Spring Break Takeover, Daytona Beach 2026
On a recent Harmony podcast, sportswriter turned social commentator Jason Whitlock showed a video clip shot from a hotel window. At first glance, it looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. Hundreds, if not thousands, of indecipherable creatures scattering in all directions for some unknown reason. With close-ups edited in, the viewer sees that these creatures are young black people running from the sound of perceived gunshots. Welcome to Spring Break in Daytona Beach.
“I know many of you are going to be upset with me for talking about it,” said Whitlock, who is himself black, “but I see these videos, I see these events, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because nothing is being done about it, nothing is being discussed about it.”
Not exactly nothing. Something worse than nothing. In the several local TV news reports I reviewed, not a single commentator, including the police, mentions the one word that best classifies the people involved, namely “black.” Nor do any of the national media that covered the story, however, sketchily, acknowledge that the outbreak of black mass violence in Daytona Beach was expected, even encouraged.
As Whitlock points out, Daytona Beach is a symptom of a larger “pandemic.” No entertainment venue in America is safe from its spread—amusement parks, festivals, parades, shopping malls, downtowns, concerts, sporting events, even ships at sea. See, for instance, the New York Post’s, “Disturbing video captures moment wild Carnival Cruise ship brawl breaks out ‘over chicken tenders’.” True to form, the Post reports that the “brawl” erupted at 2 a.m. but refrains from identifying it as part of a larger problem for anyone but Carnival.
Whitlock knows better. He also showed footage from an outbreak of intramural black violence at the Washington Navy Yards and at the Houston Rodeo. “Rodeo?” said Whitlock, perplexed that such an historically “white” venue had been invaded.
The Houston video captured a mutation within the pandemic, the emergence of girl-on-girl group violence. Videos like the Houston one circulate routinely on X and other social media sites. As in Houston, they feature groups of usually heavyset young black women flailing away at each other and pulling on their opponent’s most vulnerable spot, their hair.
The young men watch and cackle. They almost never intervene. The fellow who uploads his video provides an excited narration replete with exclamations like “oooh, baby,” “damn, girl,” and “there goes that weave.” In the Houston video, one fellow ends up holding a wig the way our indigenous ancestors might have held up a scalp.
One of the more chaotic Spring Break convulsions took place Friday night on historic Beale Street in Memphis. “The kids are on spring break and they’re running free, but it’s at the cost of adults’ fun right now,” said a bystander who witnessed the chaos. Two people were injured in two separate shootings, one a 14-year-old. As in Daytona Beach, the local media dared not use the word “black.”
At an earlier outbreak at a Memphis mall—”Community responds after MPD disperses up to 500 kids in Hickory Hill”—a local black event planner did a decent job explaining what is distinct about group black violence today.
"Everybody's ready to pop off, everybody’s ready to fight, everybody's ready to argue," said Carol Moody. "You can't say anything to anybody. I don't know if it's the political climate we're in or the social media, but it's encouraging kids to fight and for it to be videotaped and put on social media. Everybody wants to go viral.”
As I reported recently, the lethal chaos at the 2025 Super Bowl rally erupted after two black young men started "arguing about why they were staring at each other." I was relieved last week when unusually cold temperatures kept young black thugs from infecting Kansas City’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade as they usually do, a phenomenon the media and local officials refuse to acknowledge.
The social media have much to do with the spread of this pandemic. No young black kid wants to back down knowing their humiliation will be seen by thousands. So they fight on. But as Whitlock stresses, the pandemic is not a “youth” thing. It’s a black thing. “Unfathered black kids are running wild all over America,” he accurately observes. “Our kids are out of control.”
Sixty years ago, LBJ’s assistant secretary of labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, saw this phenomenon emerging. The future US Senator from New York issued a report in 1965 that predicted almost everything about the effects of family breakdown short of the video cameras. For many years post-report, the violence was easy to ignore given that it took place out of sight. Now, with it in full view, the media and the political class gloss over what they can’t ignore.
This willful blindness takes effort. The chaos has become performative and predictable. Young blacks are staging “takeover” pageants and using social media to drum up crowds keen on audience participation. As Whitlock points out, white vacationers have learned to stay away, and cities up and down the Florida coast, Miami most notably, are left cleaning up the damage from their unwanted visitors.
It’s not just Florida. These black “takeovers” are destroying entertainment venues from Beale Street to Bourbon Street to old Broadway, and God help the entrepreneur who dares discriminate. Whitlock’s candor is encouraging. Ideally, it signals a trend. If nothing else, it serves to highlight the self-destructive fecklessness of those with who prefer to keep their microphones on mute.
It’s only going to get worse. I think obama had a huge hand in racially dividing this country. Great article. Wish everyone could read it
No one wants to hear the truth. Yet, it is exactly what you describe.
I remember a math teacher in HS who caught a kid cheating, and simply asked “ What would your father say…?”
The answer is that there are no fathers. Simple.