Who is Responsible for the Murder of Cannon Hinnant?

2,155 words

It happened on August 9th, a date that carries a lot of bad juju. It happened in Wilson County, North Carolina, which has a population of about seventy-five thousand. 55.83% white, 39.33% black. Median income $33,000. Of households with children, less than half are married couples. 16.5% have a female householder with no husband present; 30.9% are “non-families” (presumably, non-married couples). Opioid overdose fatalities have tripled in Wilson since 2012. In short, it is a poor county with all the attendant social problems that now plague rural America.

But in the United States, no one who is “anyone” cares about what happens in Wilson. And that certainly applies to what happened to Cannon Hinnant. As most of my readers know, August 9th is the date that five-year-old Cannon was shot in the head at point-blank range by his 25-year-old black next-door neighbor Darius (no kidding) Sessoms. The murder occurred in the presence of Cannon’s two young sisters (ages seven and eight). While Sessoms fled the scene in his Toyota, Austin Hinnant, the little boy’s father, emerged from the house screaming, then cradled the dying boy in his arms. A neighbor who happened to be looking out her window watched in horror and disbelief as the scene unfolded. “They’ll never get over it,” she said of the family.

Apparently, Cannon was on his bike, playing in the yard with his sisters. Sessoms simply walked up to the boy, put a gun directly to his head, and pulled the trigger. His motive? No one knows for sure, but it has been suggested that Sessoms may have been “provoked” by the fact that Cannon had ridden his bike into Sessom’s yard. The murderer was apprehended hours later and is being held without bond, facing a charge of first-degree murder.

It’s one of the most horrific killings I’ve heard about in a while. People are murdered all the time in this country, but every now and then there’s one that really makes you feel something. You feel sick and angry, and you know that this one is going to stay with you. Said the neighbor: “My first reaction was he’s playing with the kids. For a second, I thought, ‘That couldn’t happen.’ People don’t run across the street and kill kids.” Then, inevitably, she added, “It’s almost like seeing a movie and then all of a sudden it dawns on you it’s not a movie.” No ma’am, it’s not like a movie. In a movie, it would be a white man shooting a black child.

The murder of Cannon Hinnant isn’t just “senseless,” it’s an obscenity. To say that it fills one with righteous indignation would be a gross understatement. Hopefully, Sessoms will be executed for this crime, since North Carolina has the death penalty. But the thought is curiously unsatisfying; like putting down a rabid dog. No, there are bigger fish here who ought to fry.

The story made local news, but despite the horrific nature of the crime, the big national news outlets did not pick it up — not for a while, at least. Nevertheless, the story began to be shared widely on social media. Those who circulated it agreed on two major points. First, the crime is utterly heinous. Second, if the races were reversed, it would have been plastered across every front page in America, and the talking heads would never shut up about it. It would be an occasion for warning us about the deadly rise of “white supremacism.” Blame would be laid squarely on the shoulders of — who else? — Donald Trump. The crime would be used as an excuse to deplatform dozens more, perhaps hundreds more, conservatives. BLM and Antifa would respond with mayhem of a kind that would make the last two months seem as peaceful as a Japanese tea ceremony.

So far as I can establish, Tucker Carlson seems to have been the first in the national news media to cover the story. On August 13th, he devoted a brief one minute and thirty-six seconds to it, simply reporting the facts without commentary. The next night he returned to the story in a segment that was longer, but still well under four minutes. This time, with guest Nancy Grace, he tried to address the question of why the story was not being reported more widely. I’ll return to what was said a little later, as it is very revealing.

Also on the 14th, CNN finally covered the story on its website, devoting a mere two hundred words to it. Reportedly, this occurred only after there had been widespread criticism of the network on social media. They, and other outlets, were accused of burying the story of Cannon Hinnant because it “didn’t fit their narrative.” By this point, the hashtags #SayHisName, #SAYHISNAMECANNONHINANT, and #CannonHinnant had taken over the trending page of Twitter. “Just imagine if the races had been reversed,” or words to that effect, was tweeted by many. On August 15th, ABC and the Washington Post finally covered the story.

Needless to say, none of these outlets entertained the possibility that the media and the Left’s non-stop anti-white rhetoric might have created the conditions that made possible this child’s murder. Even Fox wouldn’t go there. Not even Tucker. Now, I’m a fan of Tucker Carlson. Within the strictures imposed on him by the mainstream media, I think he actually manages to say some things that are rather daring. This was the one time when I truly felt ashamed of him. Apparently, Tucker was afraid to dish up some version of the “had the races been reversed” argument himself, so he tried to get Nancy Grace to do it for him. She didn’t take the bait.

As I mentioned, Grace appeared on a short segment of Tucker’s show on Friday, August 14th. After reminding his audience about the murder of Cannon Hinnant, Tucker said “The question is, why haven’t the media covered this story? What about it don’t they like?” Humm. Then he turned to Grace, asking her to “make sense of this for us.” Grace then basically proceeded to summarize what we know about the killing, then simply repeated Tucker’s query: “You’re right, this case has not been covered and I wonder why, too.”

But Tucker didn’t give up. He keeps pressing Nancy: “Look, I’ve said many times, and I mean it, that I don’t think you should draw broad societal conclusions from a single horrific crime. . . But to ignore something completely, and they ignore murders, by the way, every day on the Southside of Chicago as well, you really get the feeling that news coverage is guided purely by political imperatives, purely.” In others, might the press have political motives for not covering the murder of a white child by a black man? What say you, Nancy?

Amazingly, pathetically, Grace responded: “Well, it seems to me that right now, with the concern over COVID and not going to back to school and the issues surrounding that and the protests all around the country, even attacking a Ronald McDonald house while sick children were inside cowering, that’s all the headlines.” In other words, with all the COVID coverage, the media just had no room for poor Cannon. Then she quickly added, her voice rising, “What about this boy?! What about justice in this case?! What about my children and your children? They deserve to get just as much attention as all of the other headlines.” Tucker ended the interview at this point, calling Grace “one of the most direct people on television.” One hopes he was being ironic.

You can either take this exchange as an unfortunate display of cowardice, or as a kind of esoteric communication — what liberals like to call a “dog whistle.” Tucker posed questions that all of his viewers know the real answers to, regardless of what Nancy Grace said. What is it about the story that the media “don’t like”? What “political imperatives” caused them to ignore it? And what did Grace mean when she said “What about my children and your children? They deserve to get as much attention as all the other headlines.” Did she mean to suggest that white lives matter too? But perhaps I’m being too charitable.

Even if this was some kind of indirect way of communicating the obvious, the fact that the obvious cannot be directly communicated is an indication of what a terrible predicament we are in. It’s not like I’m expecting Tucker to plug The White Nationalist Manifesto ^[2]. But would it really be career-ending to point out that had the races been reversed, coverage would have been different? Would it really be career-ending to point out that the anti-white bile spewed in this country on a daily basis might have encouraged Darius Sessoms to murder this child? Apparently so.

We will see what Tucker says in the next few days, but I am not optimistic. What needs to be said — what must be said — is that the Left has blood on its hands, just as surely as does Mr. Sessoms.

Cannon’s mother, Bonny Waddell (who was not, apparently, living with the child at the time) apparently gets what is going on here. She posted a passionate statement on Facebook that begins as follows: “THIS WAS NOT JUST BECAUSE MY BABY WAS RIDING A BIKE!! DONT LET THIS SOCIAL MEDIA AND NEWS FOOL YOU!” She then went on to say, “We will get our justice and I’m taking every damn body down right with him! . . . I lost my child, I lost my innocent child, and no one can give me him back. I will burn this country down if it’s what it’ll take to see this man burn in hell. I’m ready to flip this county upside down.”

That was posted just a day or so after the murder. A little later, the mother issued another statement, which has occasioned widespread comment: “My baby didn’t see color, my baby made sure you knew he loved you even if he only knew you five minutes [I don’t care] what damn color you are!” In other words, this grieving mother felt obliged to defend her dead child by reassuring us that he wasn’t a racist. What is the implication here? That if the child were “racist” he would have deserved to die?

I suspect, in fact, that little Cannon probably was a “racist,” at least by the standards of today’s Left. As has been demonstrated in psychological tests, young children naturally prefer their own kind and feel fear and aversion toward those of other races. This was the whole point of Newsweek’s infamous “Is Your Baby Racist?” issue ^[3]. It takes years of brainwashing to get people to suppress these natural instincts. Brainwashing which, sadly, appears to have had its effect on Cannon’s parents.

You see, it has emerged that the night before the killing, Austin Hinnant actually had Darius Sessoms over for dinner. Now, to provide you with some perspective, Sessoms was previously convicted of felony larceny of firearms, misdemeanor maintaining a place for a controlled substance, and felony marijuana possession, all in 2016. Perhaps Mr. Hinnant thought he had turned over a new leaf. Sessom’s brother, by the way, is a convicted child molester.

I can’t help thinking that if Mr. Hinnant were just a bit racist, he would not have chosen to live near Darius Sessoms, much less socialize with him, and Cannon would still be alive. The good kind of racism protects our children from savages.

Austin Hinnant thought he knew Darius Sessoms. But there is no knowing the Darius Sessoms of this world, not really, not ever. What was it Kipling said? “Half devil, half child”?

While normal people feel disgust at the murder of Cannon Hinnant — as well as the Leftists who promoted it, the liberals who covered it up, and the conservative eunuchs who will say nothing about it — some of Sessoms’ brethren have taken to Twitter to celebrate ^[4]. Dante Salvador tweeted, “Blew his little white privileged brains clean out of his head! #BlackLivesMatter.” Gosh, I wonder who taught Mr. Salvador about “white privilege”? The Hinnants, living in a poor neighborhood in a poor county in a poor state, don’t seem that privileged to me. “[I don’t] give a shit he is white its time for revenge we tired shit over with now we shooting yall go cry to yo mama,” wrote another. Don’t expect any mainstream media coverage of this either.

Kipling was wrong. They are more than half-devil.

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