Tim Pool justifies blacks being acquitted for beating unconscious white teen to death and blocking rescue

Really stupid

On June 2, 2022 a tragedy occurred in Akron, Ohio. A group of four high school students, two white and two black, were spraying people with a squirt gun. The squirt gun was obviously not a real gun. The group pulled into the parking lot of a charter school and chased a group of three black men, DeShawn and Tyler Stafford, ages 20 and 19, respectively, and their 21-year-old cousin, Donovon Jones, who were playing basketball. The high schoolers sprayed the black men with the squirt gun, and then the blacks began to chase the high schoolers back to their car when they realized the squirt gun was harmless. A fight ensued. Although the fight was understandable, the actions that followed were not.

One of the high schoolers, Ethan Liming, was punched in the face by one of the black men. He hit his head on the concrete and he was knocked unconscious. The black men didn’t fight any of the other high schoolers, but quickly set about stomping the unconscious Liming’s head into the ground. When one of the high schoolers tried to call for an ambulance, the black men stole his phone. When they tried to take their friend, obviously seriously injured, to the hospital, the black men stole their car. Liming died in the parking lot of blunt force trauma to the head.

The incident wasn’t racially motivated, but the response was. A familiar pattern in American criminal justice emerged, although the black men had initially been indicted for murder, the most appropriate charge for beating an unconscious person until he dies and preventing medical services from reaching him, the charges were quickly downgraded to involuntary manslaughter. The trial for these lesser charges took more than a year to get underway, and inexplicably ended in an acquittal for two of the men on their involuntary manslaughter charges. The jury was unable to reach a verdict for the third man, and a mistrial was declared. It remains to be seen whether prosecutors will refile charges.

This incident is part of a larger trend of juries being simply unwilling to convict black people of serious charges, even when they are unambiguously guilty. Notably, the defense did not even bother to put on a proper case. They called no witnesses of their own. Instead, the defense argued that the black men were “standing their ground” when they stomped the unconscious teenager to death and prevented him from receiving aid. The defense was absurd on its face, they obviously did not think that the Liming had a real gun when they chased him down, and Liming obviously posed no threat to the men when he was literally unconscious.

However absurd the defense may have been, it found an unlikely advocate: political commentator Tim Pool. Pool’s Youtube channel has more than 1.34 million subscribers. Just today, Pool had the following exchange with highly respected Daily Caller alumnus Scott Greer:

The response from Pool is absurd, but part of a larger trend of people being intentionally obtuse and dishonest about these racially-charged incidents. The facts of the case are not hard to come by, in fact Greer restates them clearly. In response to these facts, Pool invents a new justification for the murder. It’s a mental offramp to avoid acknowledging the obvious in cases like these.

Pool has showed questionable judgment before in racially-charged cases. He was the first (and probably the only) large rightwing figure to condemn Subway hero Daniel Penny after Penny intervened to stop a deranged homeless man menacing people on the subway. Pool, a multimillionaire podcaster, told people not to offer any help to Penny because Penny made the mistake of living in Penny’s liberal-controlled hometown, New York City. To Pool’s credit, he quickly backed off his position, claiming Penny was defending others (which was obvious from the beginning), and donated to Penny’s legal defense.

Pool’s statements reflect one of the biggest cultural problems on the Right: it is simply easy to check out. These mental offramps are everywhere and are very harmful. They allow people to seemingly stick to reasonable principles while advocating for bad ends. Pretty much no one wants to admit that they’re actually just letting black people get away with crimes because they’re black. Instead, they invent these elaborate justifications for this behavior. Everyone supports self-defense, right? Well these black people were actually defending themselves, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Who knows? Maybe they were afraid of being sprayed with bleach. This works in real court today and apparently the court of public opinion as well.

The only response has to be ridicule and remembrance. People like Pool simply can’t be allowed to get away with lying (including lying by being intentionally obtuse) about these cases. If they are, slowly the record builds over time. Details of the story, however outrageous, are muted and eventually forgotten. You slowly aren’t able to find them online. When you bring up clear-cut facts of the case, liberals try to “debunk” what you’re saying with the extensive (and fake) secondary sources created by liberals. If conservatives don’t get active in creating a real and substantive narrative of their own, they’ll forever be led around the nose by people who hate them.