Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama

  If I were claiming America has a long way to come on race relations, I think I’d showcase the hate crimes that weren’t complete fabrications. Someone should tell liberals that their argument about continuing racial problems would be more effective if they cited true cases of racism.

  RACISM AS TRUMP CARD: JESSE JACKSON, MADONNA CONSTANTINE AND HENRY LOUIS GATES

  The fact that an astonishingly high percentage of the hyped bias crimes kept turning out to be fakes—even with every journalist hunting for a real one in order to win a Pulitzer Prize—suggested that there wasn’t a lot of racism still needing to be stamped out in America. But the media wouldn’t rest.

  Hoax charges of racism aren’t rare because they are the trump card. These get-out-of-jail-free cards are too great a temptation to resist, especially in moments of crisis.

  When the National Enquirer broke the story of Jesse Jackson’s mistress and love child, he said that there must be “some motive” in revealing a “two-year-old story” and noted that the week Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize, he had been threatened with the exposure of his sexual liaisons.42 (It was a “two-year-old story” only in the sense that his love child was nearly two years old—but this was the first the public had heard about it.)

  On CNN’s Crossfire, Al Sharpton said that “the timing of this, whether it was deliberate or not, to me is very, very suspect.”43 Of course, if it was not “deliberate,” then there was nothing suspicious. Whether intentional or not, it’s still first-degree murder!

  On Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes, civil rights lawyer Keith Watters was more explicit, blaming the scandal on “a lot of racists are attacking him, are using this to bring him down, because they don’t like what he believes…” 44

  Not all black commentators jumped on the racism bandwagon. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary A. Mitchell expressed disappointment that some people were “more concerned about who leaked the story than they are that another respected leader and minister has set a poor example.” Mitchell also said that, for years, reporters had ignored rumors about Jackson’s private life—even when he ran for president—for fear of being called “racist.”45

  In 2007, Madonna Constantine, a black professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, claimed to be a victim of racism when she came under investigation for plagiarism. The racism charge was given added punch when, not long into the investigation, she claimed to have found a noose hanging on her office door!

  A huge hoo-hah ensued, with student protests against racism until…the grand jury began looking at Constantine herself as the perpetrator of the hate crime. The noose investigation quietly disappeared, apparently unsolved, but the university fired Constantine for plagiarism the following year. 46 The only thing that saved this poor woman from being a complete buffoon was that Al Sharpton wasn’t defending her.

  Even respected Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates went to racial victimization in a moment of stress. Gates had just gotten off a fifteen-hour flight from China, he was tired and cranky and didn’t have his house keys. After he and his driver had broken in, the police showed up, demanding to see Gates’s ID as he stood in his own house. Gates blew up and accused them of racism.

  It takes remarkable character not to do that. With clueless liberals salivating for instances of racism, blacks must think: Really? I can do that? Oh look! A fish just jumped into my boat and bit my hook!

  Liberals send out engraved invitations to black people, begging them to claim racism, and then turn around and stalwartly refuse to believe that a false accusation of racism has ever been made. They’ll still wheel out the fakes from time to time, confident that most people have forgotten the details.

  In a society that has virtually no moral standards anymore, claims of racism are about the only thing that still get the moral-indignation juices flowing. But if a charge of racism is going to mean anything, the incessant false charges have got to stop. They help no one but serial fantasists. Hoax racism charges have wasted enormous amounts of police, prosecutorial and university resources, torn up communities and generated racial animosity where none had previously existed.

  RETALIATORY RACE CRIMES THAT AREN’T HOAXES

  It’s not just that liberal media elites were making jackasses of themselves and wasting the police’s time. Their constant burnishing of the facts in order to create the impression that America is a nation exploding in racism kept getting people killed.

  In 1989, a group of black teenagers in Wisconsin reacted to the movie Mississippi Burning by attacking a white person. After ginning themselves up over the movie, one of the black kids said to the others, “Do you all feel hyped up enough to move on some white people?” They did, randomly choosing a fourteen-year-old white boy to beat to a pulp, leaving him in a coma with permanent brain damage.

  The non-American director of Mississippi Burning justified his “fictionalizing” in the movie by saying he wanted people to react “viscerally, emotionally.”47 It worked. Now a young boy is brain damaged for the sin of being white.

  The only reason we even know about that incident is that the defendants were charged with a hate crime and their case appealed to the Supreme Court on the First Amendment grounds. The first mention of this abhorrent—and genuine—hate crime in the Nexis archive is in a Washington Post article about the Supreme Court appeal.48

  The New York media’s hysteria over the “white today” shoe polish attacks was not dropped soon enough to stop a series of black-on-white backlash crimes—crimes committed in response to the fake bias incidents. And the retaliatory crimes weren’t hoaxes.

  Two black men in Brooklyn punched a white vagrant so hard he lost his teeth, telling him, “How about we paint you white, whitey?” (demonstrating their abject failure to grasp the point of the made-up hate crime). In the Bronx, a group of blacks beat and robbed white and Hispanic students, announcing they were looking for whites to assault. On a subway in Manhattan, three black men hit a white male passenger, telling him, “This is for what happened in the Bronx.”49

  About a week after the alleged paint attack, a fifteen-year-old white girl in Brooklyn was snatched from a bus stop at around 6:45 a.m. by two black men, thrown into their stolen Toyota Camry, raped, sodomized and robbed in what some believed was a retaliatory bias crime. Her attackers told her they raped her because she was “white and perfect.”50 The girl was treated for rape at a hospital and, by the end of the week, the police had found the stolen car she was raped in, partially charred from an attempt to burn it.51 Mayor Dinkins offered a $10,000 reward for information about the attack—half the reward for the white-paint assault.

  A few days later, a black man claimed he was beaten by a group of whites, who told him, “You aren’t going to rape any more white women.” Mayor Dinkins rushed to lambaste the attack, calling it an “absolutely appalling act of bias violence.”52 In short order, the man admitted he had made the whole thing up—as well as two earlier bias crimes he had reported.53 So here we had a fake racist crime by whites inspiring a real crime by blacks, which led to another hoax hate crime by a black person.

  There were nearly three times as many articles on the mythical white-paint attack as there were on the actual rape and sodomy of the fifteen-year-old girl for being “white.” Nexis registers fourteen stories mentioning the rape, such as this one from the New York Times: “Police Find Bias Crimes Are Often Wrapped in Ambiguity.”54 Meanwhile, there were thirty-six major, lengthy in-depth features on the paint attack that never happened.

  It took the rape of a girl for being “white and perfect” for reporters to realize that some interracial crimes were not bias crimes at all. Sometimes a crime was just a crime—for example, all black-on-white crimes. Newly aware that interracial crimes could happen for nonracial reasons, journalists couldn’t stop making that point in the case of the fifteen-year-old white girl raped by two black men.

  The man on the street quoted by New York Newsday said: “I don’t think it was a bias crime…It just
happened.…I think if it had been a black girl over there, they probably would have done the same thing.”55 Eerily, the man on the street always seems to say exactly what reporters are thinking!

  A Newsday columnist weighed in, saying: “The rape of the fifteen-year-old was terrible. The fact that young girls are raped in this city every day doesn’t make it any less terrible. But magnifying it into an act of racial retribution widens the gulf between blacks and whites.”56 Not as much as interracial rape widens the gulf, I’d guess.

  So journalists were aware that reports of bias crimes could incite racial tension—at least when they were reporting crimes committed by blacks against whites. Why hadn’t they noticed that with the white paint attack or Howard Beach? Why not, when they reflexively believed any hate crime alleged by a black person?

  As soon as the next white cop shot a black criminal, the media would be right back to widening the gulf between blacks and whites.

  On December 30, 1992, a group of eight blacks, two of them women, abducted a white girl, twenty-five-year-old Melissa McLauchlin, gang-raped, bound and tortured her before shooting her six times and throwing her body to the side of the road. This odious crime was committed in retaliation for “400 years of oppression.”57 These weren’t common criminals grasping at straws; they were inspired by the idea that whites systematically oppress blacks. The ringleader, Joseph Gardner, was a naval petty officer whose mother worked in a sheriff’s office. He had told the others that his New Year’s resolution was to kill a white woman.58

  In 1993, Colin Ferguson, a Jamaican immigrant, shot white passengers on the Long Island Rail Road, killing six, in retaliation for racism, as he explained in a note in his pocket titled, “Reasons for This.” He said he had targeted Nassau County because it was predominantly white and had spared New York City because of its black mayor, David Dinkins. His lawyers, William M. Kunstler and Ronald Kuby, argued that Ferguson was not guilty by reason of “black rage” insanity.59

  The stories the media pounded into us were the ones that comported with their fantasy of a world riven by white racism against blacks. Reporting that a hate crime was a hoax was not a high priority for them. The media would spend months hawking some three-alarm racism story, and then when it turned out to be a fraud, they’d whisper the ending and tiptoe out of the room, as if they were reading a bedtime story to a child.

  The problem with liberals’ constantly imputing racist hatred to white people was that it kept creating real racist hatred in black people—ending with real dead white people.

  CHAPTER 5

  THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC

  The Reverend Jeremiah Wright wasn’t the first nutty black clergyman admired by Democrats. If it seems surprising that Democrats would indulge Wright’s deranged rants, consider how shocking it is that they don’t even mind standard Christianity when practiced by black people.

  Liberals’ general view of Christians is that they are simpleminded nazis. In the 1980s, the New York Times famously quoted Professor Samuel S. Hill of the University of Florida for the proposition that evangelical Christians were “more easily led” than other voters.1 Legions of liberals took him at his word and were led to disdain Christians.

  In a feel-good piece on “Christian fascists” in the May 2005 Harper’s, Chris Hedges reminisced about his Harvard Divinity School professor Dr. James Luther Adams, who had predicted in the 1980s that fascism would not come to America with swastikas but “carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance”—which, outside of Harvard, would make it hard to pick the fascists out of a crowd. Fire at will, men, these people love Jesus AND America!

  In particular, Adams warned “to watch closely the Christian right’s persecution of homosexuals and lesbians.” This reminded him of, yes, Hitler.2 Adams acolyte Chris Hedges took notice and realized: evangelical Christians were planning a holocaust against gays!

  The evangelical ministers’ position on homosexuality is what led Hedges to conclude they were fascists. Opinions can differ on homosexuality—unless you happen to be a clergyman with the Christian, Jewish or Muslim faith, because all three major world religions take a dim view of sodomy. Next, liberals will be attacking Christian ministers who criticize sin.

  But while imagining that white evangelical Christians were on the verge of engineering a second Holocaust, liberals find black evangelical Christians adorable—cuter than a bug’s ear! Even when blacks oppose gay marriage, they get a pass.

  Obama’s presidential run brought out record numbers of African American voters in 2008. Unluckily for liberals, 2008 was also the year California had a proposition on the ballot that would ban gay marriage. Without the immense black turnout, California’s Proposition 8 might have failed—it definitely would not have passed so decisively. Whites and Asians were split on the initiative, with bare majorities opposing it, 51 percent to 49 percent. Hispanics supported the ban, 53 percent to 47 percent. But black voters overwhelmingly voted for Prop 8 by a whopping 70 percent.

  Liberals responded to the undeniable fact that blacks killed gay marriage by…attacking Mormons. After the vote, thousands of protesters gathered outside Mormon churches in Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago to slam opponents of gay marriage as haters and “morons.” There were threats to challenge the Mormon Church’s tax-exempt status.

  Hollywood liberals and other predominantly gay groups made a sneering video accusing religious voters of stupidity for not knowing that the Bible condemned “shrimp cocktails” as much as sodomy—the two most popular items on the menu at any Hollywood party! Evidently, the New Testament hasn’t made it to California yet. Liberals were so upset about the gay marriage vote, they were on the verge of claiming Proposition 8 was born in Kenya.

  But even in the middle of this epic hissy fit over Prop 8, liberals managed to contextualize the black vote. The fact that seven out of ten blacks voted to ban gay marriage was merely “disappointing” and “painfully ironic.”3 No one challenged the black churches’ tax-exempt status.

  Dan Savage, the Maxine Waters of the gays, illustrated the double standard. To the Mormons, he said, “f—k you, Brigham Young.” To the blacks, he rambled on incomprehensibly:

  The relative handful of racist white gays and lesbians—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are not a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color. (Read that carefully: I did not say that black homophobia is a bigger problem than white racism; I said that the huge numbers of African-American homophobes are a bigger problem for gays and lesbians—including gays and lesbians of color—than the comparatively small number of racist gays and lesbians. Which does not excuse racism among gays and lesbians, of course.)

  Harvey Fierstein stopped reading at that point. Just reading that passage made me feel dizzier than a passed-over drag queen during last call at a rage in West Hollywood. Terrified of insulting black people—even black people against gay marriage—Savage took refuge in complete opacity.

  In a 1994 college speech, Reverend Al Sharpton referred to “them Greeks homos.” At first he claimed that “homo” was “not a homophobic term,” but then simply denied having said it, despite the existence of a videotape.4 Nutty black clergymen got a pass on condemning sodomy and everything else.

  As president, Bill Clinton had played both the gays and the blacks on gay marriage. First, he denounced Republicans for the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. His press spokesman, Michael McCurry, called it “gay-baiting pure and simple.”5 Next, Clinton signed DOMA into law and bragged about signing it in campaign commercials on black radio stations during his 1996 reelection campaign.

  If liberals were willing to forgive blacks for being Christians, they were thrilled with black religions that didn’t take the God part all that seriously, but were actively hostile to America. While hysterical about white Baptists, liberals are complacent about psychotic cults involving persons of color. The Democ
rats have repeatedly endorsed black racist sects on the fringes of society. (Which is how we got the Reverend Al Sharpton.) Maybe if liberals had spent a little less time combing through Pat Robertson’s sermons for secret Nazi references, and instead had taken a peek at certain demagogic black religious leaders, several employees of a Harlem clothing store, two policemen, a congressman and nine hundred people, about six-hundred of them black, would still be alive today. But their position was: Forget Jim Jones, let’s get back to what Jerry Falwell said about our beloved Teletubbies!

  Time and again, the Democrats’ defense of some black pseudoreligious group would result in a violent explosion. Then, the entire incident would either be forgotten or reclassified under “Falwell” so that no one would notice the perpetual chaos being foisted on the country by mad black leaders who were sanctioned by the liberal establishment.

  THE MOSQUE AND CHARLIE RANGEL

  In 1972, members of the Nation of Islam mosque led by Louis Farrakhan ambushed four New York policemen, badly wounding three officers and murdering one.

  The police had received an anonymous—and it later turned out, bogus—phone call, reporting an officer in distress on the second floor of West 116th Street. Unbeknownst to the responding officers, this happened to be Farrakhan’s mosque. The first four cops on the scene either didn’t realize (or didn’t care) that the front doors of the mosque were uncharacteristically thrown open and the usual phalanx of armed “Fruit of Islam” Muslim guards were absent. The officers ran into the building and up the stairs in search of the injured policeman.

  Once all four were in the stairwell, the doors behind them were slammed shut and bolted. At that moment, more than a dozen black Muslims, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” charged down the stairs. The Muslims kicked and dragged their trapped quarry to the bottom of the stairs and then out into the vestibule where they beat, kicked and stomped the policemen to a gruesome pulp. With all four officers on the ground and the vestibule awash in blood, the Muslims managed to wrench service revolvers from two of the battered officers. One of them shot Officer Phil Cardillo in the chest at point-blank range.