This week, activists gathered for yet another performative press conference after jokes about George Floyd during Kevin Hart's roast triggered outrage from the same professional grievance industry Americans have been watching for years. Curiously absent were the press conferences condemning jokes about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That contrast told me everything.
Because I've seen this machinery before.
In the summer of 1999, I sat inside a WTAE news truck in Pittsburgh as a 20-year-old intern flipping through thick stacks of press releases with my photographer before we started the day. Activists. Nonprofits. Politicians. “Community leaders.” Professional outrage merchants.
Every morning, it was the same ritual.
Yes. No. Maybe. Not a chance. Boring. Could make good TV.
That's how news decisions get made.
Contrary to what Americans are told, the media does not simply “cover” the national conversation. In many ways, it manufactures it. If cameras don't show up, the press conference doesn't matter.
If reporters ignore the staged outrage, the outrage dies in the parking lot. It never trends. Never becomes a hashtag. Never turns into a national morality play.
The public sees a movement. The media often sees programming.
Twenty-one years later, during the 2020 “summer of love,” I watched that same machinery help set my city on fire. At the time, I was working at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh. While politicians, movement operatives, and media personalities performed for cameras outside, the people inside the system were left to deal with the consequences in real time.
The city was boiling.
Demonstrations became chaos. Chaos became destruction. Police officers were screamed at, assaulted, harassed, and overwhelmed while television cameras captured the most emotionally charged images possible and fed them into America's bloodstream twenty-four hours a day.
The narrative had already been decided: America was under attack from racist policing. Black America was under siege. The country needed a reckoning.
But what I remember most from that summer wasn't the chanting.
It was the silence.
On August 24, 2020, 17-month-old Zykier Young was sleeping in his crib at the Three Rivers Manor apartments in Pittsburgh's Spring Hill neighborhood when gunfire erupted outside. Black gang members opened fire on each other in broad daylight. A bullet tore through the walls of the apartment and struck the toddler in the head while he slept.
He died.
There were no national media trucks outside the apartment complex. No celebrity outrage. No endless cable coverage.
No corporate statements. No professional athletes wearing his name across their backs. No riots.
No marches shutting down highways. No carefully choreographed press conferences with activists pretending to care about “Black lives.”
The family grieved quietly while America's outrage industry looked the other way.
That was the moment I stopped pretending this movement was primarily about protecting Black lives. Because when a sleeping baby murdered by street violence cannot generate even a fraction of the national outrage produced by politically useful cases, people have every right to ask what this movement actually is.
And the answer is uncomfortable.
Victimhood became an industry.
An entire ecosystem now profits from outrage: movement operatives, media outlets, consultants, politicians, nonprofits, corporations desperate for virtue points, and social media personalities who built careers turning public anger into currency.
The formula is simple: find the right victim, push the right narrative, activate the cameras, trigger emotional hysteria, and anyone questioning the storyline becomes the enemy.
I know how the machine works because I watched it from multiple angles. I watched it as a journalism intern learning how editorial decisions shape public perception before most Americans have even had their morning coffee.
I watched it inside the criminal justice system as the same repeat offenders cycled endlessly through revolving-door policies while reform activists demanded even less accountability. And I watched innocent victims disappear because their deaths were inconvenient to the narrative.
That same summer, local BLM organizer Christian “Chrissy” Carter accumulated felony riot charges, harassment charges, and terroristic threat charges while becoming a media fixture during protests. Cameras showed up constantly. Coverage flowed endlessly.
A murdered toddler barely generated a ripple.
The disparity was impossible to ignore.
Americans are constantly told the greatest threat facing Black communities is racist policing. But most Black homicide victims are killed by other Black offenders — not police officers. Those numbers are not controversial. They are not hidden.
They are not difficult to find.
What's difficult to find is sustained national outrage when the victims do not advance the preferred political script. That's because selective outrage is more profitable than honest conversations.
And while outrage groups screamed about “justice,” progressive prosecutors and cashless bail crusaders were busy turning criminal justice systems into experiments in ideological theater. Inside the jail, we watched the same offenders return again and again while politicians congratulated themselves for being “compassionate.”
Communities paid the price for elite moral vanity.
Public safety became secondary to political branding. The people suffering most were often the very residents the movement claimed to represent.
Then came the ritual canonizations.
George Floyd became something far larger than a man. He became a symbol powerful enough to justify riots, destruction, corporate panic, censorship, public shaming campaigns, and a complete cultural obedience test across the country.
Question any part of the narrative and you risked social or professional destruction.
Meanwhile, countless innocent victims of everyday violence remained invisible because their suffering generated no political leverage. No profitable outrage. No cameras.
No movement.
That is the ugliest truth of all: America created a hierarchy of victimhood.
Some deaths become national tragedies. Others become statistics.
Some families receive media entourages and activist armies. Others release balloons quietly into the sky while the country moves on by morning.
I saw it.
Not from Twitter. Not from a think tank. Not from a partisan talking-point memo.
I saw it from inside the newsroom machinery and inside the justice system itself.
And once you see how the outrage economy operates — how narratives are selected, amplified, monetized, and weaponized — it becomes impossible to unsee.
Real lives matter.
Not just the politically useful ones.
Kelly Rae Robertson is a Pittsburgh-based counselor, commentator, and former criminal court investigator who spent more than 14 years inside the Allegheny County justice system. Drawing from firsthand experience in both criminal justice and media, she writes about crime, selective outrage, institutional corruption, media manipulation, and the human cost of ideological policymaking. Her work has appeared in The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, and Law Enforcement Today.
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