By this time in the coverage of Waukesha, the media were doing the "we may never know the motive" bit and it was left up to independent journalists to discover and publish Brooks' social media posts. That week, the Sunday shows focused on Covid and how it was expected to affect Black Friday sales.

Of course we're seeing a very different sort of thing today. Today, as of two hours ago, they've leaped forward to using yesterday's shooting in Buffallo as a lever to portray the grief and outrage many felt in the wake of the Waukesha Christmas Parade attack as a "white supremacist conspiracy theory" which incited the shooter.

"A Black driver killed white people at a holiday parade last year—and the right-wing freakout about it may have factored into the rampage in Buffalo."

https://archive.ph/f7oLt

The live-streaming service Twitch confirmed that the white gunman who shot 13 people at Tops Friendly Markets—11 of them Black—posted footage of the violence. A screenshot from that video showed white writing along the black barrel guard.

It appears that one line was the misspelled name of Virginia Sorenson, a member of the “Dancing Grannies” parade troupe who was killed in the city of Waukesha, Wisconsin’s annual Christmas parade. Though less clear, the line below may be the name of another parade victim.

... Sorenson, 79, was killed with five others when 39-year-old Darrell Brooks allegedly barreled through the parade in an SUV. Brooks is Black and had a history of violence, and evidence released by prosecutors after the attack suggested he sought to inflict maximum carnage.

As The Daily Beast previously reported, far-right actors homed in on posts attributed to Brooks in which he shared antisemitic content, expressed rage toward white people and police, and support for Black Lives Matter. (A Facebook account linked to him had also expressed a lack of surprise at the not-guilty verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse, the white, self-styled vigilante teen charged with murder at a racial-justice protest in Kenosha.) They used the posts to suggest the attack on mostly white parade-goers was the targeted work of a Black extremist.

Police in Waukesha quickly dismissed the possibility that it was a planned terror attack, and there has been no evidence that the suspect in that disaster—who was apparently fleeing a domestic disturbance—intentionally targeted any ethnic group that night.