told him to kill that poor child — that’s a different kettle of fish. That type of insanity, incidentally, is very rare.

On the information available, racism, if it exists, lies, not in the killing itself, but in the media’s deliberate decision to ignore it. Black on white killings are not the fashion for the media.

On further thought, though, even racism doesn’t describe the media. After all, this is the same media that studiously ignores all those children who die in black neighborhoods because of black-on-black crime. The media doesn’t really care about blacks, just as it doesn’t care about anybody’s skin color. All the noise that the media makes about racism is because racism is another tool in the leftist shed. Leftists are cynical and — here’s that word again — evil.

So, yeah, I keep coming back to evil in connection with Cannon’s death.

The last piece in my discussion about Cannon’s death, about racism, about evil, about the media, and about leftism, is an article that Daniel Greenfield wrote. I’ll quote a little; I urge you to read the rest:

The body of a junkie ex-con who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint was placed in a golden coffin on a horse-drawn hearse while a nation whose cities were burning watched.

Cannon Hinnant was laid to rest quietly in a small funeral home across the street from a gas station. The mourners, some driving pickup trucks, parked out front and made their way through the puddles to hear his youth pastor eulogize the 5-year-old boy who had been shot in the head.

The deaths of George Floyd,a 46-year-old Minneapolis black ex-con strung out on drugs, and Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy from a small city in North Carolina, are both symbols.

Floyd’s death during a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, the destruction of statues and stores, hundreds of millions in damage, severe injuries and deaths, and a political inquisition. Hinnant’s death has been ignored outside the local and conservative media.

The out-of-context video of Floyd dying of cardiac arrest while high on Fentanyl became evidence of police racism, not just by the white officer restraining him, but across the country. And Cannon Hinnant’s murder at the hands of a black felon while riding his bike on a grassy winding street became evidence of a racist double standard and out of control crime.

The truth is that Floyd and Hinnant’s deaths were symptoms of the same crisis.

After Floyd’s death, it became fashionable to speak of crime and policing as inventions of white supremacists and symptoms of white fragility. Cannon’s small head proved fragile when he was shot, but Hinnant’s father regularly invited Darius Sessoms, his killer, for meals or a beer.

Sessoms had been in and out of prison. The common theme was drugs and guns. Year after year, he would go in for 3 months for possession, and then out again, he appeared to have stolen a gun, and then he had begun maintaining a house for drug activity.

It’s a familiar story in Wilson, North Carolina, a half-black and half-white city of under 50,000 which has seen huge drug busts over the years and where the crime logs focus on drug-related crimes by men with three names and no future.

Perhaps we’ll discover that Sessoms killed Cannon because the boy was white. But it doesn’t matter. What he did was a pure and abstract act of evil. It reflected a deep, cultural rot that encourages black people to destroy themselves and, sometimes, along the way, to destroy lovely little boys or whole cities — all in the pursuit of statist power.