Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly to write. I don’t mean in general staring off into space or watching the clouds in your coffee kind of stuff, I mean when you see something so extraordinarily evil that you’re left speechless.

That happened to me last week when I saw the video of a white female student being brutally beaten by a black female student in Missouri. As you’ve no doubt seen, the black girl beats the white girl into unconsciousness and repeatedly slams her head into the concrete. The victim went into convulsions and, as of this writing, is in critical condition in the hospital.

There are two primary questions I had after watching this video. The first was why does no one try and stop the attacker when there are a dozen people around the fight, including at least one person recording a video? The second was what kind of an upbringing compelled them to act this way? These two unanswerable questions melded into a third, which was, why do we see so many videos of blacks acting violently? Beating white people. Beating other black people. Attacking restaurant employees. Attacking cops. Pushing people in front of subway trains. And the list goes on. And on. And on.

On the day I saw this video, I happened to be reading a book called Empire by Niall Ferguson. I was at the point where he compared the actions of the British—which is the empire to which the title refers—and the Japanese in their early 20th-century empire. In particular, he discusses the Rape of Nanking, one of the most brutal and disgusting displays of savagery ever chronicled.

Ferguson doesn’t pretend the British were never brutal. In fact, they were and he discusses it. But he makes the distinction between the British killing opponents during battles—sometimes including unarmed women and children who were peacefully protesting—or the deaths of prisoners from incompetent logistics management and the Japanese brutal, intentional infliction of pain and torture on civilians and POWs alike. There were literally contests to see who could kill more people or do so more quickly or brutally.

Such abuse was never limited to the Japanese, of course. The Germans were equally as evil during WWII. Like the Japanese, their killing beyond the battlefield was often a mix of cruelty, sadism, depravity, and systemized murder. Such evil has been endemic throughout much of human history.

Image by Vince Coyner using AI.

One of the reasons the Spanish were able to so easily subdue the great Aztec empire was because so many of its neighbors were enthusiastic about ridding themselves of the cruel, murderous empire where captured enemies would frequently die horrifying, brutal deaths. More recently, the Rwandan genocide, ISIS’s brutality, the execution of thousands of Nigerian Christians by Muslims, and Hamas’s October 7th attacks demonstrate that man can be a savage instrument of evil.

Since the moment Cain slew Abel, history is full of violence. But what we’re seeing among many American blacks seems to be different. Not different in that it’s unique in history, but that it’s unique in American history. What I mean by that is that it’s a perfect storm of Democrat malevolence.

That storm has three components. The first is what seems to have become the primary plank of the Democrat party; namely, alleged white racism. Before Barack Obama, America’s race relations had been largely improving for 40 years. With his “the police acted stupidly” comment, things got off on the wrong foot, and after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, things went south quickly.

Then, George Floyd’s death in 2020 sent race relations into a tailspin. With the riots and the shilling for BLM by everyone from the NFL to Microsoft to congressional Democrats, things took a decidedly bad turn. Suddenly, we were told systemic racism was to be found everywhere, from law enforcement to math to punctuality to proper English.

At the same time, we had the Pentagon, the White House, and practically every news organization in the country telling us that white nationalism is the single biggest threat to the country and that blacks were in constant danger. The left has done to whites what the Nazis did to the Jews, what the Japanese did to the Chinese, and what the Hutu did to the Tutsi… dehumanize them, make them into the Other, the ones towards whom no humanity need be shown. Once that mindset is absorbed, there are no limitations on what can be done to members of the target group.

The second component is that black Americans have been told by Democrats that they cannot succeed. Regardless of what they do, they are incapable of success in America because of white oppression. As such, the rules need to be changed for them—most critically, the elimination of consequences for crimes. Essentially, the argument is that given that blacks cannot find success when they behave properly, society can’t punish them for behaving improperly.

The third component is the collapse of the black family. Today, more than 70% of black babies are born to unwed mothers.  That leaves a single mother, often on welfare, to raise the children. And children in fatherless homes are far more likely to be criminals.

The outcome of this perfect storm is that a significant proportion of the black population hates white people, has little belief that blacks have a vested interest in civilized society, and comes from homes in which no one teaches them right from wrong. With little reason to have self-respect and even less reason to respect others, too many black Americans are simply acting out as a child would, with no filters, no self-control, no empathy, and no real remorse. That’s a recipe for disaster for society.

If America is coming apart at the seams, it’s not because of any “systemic racism” but, rather, because Democrats have seen fit to weaponize blacks, and not just against whites, but against the very fabric of America. This plays itself out in major cities across the country where most black Americans live and dominate politics.

Indeed, black mayors (most of whom are Democrats) run almost every one of America’s largest and most important cities, Washington DC, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and New Orleans among others. Virtually every one of them is like living in a relative war zone compared to much of the rest of the country. The ironic thing about all of this is that the biggest victims of this black despondency and disconnection from civilized society are fellow blacks because the animating factors of alienation and desolation know no bounds, color or otherwise.

This is not a sustainable model. A nation divided by race cannot survive. Americans fought a war (started by Democrats) and then passed civil rights laws a century later (which Democrats opposed) to stop systematized racial divisions. But here we are with a significant portion of America’s population looking into life’s kaleidoscope and seeing nothing but a fatalistic cacophony where they have no agency, nothing matters, and, thus, nothing has any value, including their lives and those of others.

What we saw in that video is the epitome of the race war Charles Manson tried to launch. He failed then, but, sadly for Americans of all hues, half a century later, the Democrats are making his dream a reality.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.