Morning Wire - Why the Cincinnati Beatdown Went Viral

Episode Date: August 2, 2025

An unvarnished conversation with Heather Mac Donald, author of “When Race Trumps Merit,” on the truth behind the Cincinnati mob attack, what the crime data really says about race in America, and how the media fuels dangerous narratives. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsor: ZocDoc - Find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Visit https://Zocdoc.com/WIRE #sponsored - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A shocking mob attack in downtown Cincinnati has led to a string of charges against several suspects and a federal investigation. The footage of the shocking event renewed the national debate over racially motivated crimes and prompted the DOJ to look into potential hate crime charges. In this episode, we sit down with best-selling author Heather McDonald to discuss what crime data reveals about racially charged crimes in the U.S. and the media's role in inflaming racial tensions. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Saturday, August 2nd, this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. You know that nagging feeling about the doctor's appointment you've been putting off forever? Maybe it's that dentist cleaning you're now six months overdue for.

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That's ZOCDOC.com slash wire. Zocdoc.com slash wire today. Joining us now to discuss the racially charged debate raging around the recent mob attacks in Cincinnati is Heather MacDonald, a Manhattan Institute fellow, a contributing editor at City Journal, and author of Win Race Trump's Merit, which is a Daily Wire published book, I should know. Heather, thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure, John. Thank you. So this week we saw a video go completely viral on the Cincinnati attack.

It's really disturbing. I actually had a hard time getting over watching it. 15 people or so surrounding this man. Eventually a woman getting just pummeled. The woman is knocked out or head hits the concrete. It's alarming. It's disturbing. First of all, why do you think this has gone so viral? Well, I think people realize that they've been fed a pack of lies when they have been told by President Obama, by President Biden, that whites are the biggest threat to blacks.

The two presidents used to routinely intone that black parents were right to fear that their children will be killed every time they step outside, meaning by a white person or by a police officer. The data is precisely the opposite. The rates of interracial crime are way, way on the side of blacks beating up whites. And people experience this. They see it, but they're not allowed to talk about it. and this is just proof that you can't really suppress. Now, this video really spread like wildfire before anyone really knew much about what led to the violence, but there's no doubt about what we see in it, which is a bunch of people either just standing around

watching somebody get their head literally stomped on, on the concrete. This is with the male. And then the female being punched right in the face by a full-grown male, her head hitting the concrete, like I said. She's knocked out for several seconds yet, Through all of this, almost no one acts to help either of them. Are we seeing a societal problem here on display in this video? Well, it's certainly a group of people that have not been socialized,

that have been taught to give in to their worst impulses. And, you know, I'm not, I don't want to really invoke social media here, but whether this is all sort of performative, I don't know. but this is not again the data show that this is not an aberration in 2023 the National Academy of Sciences which is about as establishment and and liberal as you can get came out with a report on crime edited by the left-wing criminologist at Columbia Bruce Western that said that white-on-black homicides are virtually non-existent. Whites are virtually never killing blacks, whereas blacks commit violent crime against whites

at 35 times the rate at which whites commit violent crime against blacks. That is the reality. Hate crimes are just as disparate. If you want to look at who's committing hate crimes against gays, against Asians, against Jews. It's overwhelmingly blacks, not whites, and yet we're told just the opposite. And the narrative that is embraced by the media,

which is that whites are constantly oppressing blacks, that they are the source of the astronomical black death by homicide rate, cannot help but create in some people a sense of entitlement to strike back at their alleged oppressor. whites are effectively dehumanized by the media when it comes to race relations. Now, you mentioned the media there. I wanted to ask you about that factor. For at least the first 24 hours, we didn't see any major outlets covering this at all, at least not what I saw. When they did cover it, it was in a pretty subdued way with vanilla

headlines where they've just buried the stories. You're saying the media is not just complicit. They're actually making things worse here in their coverage. Can you expand on that? Absolutely. Black-on-black homicides get no coverage. Black-on-white attacks get no coverage. The only coverage, you know, the media is racist. The only black lives they care about are those extremely rare instances where a white police officer has taken the life of a black person. those become international global sensations overnight. They get nonstop media coverage, creating a completely phony impression of what the real source is of threat to black people and, frankly, to white people. Now, we'll always hear from the media that most crime is intracial.

That's true. But the rates of intracial crime are very different. and the rates of inter-black-on-white versus white-on-black crime is very different. So people have been living in a tissue of media lies that at some point it's just not going to work any longer. And we're seeing this, I think, with the Trump administration that is no longer putting out these phony narratives about white supremacy. that is no longer accepting anti-white, anti-Asian racism on the part of institutions. And it may be that with a leader that's willing to say, you can't scare me any longer by calling me a racist, I don't care that more and more people are also not going to accept the race hustle and the race grift.

To your point, Vice President J.D. Vance publicly weighed in on this. He called for the arrest of all the thugs involved in this, putting a lot of pressure on local officials. What I saw is a mob of lawless thugs beating up on an innocent person and it's disgusting. And I hope every single one of those people who engage in violence is prosecuted to the full extent of law. And they will be. They will be so long as law enforcement in the state of Ohio takes their job seriously. Now, we did see local officials finally start to really get their act together on this. The police union's been very great on this.

The mayor finally weighed in. some other people have condemned the attacks. So can this kind of pressure from the White House have an effect? Do we see trends of local officials responding to that kind of pressure? Well, I don't know. We're certainly not seeing that when it comes to immigration enforcement. I'm here in Los Angeles, Southern California, and the police departments here are just as adamant about not cooperating with ICE.

So that's a demographic reality. They're obviously catering to the fact that Southern California, California is now massively Hispanic. And when it comes to black issues, race issues, white, white, black issues, I'm not sure. We'll see. I hope that the Trump administration is going to encourage more departments to publish their racial crime data. Very few do at this point. It becomes harder and harder to get.

But I think that the Trump administration has, as usual, the power of the person. I actually don't believe in federal spending and local crime matters. I think that it's a shell game. I don't believe in federal grants, basically, because it's just local taxpayer dollars that gets sent to Washington and then funneled back, and we're all supposed to be so grateful that we've got our local tax dollars back. Nevertheless, given the fact that the feds do send local taxpayers back to local jurisdictions

for police spending and whatnot, they should be very explicit and demanding about expecting local police chiefs to publish their crime data. Don't cover this up. And police chiefs, when they're giving public presentations, should start educating the public about the reality of crime. Because, again, we've lived like one phony narrative after another in Atlanta. If you may recall, John, there was the... spa shootings in 21 by a white guy that went to three Asian massage parlors and shot them up because he was racked by religious guilt over his sexual taste. This became the standard story that whites were going around beating up and killing Asians when in fact we saw,

occasionally we got the videos where the elderly Asians were being routinely set upon. by blacks in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Before that, in the 2000s, in 1990s, we used to hear about the knockout game all the time where young blacks go around and club elderly people from behind. This is the reality, but the narrative is just the opposite. Now, you've been personally hit with a lot of accusations

in the past for bringing up this data that it's racist to even cite statistics like this that, like you said, are coming from very authoritative sources, a lot of left-wing sources. Why is it so important to actually look at the data in an unflinching way? Why is this so vital? Well, if you care about black lives,

you should look at where black lives are being taken, and that is inner city neighborhoods by kids that don't have fathers that have never been socialized that are engaged in these absolutely mindless, barbaric drive-by shootings that are taking the lives of young, black children. If we go around pretending that the problem is whites and we need more anti-racism

training, that's not going to help these kids survive childhood and not get shot while they're playing on trampolines or in their bed at home or at birthday parties or in a park at a barbecue. That's how black kids are getting gunned down. And we turn our eyes away from that reality because Is it so depressing and squalid? But that's where our focus should be, not on fighting phantom racism. Plus, I just believe in the truth. I do not believe that human beings should be forced to live with lies, whether it gets, whether it's with regards to the optional nature of biological sex or what the source is of violence in this country. Well, a hard conversation that's raging again across the country. Meanwhile, charges have been filed in Cincinnati, so we're seeing the beginnings, at least, of justice there. Heather, thank you so much for coming on.

My pleasure, John. Thank you. That was Heather MacDonald, author of Win Race Trump's Merit, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.