Shaun King wrote a lecture piece in the New York Daily News today, but it isn’t aimed at the monsters who held a mentally disabled man for days, tortured him on live Facebook video, and screamed racist insults at him. It starts with the headline:

“Stop using the attack on a mentally challenged white man in Chicago to promote a racist agenda against Black Lives Matter”

King claims:

This country does not need me to speak out on crimes committed by black folk because nobody in this country is held more responsible for the crimes they commit, and even the crimes they don’t commit, than black folk in America.

That’s not why you need to speak out, Shaun. You need to speak out because you decry racism in this country, consider yourself an activist on racial issues, and the attackers are heard in the video saying:

“f— Trump” and “f— white people” and…that the victim “represents Trump.”

King does admit that the attacks were terrible and criminal, but…:

I speak out on injustice. What happened to this man in Chicago was terrible. It was criminal. I hate it, but guess what — justice was swift. It was miraculously swift.

You know why justice was swift? Because the criminals livestreamed it. Kinda easy to figure out who the perpetrators are when it’s live online.

Then King goes on with statistics about gun violence (what does that have to do with this?) and to draw false equivalencies between this case and the George Zimmerman case and others, and bringing in issues with the way blacks are treated in the justice system.

I understand that something about this case and the reaction must have triggered King. A crime such as this brings out memories and links for a lot of people, memories and links that may be painful but may not be totally relevant. For me, it brought back memories of murder trials I’d worked on where a group of friends turned on one of the boys, kidnapped, tortured and finally murdered him after holding him captive for days. I had an extremely emotional reaction to this video and story because of my former experiences. And while there are parallels to this case, it is not this case, and as someone who has the ability to reach people through my writing I have a responsibility to not conflate the two.

So does Shaun King.

He claims the attack has nothing to do with race or Trump, that the Chicago Police said they targeted the boy because of his handicap. I’m sure that had something to do with it – he was a much easier target due to his handicap, and because he allegedly knew one of the attackers from school.

It must be nice to live in a world where you can conveniently ignore what comes out of someone’s mouth, multiple times, on video, simply to have it fit your own narrative.