Who killed Tyre Nichols?

The 29-year-old father, lensman, and skateboarder drove home after capturing the sunset in a Memphis park on Jan. 7.

“Photography helps me look at the world in a more creative way,” Nichols stated on his website. “I hope to one day let people see what i see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work.”

Five local police officers — all black — pulled Nichols over that evening for an alleged traffic violation. This occurred just 100 yards from the house that he shared with his mother and stepfather. Apparently frightened by the policemen’s aggression, Nichols ran away. The cops caught him and then tased, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, and savagely beat him.

Body cam videos and images from a nearby surveillance camera eyed officers Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith sequentially punching Nichols in the face and stomach and otherwise physically abusing him. One lawyer observed that these cops turned Nichols into “a human piñata.”

Paramedics found Nichols battered and then drove him to a local hospital, with little urgency. Three days later, he succumbed to his police-inflicted wounds.

The Memphis Five subsequently were fired for this fatal atrocity and charged with second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression, per the Associated Press.

These black cops worked for Police Chief Cerelyn J. Davis, a black woman. Chief Davis serves Mayor Jim Strickland, a white Democrat. And they both are overseen by a black Democrat, Memphis’ City Council Chairman Martavius Jones. These officials derive their power from the people of Memphis, a 64.6 percent black city.

Despite this profusion of black faces, it turns out that Nichols’ assailant was none of the above.

Who killed Tyre Nichols?

Whitey did it.

Leading lights on the left identify white racism as the root cause of Nichols’ death. Despite a depressing, maddening, and disgusting crime scene that is blacker than a Soul Train rerun, Nichols was killed by something whiter than a Nuremberg rally.

At least this is what the Left wants Americans to believe:

• Missouri Rep. Cori Bush said that “merely diversifying police forces will never address the violent, racist architecture that underpins our entire criminal legal system. The mere presence of Black officers does not stop policing from being a tool of white supremacy.”

• “Doesn’t matter what color these police officers are,” freshman Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said via Twitter. “The murderer of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of a system built on white supremacy.” He added: “To deny the anti-Blackness and white supremacy undergirding our justice system is to blind yourself from reality.”

• “I need so many people to understand this regarding Tyre Nichols,” Atlantic magazine contributor Jemele Hill wrote via Twitter. “The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence.”

• National Coalition of Law Enforcement Officers for Justice Reform and Accountability co-founder Redditt Hudson told MSNBC: “This is what it looks like when black officers internalize and align themselves with police culture, which itself is rooted in white supremacy.”

• “Black/brown faces can hold positions of power and uphold white supremacy,” according to MSNBC alumna Tiffany Cross.

Occam’s Razor is the philosophical principle that the simpler of two competing explanations tends to be correct. In this case, the Memphis Five’s critics justifiably could attack them as evil, cruel, sadistic practitioners of police brutality who overpowered and killed their victim — just because. Tennessee has the death penalty, and these killers should get it — good and hard. (Second-degree murder, however, is not eligible for the death penalty.)

Rather than accept this thoroughly plausible motive for Nichols’ killing, these left-wing agitators peddle a baroque conspiracy theory wherein the anti-black hate of a slavery-stained police system penetrated the brains of these policemen. Possessed by Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Confederacy, these cops uncorked this bottled-up white nationalism and sprayed it all over a peaceful, unarmed fellow black man.

This second theory requires a kind of black magic (no pun intended) that spans over four centuries — from 1619 to 2023. Unburdened by knowledge of personal responsibility, these leftists fail to understand that sometimes rotten folks do rancid things.

Paradoxically, the Left derides white people, but they cannot quit them, either. Woke Anglocentrism constantly keeps whites atop their culturally Marxist minds. Leftists assume all-encompassing, universal white control of black people. White supremacy — Bush, Frost, et al. contend — is so mighty that it makes blacks do things, even hideous things, that they otherwise would not attempt.

Thus, these buffoons foolishly have handed the Memphis Five a free legal strategy for their eventual trial.

When former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White faced first-degree murder charges for fatally shooting his colleague Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in November 1978, White’s attorneys invoked the notorious Twinkie Defense. Milk and Moscone’s assassin, they claimed, was so depressed that he devoured Twinkies, soda, and other junk food. White’s psychosis triggered a “diminished capacity” to stop himself from gunning down these two local officials.

The jury bought this rubbish and convicted White of a lesser crime: voluntary manslaughter.

Riots erupted.

The Memphis Five likewise might prevail in court.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” their lawyer might plead, “the defendants did not beat Tyre Nichols to death. The White Man did. He slammed their fists into Nichols’ face. Whitey swung their batons into Nichols’ back. The ghost of Robert E. Lee forced their boots into Nichols’ skull. And the spirit of KKK Exalted Cyclops and former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) propelled them through this hate crime on behalf of the millions of whites — dead and alive — who could not or cannot stand black people. My clients did not do this. So, you must set them free.”

These same left-wing voices also contradict critical race theory, which holds that black people, by definition, cannot be racist, since whites hold all the power in America. CRT considers blacks as helpless in this white-dominated country as baby chicks amid mountain lions.

So, how can these same pro-CRT leftists now assert that the accused attacked a black man, something about which one MSNBC commentator said: “I don’t believe those five cops would have done that to a young white on a traffic stop.” If black people are powerless in an Anglo-omnipotent society, how could they muster the calories to commit this carnage?

These leftists also raise this question: If black people do bad things due to white supremacy, what happens when they do good things? Is admirable black behavior also white supremacy in action?

When Denzel Washington wins his next Academy Award, should he thank Thomas Edison, Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn, Alfred Hitchcock, Busby Berkeley, Arthur Freed, and all the other white people who made motion pictures happen? Where would Denzel be without them?

“What did I do to deserve this?” Denzel might ask. Then, he could hand back his shiny new Oscar and slouch off the stage.

If white supremacy makes blacks do dreadful things, it surely must direct them when they do beautiful things. As the CRT crowd insists, white people hold all the cards in America.

The Whitey-Killed-Tyre-Nichols theory that the Left shrieks is especially odious. They believe that blacks lack moral agency. Blacks have no self-control. Blacks govern neither themselves nor their actions. No matter what, Whitey is in the driver’s seat.

The Memphis Five are victims, the Left tells us, nearly as much as Trey Nichols. They are mere puppets, and white people yank their strings

More broadly, the critical race theorists consider this nation a giant Sesame Street in which Jim Crow is alive and well, having replaced the late Jim Henson. In the Critical States of America, where responsibility is collective rather than personal, blacks are no more in command of their actions than are Big Bird and Kermit the Frog.

The Left considers black people value-free objects that whites manipulate at will.

David Duke would struggle to be more condescending, bigoted, and anti-black than that.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor. Michael Malarkey contributed research to this opinion piece.