“It’s only new if you have been aggressively ignoring the epidemic of black mob violence around the country.”

A faithful reader forwards a link with the comment: "N.Y. Times Tries to Spin Surge in "Knock-out Game" Racial Attacks as an Urban Myth."

He highlights these quotes from the story:

"The attack added to a growing log of reports of such crimes in the Northeast and beyond. Young assailants were randomly picking unlucky targets and trying to knock them out with just one punch."

And:

"And in New York City, police officials are struggling to determine whether they should advise the public to take precautions against the Knockout Game — or whether in fact it existed."

And:

“We keep getting asked that question,” he said, of the Knockout Game, “and there is no noticeable trend.”

The reader comments:

Meanwhile, the alternative media has been reporting the FACTS on the obvious surge in black on white "thrill" violence for many months:

Surprise! Media finally wake up to Knockout Game.

“It’s only new if you have been aggressively ignoring the epidemic of black mob violence around the country,” said Sherry Godfrey, of Springfield, Mo. “But it happened to my son and I had no idea it was happening around the country until I researched it and found the book “White Girl Bleed A Lot.” For reporters willing to look, hundreds of examples are easy to find – though more often the perpetrators are identified as “unruly teens” or “rambunctious” rather than creators of racial violence and mayhem.

LATER: See also "Knockouts High and Low. Without self-restraint, we slip toward barbarism" who makes the connection between C.S. Lewis, the Knockout Game and Harry Reid's "Nuclear Option."

On November 22, 1963, two other notable men died, and got relegated to the foot of page 37 — the British authors C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Lewis endures because of the Narnia books (and films), but there’s a lot more in the back of his wardrobe. In his book The Abolition of Man, he writes of “men without chests” — the chest being “the indispensable liaison” between the head and the gut, between “cerebral man” and “visceral man.” In the chest beat what Lewis calls “the trained emotions.” Without them there is no honor or virtue, but only “intellect” and/or “appetite.”

Further down:

Restraint is an unfashionable concept these day, but it is the indispensable feature of civilized society. To paraphrase my compatriot George Jonas, punching a spinster’s lights out isn’t wrong because it’s illegal, it’s illegal because it’s wrong. But, in a world without restraints, what’s to stop you? If a certain percentage of your population feels no moral revulsion at randomly pulverizing fellow citizens for sport, a million laws will avail you naught: The societal safety lock is off.

That’s “visceral man.” What about Lewis’s “cerebral man”? In free nations, self-restraint is required not only of the underclass but of the rulers, too. Harry Reid is an unlikely gang leader, but, for a furtive little rodent, he landed a knockout punch on America’s governing norms. Like the lil’ old lady, Mitch McConnell never saw it coming. One minute, the time-honored practice that judicial appointments required supermajorities was there; the next, it was lying on the ground dead. Yes, yes, I know Senate procedural rules aren’t quite as gripping as “polar-bearing.” But, as I said, a free society requires self-restraint at all levels. Forget the merits of Reid’s move to simple majority rule, and simply consider how he did it.