According to our leftist betters, a sickening graphic video showing a white man being brutally tortured in Chicago by four black attackers as they shout, "F--- Donald Trump! F--- white people!" isn't evidence of racism or a hate crime.

In the left's alternate universe, Pepe the Donald Trump-loving cartoon frog is racist.  Kidnapping, torturing, and scalping an innocent white man because he is white is not racist.  Black-hating mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof speaks for all white people, but the newly arrested black perpetrators in Chicago, Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, Tanishia Covington, and Brittany Covington, are all rogue actors.

No minorities are responsible for their actions.  It's society's fault.  It's capitalism's fault.  It's the fault of white privilege.

To be clear, I am referring to the #BlackLivesMatter kidnapping broadcast live on Facebook (since censored by the fake news commissars at Facebook and at YouTube) that shows a captive, reportedly mentally disabled young white male being physically abused by four young black assailants.  Fortunately, Live Leak posted the full video, which runs 27 minutes and 39 seconds.

Black Lives Matter movement hero DeRay Mckesson rushed to Twitter Thursday morning to make excuses for his comrades-in-arms.  "It goes without saying that the actions being branded by the far-right as the 'BLM Kidnapping' have nothing to do [with] the movement."

He's lying.

This is exactly what Black Lives Matter stands for.  Its supporters lionize those who murder cops and white people.  At their marches, they carry signs reading, "End White Supremacy."  America, they claim, is systemically racist.  In other words, white people are racist and evil.  

In my previous American Thinker profile of Black Lives Matter, I wrote:

The Black Lives Matter cult is animated by a hatred of normal American values.  Its members idolize convicted, unrepentant black militants and cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal and have declared "war" on law enforcement.  While its members openly call for police officers to be assassinated, its leaders, wishing to seem more respectable before the TV cameras, downplay the insurrectionary rhetoric whenever a member kills a cop.

These are sick people who need to be dealt with.  The Black Lives Matter movement should be disbanded by force, if necessary, and its leaders arrested.  Sedition and gangsterism aren't free speech.

Returning to the video, in it one person says, "This nigga right here represents Trump" and says he will put the victim in the trunk of a car and "put a brick on the gas."

The victim is forced to drink water from a toilet.  The victim's clothes are sliced.  An attacker cuts off a part of the man's scalp while his mouth is bound with what appears to be duct tape.  A woman mocks the victim, saying, "Oooo, that bit's gone" as the man is menaced with a knife.  "This s--- is hilarious," the woman says while laughing.  Another says, "Smack his ass."

The attackers allow their faces to be shown as if they don't expect to be held accountable for their actions.  They even call each other by first names.

In Barack Hussein Obama's America, these criminals have every reason to believe they will not be held to account for their actions.  And in Mayor Rahm Emanuel's blood-spattered Chicago in the era of the Democratic Party-endorsed Black Lives Matter movement, these people can reasonably expect a slap on the wrist – if that.

Predictably, the assembly line at the leftist excuse factory sprang to life as soon as the video received attention.  The talking points quickly went viral.

Commander Kevin Duffin of the Chicago police shrugged.  "Kids make stupid decisions – I shouldn't call them kids.  They're legally adults.  But they're young adults, and they make stupid decisions."

He added, "That will certainly be part of whether or not we determine this a hate crime or whether or not this is stupid ranting and raving."  (Why it can't be both is unclear.)

On CNN, Daily Caller columnist Matt K. Lewis correctly described the incident as an example of "evil."  "That's what this is – it's evil, it's brutality, it's man's inhumanity to man."

Award-winning anchor Don Lemon, who famously pondered whether Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 was swallowed by a black hole, calmly demurred.

"I don't think it's evil," he said.  "I think these are young people and they have bad home training."  He added, "I have no idea who's raising these young people, because no one I know on Earth, 17 years old or 70 years old, would ever think of treating another person like this."

At Gizmodo, Bryan Menegus wrote a piece titled "Alt-Right Trolls Use Chicago Kidnapping to Spread Lies About Black Lives Matter[.]"

He asks, "But how exactly are these teens tied to the Black Lives Matter movement? The short answer is: they're not."

Menegus calls the kidnapping an "isolated criminal event" and pedantically observes:

Not one legitimate news source linked the attack to BLM for the simple reason that no evidence of such a connection exists.  Nor did I hear the movement being invoked at any point during the 30-minute video, which I watched in its entirety.  An administrator of Centipede Central – a popular Trump supporter chatroom – was able to find the Facebook page of Brittany Herring, the young woman who filmed the act.  Her public posts, which stretch back to September 2015, have no references to BLM either.

At Bustle, Jessicah Lahitou whines that some have twisted "this isolated and highly disturbing crime into a false narrative about the Black Lives Matter movement."

Reading from the same script as Menegus, she laments:

But it is sadly telling of the political moment we're in that so many on the far right jumped at this chance to demonize BLM, rather than seek facts and advocate for serious and severe repercussions for the four individuals responsible for this crime.

Lilly Workneh, "Black Voices Senior Editor" at the Huffington Post, dutifully follows the party line, writing that the perpetrators "have no official affiliation to the Black Lives Matter movement and Chicago police said on Thursday that they have not made any connection to the racial justice group."

But journalists are not the final arbiters of truth. 

Americans agree, which is why only "6 percent of people say they have a great deal of confidence in the press," according to the American Press Institute.

It is demonstrably true that Black Lives Matter supporters embrace anti-white violence.  They're thrilled when blacks assault whites while playing the "knockout game."

They have been given aid and encouragement by President Obama, who has long tried to provoke civil unrest and racial antagonism.  He has steadfastly refused to condemn Black Lives Matter.  In fact, Obama has lavished attention on the movement's leaders and invited them to the White House over and over again.  He even blamed five Dallas cops for their own murder at the hands of a Black Lives Matter-inspired sniper.

As Colin Flaherty proves every single day, violent black-on-white crime is dramatically underreported.  The mainstream media goes out of its way not to characterize obvious racially motivated crimes committed by blacks against whites as race-related.

The Black Lives Matter movement never hesitates to go to bat for vicious thugs when they are black.

They turned Trayvon Martin into a martyr even though he attempted to murder so-called white Hispanic Robert Zimmerman because he mistakenly believed that Zimmerman was gay.  They beatified "gentle giant" Michael Brown after he attempted to murder decorated white cop Darren Wilson.  They portrayed heroin dealer Freddie Gray as a victim of systemic, anti-black violence by police and cheered as Baltimore cops were subjected to political show trials.

Whether the attackers in Chicago specifically said at any point in their lives, "I endorse Black Lives Matter" is irrelevant.  They are doing the bidding of this antisocial movement.  They are its vanguard.

Matthew Vadum is senior vice president at Capital Research Center, a think-tank in Washington, D.C., and editor-in-chief of its new Bombthrowers blog.  He is also an investigative reporter and author of the ACORN/Obama exposé Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.  Follow him on Twitter.  Email him at matthewvadum [at] gmail.com.