Some Random Kid

Do you remember going to track meets as a kid? I do. I always enjoyed the events because it was an excuse to get out of school, and there's nothing I loved more than that. My memory of them is pretty bland. Track meets, to me, were like the safest, dullest place in the world. The idea of seeing violence at them is foreign to me.

I was never very competitive there personally, but my friend Kevin was. He took it seriously, and he had a lot of first place ribbons to show for it. And so, a big part of why I went wasn't to compete myself, but to actually support my friend, and watch the audience marvel at his athleticism.

Every school has a Kevin. The one who's just built different, the kid everybody assumes is going somewhere. You probably knew one. Maybe you were fortunate enough to be one.

Austin Metcalf was his school's Kevin. Legitimately impressive on all fronts.

It's almost annoying when someone is just so good at everything, isn't it? The kid had a 4.0 GPA, the MVP trophy and just to rub it in, he has a face straight out of Central Casting for the high school hero. The All American teenage football star.

And you know what the worst part is? You can't hate him for it like the popular jock that we always see depicted in movies. Austin wasn't a bully. From all the accounts of people that knew him, he was about as good of a guy as one can be.

He would show up to his friends' games just to support them when he had no other reason to be there. His coach, Chris Jackson, called him a natural leader who lifted everyone around him up. At the memorial, Chris shared with us that Austin would regularly tell his teammates this line verbatim:

I love you, boys. Let's go to work every day.

And it doesn't stop there. Even his laugh was infectious. He was fiercely loyal and an outspoken believer in Christ. His student pastor said "Austin was a true warrior".

When Austin's father, Jeff, was describing how he lived his life, these are the words he chose:

Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.

And that was Austin... that's how he lived his life... right up until the morning of April 2nd, 2025.

It was a track meet no different than the ones I told you about. Dull, safe and perfectly ordinary. It was raining that morning, hard enough that they'd delayed the events, and a few hundred kids were packed under the tents waiting out the rain. Austin was one of them, his twin brother Hunter right beside him.

It should have been just another forgettable day in his life.

Each school had its own tent to wait out the rain. Austin was from Memorial High School. Sitting under Memorial's tent was a kid from another school, Centennial. The wrong tent. Hunter told him to move. He wouldn't. Then Austin stepped in and told him to move too.

The kid said "touch me and see what happens".

Then he reached into his backpack. Austin shoved him. The kid pulled out a knife and put it in his chest. One stab. Then he ran.

Hunter, Austin's identical twin, was right there. He dropped down and tried to stop the bleeding. He held him... here's how Hunter describes it in his own words:

I grabbed his hand and looked in his eyes. I just saw his soul leave, and it took mine too.

An identical twin. The same face... Hunter watched a mirror of himself bleed out in his arms, and by his own words, something in him went into the ground too. God bless him.

In a sane country, this story has a simple ending. The boy is mourned by everyone, no exceptions, and the one who killed him faces the full weight of justice. A dead innocent kid, a community coming together, a punished killer. No arguments about any of it. No Piers Morgan debate panels where people on 'both sides' have it out, because there are no 'both sides'.

And part of that did happen... Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder and sentenced to thirty-five years. The sentencing, in my view, is too light, but it is still the right conviction. It is justice.

But that's not where the story ends. Because something went to work that no courtroom could reach. Not on the verdict... on the meaning behind it. On who Austin Metcalf is allowed to be, now that he is dead. Somebody has made that decision. It wasn't his family, it wasn't his brother on the ground beside him, and it wasn't you.

If you want to know what people actually value, don't listen to what they say. Watch where they put their money... so let's start with the money.

While the Metcalfs planned a funeral, a fund for the boy who killed him crossed $600,000. Five thousand strangers donated to him... and it gets worse. The donations went up after he was convicted of murder.

What is happening here? Why would so many people actively, and materially support someone who murdered an innocent 17 year old boy?

This is what I am going to help you understand by the time you're done reading this.

Let's start at the top. Washington DC.

Not some anonymous account online. A sitting member of the United States Congress. A trained and certified lawyer, someone whose entire profession is the law.

Shortly after the verdict Representative Jasmine Crockett went on camera with TMZ to talk about the case. She thought 35 years was too harsh. She talked about the killer being a scared kid who, in her telling, had been shown "little to no mercy". And the boy he murdered, the honor student, the twin, the kid who regularly told his teammates he loved them? She called "some random kid who... was larger than him."

Some random kid. Doesn't even have a name.

Then the interviewer brought up a congressman who'd called for the death penalty and asked her what she made of it. Her entire answer was two words.

"Again, racism."

And Crockett wasn't unusual. That's the problem. The same reaction was pouring out of every corner of the culture at once.

Cardi B, one of the most famous rappers in the world posted this immediately after the verdict was read out:

DISGUSTING... This is not justice, this is trying to make an example.

Bree Newsome... the activist who got famous in 2015 climbing the pole to tear the Confederate flag off the South Carolina statehouse said the legal system would've treated him "totally different" if he were white. And then she doubled down: "Stop pretending there's anything Black people can do in our behavior to prevent racism."

That's the narrative. A jury found a killer guilty of murder, and the verdict itself becomes the injustice. The society that convicted him is the real criminal. That's the story they need to convince enough people to believe.

Nobody coordinated any of this. No meeting, no memo, no phone call, no group chat. A congresswoman, a music star, and a famous activist produced the identical reaction inside 48 hours, and not one of them needed to talk to another.

This is not a conspiracy. It's much worse. A conspiracy needs a meeting, it needs coordination and careful planning... this needs nothing but a shared faith.

Now you might be thinking that this is about race. I can understand the temptation... I feel it too. It's easy to feel... but it's a trap. The progressives want you to make this about race, they want you fighting within their frame. This is their territory.

So let me pull you out of that right now... because here's what they're counting on you not noticing... their 'racial grievances' were never about race in the first place. It's about power and political usefulness. That's the game.

I'm going to drop three names on you... three black people... all of them dead and all of them were in the news at some point.

George Floyd

David Dorn

Pierre Johnson

You already know George Floyd... how could you not? Our progressive institutions effectively elevated him into sainthood. You may know David Dorn too, but only because you're the kind of rare person who pays attention. The rest of the country never learned his name.

David Dorn was a 77-year-old retired police captain. 38 years on the St. Louis police force. Then instead of resting, he came out of retirement to serve as a small-town police chief. He was also a grandfather of ten who spent his life mentoring disadvantaged youth, trying to steer them towards something better than the streets. A truly decent man, and a pillar of his community.

On June 2nd, 2020, in the middle of the George Floyd riots, he went to check on a friend's pawn shop that was being looted, because that's the kind of man David was. He was shot in the street and left to die on the sidewalk... streamed live on Facebook. That's how his story ends.

This was the same summer in the same country that was supposedly tearing itself apart over black lives.... and the machine that was painting murals and holding televised funerals for George Floyd had nothing for David Dorn. No marches, no memorials, no media campaigns for justice. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer did not take a knee for David Dorn. They'd probably stare at you in confusion if you brought his name up to them.

Why?

Because his death wasn't politically useful to the regime. Whatever you believe happened to George Floyd, his death could be turned into the story the regime needed. "White cop murders innocent unarmed black victim." They just needed to be able to sell that headline. They didn't need it to be true.

David Dorn's story couldn't be spun that way. He wasn't killed by a cop or a white man. He was killed by the chaos the BLM movement generated. His death didn't feed the story, it indicted it. Letting that story get out is harmful to the regime narrative... so they let it vanish.

And now Pierre Johnson. This one is really going to sting.

Fourteen years old. You've probably never heard his name, and by now you understand why.

He was a baseball kid. Loved the game. The boys on his team were more like brothers than just teammates. Everyone who knew him said the same thing, he had a smile that could light up a room, and a heart to match.

His guardian, Christine, put it plainly: "He had a really good heart. He would've done great things. He would've been a great man."

She'll never get to see that great man. She was robbed of that by a storm of bullets. On a porch. In a neighborhood his family was trying to get him out of.

And they had every reason to try. Pierre's mother had already buried his older brother, shot on that same block, paralyzed, then gone. Pierre knew exactly what that neighborhood was. He'd been spending his summers across the city with Christine just to escape it. The last time she saw him, he told her: "Five more days, Christine, and then I'll be by you all summer." He never made it. He was killed with days left in the school year.

And that's it... another story ends. That's all Pierre gets out of this life. 14 years.

By now, you already know what the country did with Pierre's death. Nothing.

Floyd became a household name. Pierre became a statistic. An irrelevant number on an FBI homicide chart.

Here's the number that tells you everything... Pierre's family raised nine thousand dollars from 132 people to bury him. The man who murdered Austin Metcalf raised over six hundred thousand from more than 5,000 people to walk free.

And so, we have looked at four black lives. And the people who swear black lives matter sorted them out like this: made one into a saint, made two vanish, and handed the murderer a fortune attached to a narrative where he's the victim.

So... what is my point? Why am I telling you about these four lives, side by side?

The point is this:

It was never about the color of their skin. It was about their utility to the regime.

Black Lives Matter was never about the black lives. It's about power. Do you see it? It's a tool. A weapon. And the people holding that weapon already run everything... the weapon is pointed at you, and everyone you love to ensure things stay that way.

Now, here's the trick they're counting on: the fight you think you're in isn't the real one. It's the one they set up for you. A trap.

The real fight was never black against white. It's the people who rule, and everyone they rule. Predators and Prey.

I'm not going to lie to you and tell you the herd is going to wake up. It won't. Most of it never does. They will fall for this trap, and the next one... and the one after that... but there is a silver lining.

You don't have to be one of them. The trap only works in the dark. And you're not in the dark anymore. You see it... don't you? And you're not the only one who sees it. I'm building a community of people who see it. And I write every single day to pull more of them out of the dark.

And who knows what a community of people who can reliably identify these traps can accomplish? I intend to find out.

Stop being prey.

~ Clay