Maddow Not Buying Darren Wilson’s Description of Michael Brown as Super-Human ‘Demon’
In one of his interviews with police following the shooting of Michael Brown, Ferguson officer Darren Wilson described the unarmed 18-year-old as being so “angry” he looked like a “demon.” In this description, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow saw shades of John DiIulio’s 1995 Weekly Standard article, “The Coming of the Super-Predators.”
“It was meant to sound scary, and it was,” Maddow said, before quoting a portion of Delulio’s controversial theory — later recanted by the author.
Delulio wrote:
On the horizon, therefore, are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators. They are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons (for example, a perception of slight disrespect or the accident of being in their path). They fear neither the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment. They live by the meanest code of the meanest streets, a code that reinforces rather than restrains their violent, hair-trigger mentality. In prison or out, the things that super-predators get by their criminal behavior — sex, drugs, money — are their own immediate rewards. Nothing else matters to them. So for as long as their youthful energies hold out, they will do what comes “naturally”: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.
As Maddow pointed out, despite the fact that Wilson said he “felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan” in his altercation with Brown, both men were 6’4″ (though Brown weighed 290 lbs to Wilson’s 210).
“He’s 6’4″, armed, a trained police officer, inside a police car,” Maddow said of Wilson. “He thought he had met Hulk Hogan, a larger-than-life threat that he could stop only by shooting. And even then, this ‘demon’ that he saw would keep going through the shots by somehow bulking himself up to make himself immune to the shots because he was so angered by them. Gunfire only made it angry, this demon.”
While it’s been two decades since the “racial fantasy” that was the “super-predator” panic, Maddow says that doesn’t mean it’s not still “driving our judgement and our accountability.”
Michael Brown’s parents commented on the description by Wilson of their son during an interview with Today on Wednesday, saying he “added insult to injury” with his words.
Watch video below, via MSNBC:
[h/t Wonkette]
[Photo via screengrab]
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