The Other McCain

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Texas Murder: An Exclamation Point on My Argument About ‘Adolescence’

Posted on | April 5, 2025 | 72 Comments

Matt Walsh’s Daily Wire article is “members only,” so in case you’ve been hiding under a rock — or getting your news from the mainstream media — I’ll summarize what happened in Frisco, Texas, this week: A high school junior, Austin Metcalf, was stabbed to death Wednesday morning at a track meet by a senior from another high school, Karmelo Anthony. It was raining Wednesday morning. The various teams at the track meet each had set up awnings in the bleacher area around the stadium so that their athletes could get out of the rain (or, had the weather changed, to be sheltered from the sun). For reasons that have yet to be explained, Anthony, who attended Centennial High School, decided to get under the awning of the team from Memorial High School, which Metcalf attended. Members of the Memorial team objected to Anthony’s uninvited presence in their area, and Metcalf was trying to enforce the eviction:

One witness told an officer that they were sitting with Metcalf under their school’s tent during a track meet at the stadium when someone they didn’t know, identified as Anthony, came over to them.
The witness said Metcalf told Anthony to leave the tent when Anthony grabbed his bag, opened it, reached inside and said, “touch me and see what happens.” The police document said no one thought Anthony had a weapon.
One witness said Metcalf touched Anthony, and another said Metcalf grabbed Anthony.
Anthony then pulled out a knife and stabbed Metcalf once in the chest before running away, according to police.

“Touch me and see what happens.”

That’s probably evidence of what a lawyer would call premeditation.

Austin Metcalf was stabbed right in the heart. He was white, his killer was black. We can easily imagine what the media coverage would be like if the races of killer and victim were reversed. Immediately, it would be assumed that racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — was the motive, and there would be a thousand op-ed commentaries about the lessons to be learned from this shocking hate crime. As it is, however, the possibility of this being a crime inspired by racial hatred isn’t getting any media attention.

Now consider this in light of the recent media buzz around the Netflix series Adolescence. My Thursday post (“‘A Dumpster Fire of Lies’: Netflix Series Race-Swaps British Crime Trend, Journalists Treat It Like a Documentary”) got a lot of interesting comments, so let me add a coda.

As a conservative journalist, one point I try to keep in mind is that, if it weren’t for liberal bias in the media, there would be no need for conservative journalism. If the media — including both news and entertainment media — were providing a balanced and objective view of reality, then my work of pointing out the media’s lies, distortions and omissions would be unnecessary. This point is often missed when people get angry over media coverage of sensitive issues like race, sexuality, crime, immigration, etc. Unless we are mindful of what we’re doing, conservative journalists are at risk of being mistaken for ax-grinders.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, I plead not guilty.

Whatever liberals want to accuse me of, whatever labels they want to slap on me — “far-right extremist” or whatever — they are missing the point. It does not matter what my opinions may be on any particular policy issue, or how my opinions might be categorized, what actually matters are the failures of media institutions. In the particular example of Adolescence, we can say that Netflix has failed by producing a misleading depiction of youth violence and that the news media have failed in their coverage and commentary about this phenomenally popular series.

We may predict with absolute certainty, based on prior history, the next phase of the media campaign around Adolescence. Critics of the series will be labeled “far-right,” etc., for pointing out the vast gulf separating (a) the reality of youth violence in England and (b) the way youth violence is depicted in the Netflix series. The media are treating Adolescence as if it were documentary, and thereby encouraging officials to base public policy on the screenwriter’s imagination, rather than on the reality of juvenile crime. Do I have opinions about effective crime prevention policy? Yes, and I suppose some of those opinions might be considered controversial, but that’s irrelevant to the controversy around Adolescence. The point is, this dramatization should not be made the basis of public policy, which is what the media are trying to do.

What I did in my 3,000-word post Thursday was to point out that the writers of Adolescence had cited three specific incidents in England where teenagers had committed fatal stabbings as the inspiration for their project. Upon investigation, none of these crimes remotely resembles the plot of Adolescence, which is about a young boy who “has been deeply disturbed by school bullying via social media centred on incel subculture.” The creators of Adolescence have talked extensively about their desire to provoke a discussion of “young male violence,” but “didn’t want to blame the parents,” and thus settled on “the attraction of the so-called ‘manosphere'” as the teen killer’s motive.

It is therefore highly relevant that (a) no fatal stabbing by a minor in England has ever been attributed to such a motive, and (b) the alarming rise of knife attacks in England has mainly involved minorities from immigrant communities, rather than white boys like “Jamie Miller,” the protagonist of Adolescence. Despite this, the media commentary — e.g., MSNBC calling the Netflix series “a necessary lesson in modern day masculinity” — treats the dramatic fiction as if it were a documentary.

Now, from Texas, we get the unexpected exclamation point. Media accounts of the stabbing death of Austin Metcalf are woefully lacking in background information about the killer, Karmelo Anthony, and this dearth of information is . . . Well, mystifying might be the proper adjective. A heinous murder happens, and we expect reporters to dig up facts about the suspect that might give us clues to the motive. Was the accused teenager under some kind of stress? Did he have mental health problems? Were there “warning signs” that got overlooked?

Six weeks ago, Karmelo Anthony was brandishing an AK-47 and flashing gang signs, then the night before committing an atrocious murder, he posted a defiant photo to his Instagram account — so indeed, there were “warning signs” that got overlooked. But why do we have to rely on random X accounts to tell us these things? Why are the media so derelict in their journalistic duty? This is the real point, you see.

MSNBC isn’t calling this crime “a necessary lesson.” The media are not inviting us to engage in a discussion examining the social significance of this shocking murder. In case you were wondering — again, I must do the work the mainstream media won’t do — Frisco is about 30 miles north of Dallas. The town has boomed in the past 25 years, growing from a population of just 33,714 in 2000 to more than 225,000 now. The 2020 census found that the population of Frisco is 48% white, 26% Asian, 12% Hispanic and 9% black. It is a very prosperous community with excellent public schools, and therefore we must ask, why was Karmelo Anthony posing with an AK-47 on Instagram and flashing gang signs like he was some kind of ghetto hoodlum? Also, since we’re asking questions, this seems rather obvious: Why bring a knife to a track meet?

Good luck finding the answers to those questions in media coverage of this horrifying murder in Texas. Just try to keep in mind it is the gap between reality and media coverage that’s the real story. We wouldn’t be here if the media told the truth. What would Scott Adams say?

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)



 

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Category: Crime, Media Bias, Texas

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