All Buttons Pushed

Inciting racial fear has been the right's most useful and open tactic throughout Obama's tenure. As national media continue reporting police killings of unarmed black youths, the noise machine follows by turning the victims into thugs who had it coming.

The 1990 murder of Carol DiMaiti Stuart represents, in Charles Pierce's view, a particular turning point, when—

...her husband, Charles, the murderer threw out a fairy tale about a black perpetrator that sent the Boston police on an absolute rampage through the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. It didn't stop until Stuart confessed by throwing himself off the Tobin Bridge.

Racial fear-mongering in the post-Reagan 1990s was marketed through such tropes as a supposedly new, horrifying, and academically-endorsed phenomenon: young ghetto "superpredators," more deadly than any criminals ever known before. And around this time "Cops" on Fox preceded the network's marketing of "News" to a credulous audience.

So here we are, all these decades later, as the "thugs" theme gets a bigger, brighter spotlight.