Around 10:00 a.m. on Friday, a man named Rodney Hinton went to his lawyer’s office in Ohio and watched body camera footage of his son’s death. In particular, the footage shows Hinton’s 18-year-old son, Ryan, emerging from a stolen vehicle while carrying a handgun. At one point, Ryan drops the gun, then picks it up. Soon afterwards, he’s shot and killed by a police officer. None of these facts are in dispute. The video makes it all very clear. Watch:
The reason the Hinton family was watching this footage in an attorney’s office is that, of course, they were contemplating a lawsuit against the city for wrongful death. That was certainly what their attorney was thinking about. In fact, even after viewing this footage, the family’s lawyer — who incidentally works for “The Cochran Firm,” as in the late Johnny Cochran’s firm — maintained that they had a case.
Here’s what the family’s lawyer said, as a way of arguing that the police officers were somehow responsible in this scenario:
Being in a stolen car, having a firearm, firearms—we’re in Ohio, you know, so you can open carry in Ohio, so that’s not a death penalty.
Admittedly, it’s not quite as catchy as “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit” but it’s still a pretty remarkable line of argument from the Cochran Firm, all things considered. After watching the footage of Ryan Hinton exiting a stolen car with a handgun, then dropping the handgun and picking it up as police chased him, and then turning towards the officers, the conclusion from these lawyers is that Ryan Hinton was murdered simply for open-carrying a firearm. He got the “death penalty” for doing nothing wrong whatsoever. Even though his gun wasn’t holstered, and even though he was waving it around while committing a felony, and even though all of this is recorded, we’re supposed to conclude that Ryan Hinton was “open-carrying.”
This is a level of shamelessness that, in another era, would lead to a flurry of lawyer jokes on late-night television. But it’s not a joke to millions of people at the moment. It certainly wasn’t a joke to Rodney Hinton, the father of the teenager who was killed. Just hours after he viewed the body camera footage of his son’s death, Rodney Hinton got in his car with the intent of executing a police officer. He saw it as an act of revenge. And ultimately, he found a target: He ran over a recently retired sheriff’s deputy who was directing traffic outside the commencement ceremony at the University of Cincinnati. The slain officer, a Hamilton County deputy named Larry Henderson, had never met his killer before. They never exchanged words. Watch:
Rodney Hinton knew that police were justified in killing his son because he had just watched the body-camera footage. He knew that the police did nothing wrong. If the father wanted revenge on anyone for causing his son’s death, he should have taken revenge on himself. If your 18-year-old son is out with a gun stealing cars, it means you failed as a father. Even a minimal amount of fatherly guidance would have been enough to avoid this situation.
But instead of taking revenge on himself, Rodney Hinton decided to kill a police officer who was directing traffic. This should be an open and shut case, in every sense. The father is a murderer. His “revenge” obviously cannot be defended legally. Any hope of defending it morally is destroyed by the fact that, for one thing, the shooting of Ryan Hinton was justified. And secondly, the cop he killed had nothing to do with it anyway. This is not a Gary Plauche situation, where a father ambushed and killed the man who kidnapped and molested his son. This is an act of premeditated, cold-blooded murder against a random white cop.
And yet — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — this murderer is being lionized and defended on social media. The father who just executed a sheriff’s deputy, in order to avenge his criminal son who flashed a gun at the cops, is the latest celebrity in certain corners of social media. The viral clips defending this murderer are all over TikTok. Here’s just one example:
He gets the age of the so-called “kid” wrong, as he’s showing the sympathetic photos in the background. Ryan Hinton was 18, not 16, when he jumped out of the stolen car with a firearm. But the bigger issue with this video is the claim that the father “took justice into his own hands” by murdering a random police officer. Notice how there’s no pretext here, about how the officers did something wrong, or violated procedure, or any of that. There’s no explanation of how it’s “justice” to kill a random traffic cop — or to “un-alive” a traffic cop, as this guy puts it. It’s just assumed that killing a random white police officer is an appropriate response to the death of a black criminal. And millions of people find this reasoning persuasive at the moment. That’s the situation we’re now in.
For the past half-century or so, every aspect of American civic life has been devoted, at least superficially, to preventing a situation like this. If you spend trillions of dollars enacting a regime that rigidly enforces the seemingly laudable goal of “racial equality,” then surely, eventually, you’ll arrive at a point where all men are judged based solely on the content of their character. That is the grand experiment we’ve all been participating in for our entire lives. And with each passing day, it is becoming more and more clear that this experiment is crashing down all around us. We are heading, very directly, towards open and overt racial conflict.
To that end, here’s another similar video, which has more than 20,000 likes on TikTok. We’ll mute the audio because it’s obnoxious rap music. But here’s what it looks like:
It shows Rodney Hinton in court, in a jumpsuit, surrounded by a bunch of police officers. And there’s the caption that the uploader has added: “They really try to use over 30 deputies to intimidate Rodney Hinton but he kept his head up.”
Again, this post has more than 20,000 likes. This is not some random troll that didn’t get any attention. It’s one of the most popular posts about Rodney Hinton’s arrest. And people are responding to it because they genuinely believe that Hinton is a hero. There’s no rational argument that he’s innocent, or that he was justified, or that his son was innocent. This is pure racial resentment, spilling right out into the open.
Another post, with roughly 70,000 likes on TikTok, describes Rodney Hinton as a “mourning father,” complete with somber music. We’ll play part of that:
Look around any social media platform, and you’ll find plenty of posts like this.
It’s not just TikTok. On X, here’s a post with roughly 700 likes:
Rodney Hinton had no criminal record before he killed an Ohio cop in retaliation for the cops killing his son . The police department brought 30 cops to his hearing to intimidate him.
So apparently, you get to kill a cop if you have no prior criminal record. And the police aren’t allowed to guard you, either, even after you’ve just murdered someone.
Then there’s this post, with more than a thousand likes:
All I’m saying is this. If a cop killed my son…I’m airing out the precinct. Rodney Hinton Jr. is a saint and a hero.
Yesterday we discussed the story of Shiloh Hendrix, the woman who has now raised hundreds of thousands of dollars after using a racial slur at a playground. What’s happening now with Rodney Hinton is yet another example of why Shiloh Hendrix has raised all of that money. If you’re saying that “justice” is somehow served by the execution of a random white police officer, in the name of defending a thug who stole a car and flashed a gun — and many people are saying this — then you don’t get to clutch your pearls because of Shiloh Hendrix. The standards are so wildly out of whack that it’s just not sustainable. “It’s okay if we kill people but not okay if you use naughty language” is not just a double standard. It’s flat out madness — a kind of moral schizophrenia.
It’s an unsustainable approach. And with every day, it becomes more and more apparent that we simply can’t continue on this trajectory. People are tired of it. If large numbers of black people are openly defending and cheering for actual murderers who kill white people in cold blood, then you cannot tell white people that they have to make a big show of condemning a woman who says a bad word. That’s especially true as more and more white people are executed, without any media attention whatsoever.
For example, you probably haven’t heard the story of a 22-year-old woman named Logan Federico in South Carolina. Here she is, on the left:
According to the authorities, Logan Federico was, “randomly murdered by a career criminal” who was “on a spree of thefts, break-ins and credit card fraud.” That career criminal, 30-year-old Alexander Dickey, allegedly “broke into a neighboring home around 3:00 a.m. and stole a firearm, credit and debit cards, and keys to a vehicle. … [He] then allegedly entered the house where Federico was staying, entered her room, and shot her, before fleeing the scene in a stolen vehicle.”
Somehow that story didn’t get much national attention.
Neither did this one, involving the execution of Tara and Taylor Jones in front of their home in the affluent neighborhood of Wellington Florida last year:
Screenshots: YouTube.com
Surveillance footage shows that Tara and Taylor Jones were shot to death by a 63-year-old mechanic named Norman Scott, without any provocation of any kind. Again, there was no outrage. There was no public show of support for these victims.
Instead, we’re now at the point where three cold-blooded killers in the span of a few months have found large cheering sections on social media, including Rodney Hinton, Karmelo Anthony and Luigi Mangione. In fact, one of these viral TikTok videos supporting Rodney Hinton — with more than 20,000 likes — actually brings up Luigi Mangione in this context. Watch:
There’s one useful aspect of this TikTok video, which is that it makes the point that this situation isn’t all about race. Luigi Mangione was obviously white, and plenty of people justified his actions too. In fact, as you probably recall, some people who call themselves “conservatives” also justified Luigi Mangione’s actions. And that tells us that we’re witnessing a general breakdown of law and order, on top of the racial violence. Decades of justifying and excusing criminality have led us to a point where people who commit blatant first-degree murder are celebrated, at least if they’re viewed as allies of the political Left. Again: we’ve now had three of these cases in five months.
As you continue to hear the high-pitched outrage over Shiloh Hendrix, keep in mind that nothing she did, in any universe, could ever end your life or the life of anyone you care about. The people cheering the execution of an innocent police officer or a CEO or a white high school student at a track meet, on the other hand, are actually dangerous. They’re the ones you should be hearing about, nonstop. They’re the actual threat to you and your family. They’re the ones who are trying to bring about a complete breakdown in law and order. They’re the ones who want racial conflict. And as the execution of this police officer in Cincinnati once again demonstrates, even if they can’t destroy someone like Shiloh Hendrix, they will still do everything in their power to destroy you.
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