His Name Was Seth Smith…“A white kid gets killed and the damn whole world stops… F*** that white motherf***er,” said Seth’s killer, who pled down to manslaughter.
I’ve been doing lots of random punditry on Substack lately (Covid, Ukraine, crypto, prediction markets… etc.) and most of my readers are newer readers, so they wouldn’t necessarily know that Karlstack was originally set up to cater to academic economists. This is still an economics themed Substack. So, when I see injustice happening in the economics profession, I feel compelled to cover it.
There is no greater injustice in economics than Seth Smith; just hearing his name makes me boil with anger and depression and nihilism. It is so sad. Now that his killer’s court case came to a conclusion this week, and we have ostensibly obtained some semblance of closure, I am sadder than ever.
Seth Smith was a double major in economics and history at UC Berkeley. He was only 19 but a third-year student, scheduled to graduate next spring at the age of 20… he must have been very smart. He was a beautiful and brilliant young guy who had everything going for him. His dream was to attend graduate school at the London School of Economics.
At ~10 pm on June 15th, 2020 — almost exactly two years ago — Seth went out for a walk. On this walk he was shot in the back of the head, execution-style. His body was found half an hour later by a man walking his dog, sprawled on his back with one of his earbuds still in his ear, indicating he was listening to music. Here is a picture of the bus stop where Seth’s body was found.
Unfortunately for Seth, nobody cared about his murder, except for his mom, who was tweeting about it. It was not a national news story.
1/ I’m frustrated.. My son, Seth, an innocent college student was taking a walk down his street in Berkeley when he was killed execution style. No reason. His murder was June 15 and there has been little to no outcry from the university, the community or the media…
It appears we live in a culture that has so much gun violence that a 19 yo college student innocently walking down the street from his apt near Cal shot in the back of the head close range barely makes the news. Seth Smith was kind, BRILLIANT man #SethSmithdidntdeservetodieat19
Seth was to come home for the rest of the summer today 💔💔. Life can change in an instant😔. I just want him to walk in the door and give me a hug 💔💔. #SethDay#BerkeleyfindSethskiller
18 months ago my exceptional son decided to take a walk in his college town to clear his head.He never returned. An incensed neighbor shot him in the back of the head.They were strangers.I will never be whole again.💔 #SethSmithdidntdeservetodieat19#EndGunViolenceNow#Berkeley
Here is how Berkeley administrators reacted to Seth’s death, in probably the most evil fashion I could imagine. Let’s linger on this statement for a bit because it deserves a rant of its own.
Many of you may have had a close relationship with Seth and are feeling a sense of loss and disbelief.
Others, like many of us, are experiencing stress, grief and anxiety related to the coronavirus pandemic and the recent murders of George Floyd, Riah Milton, and other Black Americans.
Sincerely,
Carol Christ
Chancellor
Stephen C. Sutton
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
Sunny Lee
Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students”
First and foremost: they made Seth Smith an “also-ran” in his own obituary… they may as well have acknowledged that people should be grieving over climate change or the plight of indigenous women. This email says nothing about the search for the murderer, about the cooperation with authorities or any important information that may make students feel more secure. Instead they chose to blithely pander to partisan twitter talking points. What a disgrace. When confronted by a producer for Fox News, Berkeley admins sassily doubled down on their virtue signaling.
Im sorry that our desire to acknowledge and empathize with what folks are feeling rubs you the wrong way and didnt realize that there is some sort of rule stating that only one tragedy should be acknowledged in a given campus message.
— Vice Chancellor Mogulof
Next, let’s talk about the wording: who precisely are the “you” and the “us” in this statement? Imagine how tone-deaf you have to be to say “many of you” may have cared about Seth, but “many of us” only care about more important stuff, like a felonious drug-addicted porn star in Minneapolis who OD’d on fentanyl while resisting arrest.
Reminder: George threatened a pregnant woman by holding a gun to her belly. Seth made society better. George made society worse.
George Floyd is buried in a gold casket, while Seth Smith’s family barely reached their $30k GoFundMe goal to establish a scholarship in his name. Please donate.
Which brings me to this Obama tweet from this week.
As we grieve the children of Uvalde today, we should take time to recognize that two years have passed since the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer. His killing stays with us all to this day, especially those who loved him.
The Nazis had a word for this: Gleichschaltung. This was the process by which they established a system of total control over all aspects of German society, from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education.
Under Gleichschaltung, people were required to greet each other with “Heil Hitler!” instead of “Guten Tag!” Nowadays they are required to put pronouns and BLM in their email signature. If you hadn’t figured this out already — the point of putting pronouns in your email signature isn’t to denote your gender, it is to identify non-compliant enemies of the state.
In July 2020, acting on a tip, Berkeley homicide detectives went to question 60 year old Tony Walker about this murder. Walker made it clear he was annoyed by their questions, “A white kid gets killed and the damn whole world stops… Fuck that white motherfucker.”
Police had not mentioned anything to Walker about any “white kid,” so the fact that he unsolicited brought it up was a huge red flag. Not exactly a criminal mastermind.
Walker would turn out to be the guy who did it, of course. He was arrested a few weeks later, on August 20th, 2020. Walker killed Smith for no reason at all — simply because he was white and walking down the street listening to music — and then had the audacity to complain about “whitey” upon being caught.
I read about Walker’s life… sad story, he never had a chance. Do the details really matter? Another product of a broken family with no father figure. He was first convicted of burglary in 1979 and then he spent the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, and 10’s in and out of various jails for various burglaries, gun charges, and assaults. Walker described himself as a “washed-up nobody” who probably deserved to die in prison.
In court, nobody attended in the audience on Walker’s behalf.
If the roles were reversed and it was a white 60 year old white guy who shot a black 20 year old university student at the height of the BLM riots, the country would be left in ashes while the lectures on white guilt would be ramped up to 11. But because it was a black man killing a white kid, it was swept under the rug and the media minimized this story at every step of the way.
The DAs office stated that it’s unfortunate Seth’s murder got so little press 🤨. A Berkeley student murdered by a random stranger. Perhaps the uni had a hand? No one wants to lose customers over negative press 🤨 #SethSmithdidntdeservetodieat19
By now you may have figured out that Tony Walker wasn’t exactly Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed his family. So what was his motivation? Well, that’s the thing, he didn’t really have any motivation, he didn’t even rob Seth’s corpse. It was a totally senseless crime. It doesn’t make any sense… until you remember that George Floyd fever was in full effect at the time, tearing the country apart. Walker was low-IQ and suggestible, and it is plausible that was prodded to kill Seth by the vitriol of the racebaiting mainstream media.
Again, imagine if in the wake of the George Floyd riots a white guy shot a black guy and said “Fuck that black motherfucker.” That would be a hate crime, right? The media would be obsessing over the case for months and we would never be allowed to forget about it. So why isn’t this one classified as a hate crime? The victim was targeted and executed based upon no other reason than his race.
The answer is pretty simple, that it didn’t fit the media’s narrative, which is why in every local news article they shrug their shoulders and calls this a random / senseless / unexplainable tragedy that we will never get to the bottom of. Nobody in the media even attempted to find the real cause. But people can see the truth. If you read any of the comments, tweets, or reddit posts about Seth Smith you will see that the comment section has figured it out.
Seth’s mom hinted that there was more racial animus in this case than the media let on, saying, “Walker had likely suffered a lot in his life and must have harbored so much anger about what’s happening in the world… Nobody should feel anger and hatred toward another human because of what they look like.”
Her words make it seem like she is entertaining the possibility that this was a hate crime. Walker “harbored so much anger about what’s happening in the world.” Why exactly was an angry and resentful black man emboldened to commit violence against a random white student? What was happening in the world at the time? Was there anything that would make a black man angry at white kids? Were there any huge racial riots happening? Perhaps a sort of systematic anger that may be directed at whites? Provoked by the media? The media never explored this angle. Because the media is guilty.
An Unjust Plea Deal Based on Bullshit Allocution
Walker’s murder charges weren’t augmented with hate crime charges as they should have been, rather, they were downgraded from murder to manslaughter. Manslaughter? For shooting Seth in the back of the head out of racial hatred? Mitigating circumstances being… what, exactly?
The probation officer found no mitigating circumstances that would justify a lighter sentence. Walker’s probation officer wrote, “The defendant has demonstrated that he is a danger to the community and needs to be separated for the community’s protection … the defendant has established an entrenched pattern of criminal conduct that probation, prison and parole have been unable to eradicate.”
The main reason for this manslaughter plea, then, had nothing to do with mitigating circumstances. The entire reason for is that Walker initially pled no-guilty to murder, and all the evidence against Walker was circumstantial. There is no DNA linking Walker to the case, just testimony. So the charges were downgraded to ensure a conviction.
Seth’s mom was not thrilled with this. “They basically said that they’re accepting the plea deal and that it was their choice and not ours … If the allocution happens, that will be the only narrative of any kind that I will get as to what ended my son’s life… or me to get closure, I definitely need, kind of, a narrative as to what happened. It’s just a huge mystery in my life right now and very difficult ,I was anticipating time off and to hear the evidence, hear the witnesses and find out more of the story of what happened. And with a plea deal we don’t get that.”
As part of this plea deal, Walker promised to explain his motivation for the killing.
Is this really how courts work? You can get away with murder as long as you pretend to tell people why you did it? Really? Helping the parents find closure (if that can ever be done) would require some deep reflection from the perpetrator. Instead Seth’s parents had to listen to nonsensical babbling from this violent retard who’s too retarded to even piece together his own actions in a coherent manner.
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Spurwing Plover
1 year ago
Liberals never want to blame the person who commits all the crimes their always looking for scapegoats like The Gun Lobby Gun owners and Gun Stores they never go after the Maniacs thats because they want t o be on the Fake News Shows like Today,GMA,CBS Sunday Morning 60 Minutes Etc
Deplorable Me
1 year ago
“We don’t have time to mourn a real tragedy because we are pretending to care about so many contrived ones. So, go about your business as usual.
Sincerely, Carol Christ Chancellor Stephen C. Sutton Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Sunny Lee Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students”
Just look at that smug little white shit, enjoying his “white privilege” by working his ass off, prioritizing his future and exploiting his intelligence. How utterly sickening. He deserved what he got from such an exquisite example of a product of the Democrat system.
Worshiping a career criminal, violent thug fentanyl peddler is more the Democrat’s speed. “If I had a son, he would be a drug peddler like George Floyd” says Obama.
Walker is a turd that is a product of the Democrat party driven by the hyperbolic coverage the racist, leftist media gives every police shooting involving a black suspect. This is exactly the outcome the left wants, just as they got in Uvalde and Buffalo.
If the NRA had more influence than the left in Berkley, Walker would have been in jail for his gun crimes. But, he only killed a white guy, so no harm done.
Liberals never want to blame the person who commits all the crimes their always looking for scapegoats like The Gun Lobby Gun owners and Gun Stores they never go after the Maniacs thats because they want t o be on the Fake News Shows like Today,GMA,CBS Sunday Morning 60 Minutes Etc
“We don’t have time to mourn a real tragedy because we are pretending to care about so many contrived ones. So, go about your business as usual.
Sincerely,
Carol Christ
Chancellor
Stephen C. Sutton
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs
Sunny Lee
Assistant Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students”
Just look at that smug little white shit, enjoying his “white privilege” by working his ass off, prioritizing his future and exploiting his intelligence. How utterly sickening. He deserved what he got from such an exquisite example of a product of the Democrat system.
Worshiping a career criminal, violent thug fentanyl peddler is more the Democrat’s speed. “If I had a son, he would be a drug peddler like George Floyd” says Obama.
Walker is a turd that is a product of the Democrat party driven by the hyperbolic coverage the racist, leftist media gives every police shooting involving a black suspect. This is exactly the outcome the left wants, just as they got in Uvalde and Buffalo.
If the NRA had more influence than the left in Berkley, Walker would have been in jail for his gun crimes. But, he only killed a white guy, so no harm done.
Prediction: he’ll be out long before he is 80.