“They begged for that beat down! I am grateful for that whole story.”
That’s Cincinnati city councilwoman Victoria Parks (D) taking to Facebook like a damned fool in the wake of that viral beatdown video from outside the city’s annual music festival last weekend.
Back when politicians still understood small-r republican values — you know, decorum, the common good, civic virtue — something like Parks’s comments would have been assumed to be bad satire:
Cincinnati Councilman Victoria Parks (D) on the viral white attacks: “They begged for it” pic.twitter.com/xnpJLTBrmk
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 30, 2025
Sadly, comments like hers from elected officials who are supposed to know better have become increasingly common.
If you haven’t seen the videos yourself, here’s the version that everybody was talking and writing about before Parks went and stole the spotlight.
PJ Media’s own Kevin Downey Jr (I love his stuff) had all the beatdown video details for you on Tuesday with one of his deliciously provocative headlines: “The Cincinnati Beat Down Is Nothing New. Democrats Have Been Spewing Anti-White Hate for Years.”
But alternate versions of the video that came out since then aren’t so clear-cut. The white male victim, who looks intoxicated to my expert eyes, might have been spewing racial slurs. That’s no excuse for violence, of course, but you know what they say about the madness of inebriated crowds.
So let’s stipulate that a white guy mouthed off to a black crowd — I’m not going out on a limb here, guessing there weren’t many sober people that late at night during a music festival — and things got out of hand. Though the beating looked brutal, reports say he escaped with only minor injuries.
If there’s anything to be grateful for in this shocking story, maybe it’s that.
The worst part is how many people, including at least one woman, joined in. The riotous crowd kicked and hit the man even after he lay prone on the street.
What’s there to be “grateful” for in that part of the story? Where’s Barack Obama to remind us, “This isn’t who we are?”
And Another Thing: I won’t take sides over who’s to blame for how things got started. The videos the public has seen so far are inconclusive. I’m just willing to stipulate certain possibilities so we can try to have a reasonable discussion. But I do take sides against the police chief trying to duck her responsibilities, and politicians like Parks fanning racial grievances.
One of the few times to be grateful for stupid people doing stupid things is during a Three Stooges short. Setting race aside, there’s nothing to be grateful for about a drunk loudmouth taking a beating from a drunken crowd.
But the most shocking part was the white woman who got sucker-punched so hard, she went right down on the pavement, smacking her skull so hard she was left briefly unconscious with a dead-eyed stare.
Parks said the woman “begged for it” and that she’s grateful that the woman got “beat down.”
Did Councilwoman Parks mean to imply that she’s grateful because it was a white loudmouth taking a beating from a black crowd? Did the woman deserve a dead-eyed concussion just because she was white? Is every instance of black-on-white violence, even against loudmouth jerks, long-delayed racial justice for crimes committed long before any of those involved were born?
That post-racial America we once strived for seems further away every time some loudmouth elected Democrat takes to Facebook or X.
Recommended: Starvation Is Kinda Cool, Ackshully
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