Foreshadowing the OJ trial, the media considered it highly probative that earlier in the night, Officer Powell had referred in a private communication to a domestic violence call as something “out of Gorillas in the Mist.” But forepersons on both juries said that race did not figure into their deliberations at all. In fact, “Bob” reported that it was the younger jurors, rather than the two black jurors, who seemed to see things from King’s point of view.16
It was not as widely reported—meaning it was reported in a single newspaper—that Officer Koon had once given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black transvestite prostitute with sores on his mouth after the man collapsed in a police station lockup. When the prostitute died, the medical examiner confirmed that he had had AIDS. Koon explained to one stunned officer that he did it because the transvestite prostitute “was created in the image and likeness of God, and if he could keep him alive, he was going to do that.” 17
Ted Koppel asked the forewoman of the first jury if the ensuing riots had given her “any second thoughts at all about what you had done?”18 The jurors? They did their job, and properly according to everyone familiar with the evidence.
How about KTLA? That TV station was rewarded by the industry for deceptively editing a video in order to create the false impression of racist cops savagely wailing on a random “black motorist.” Anyone with a passing familiarity with the facts of the case—say, someone working at a television news bureau—had to know an acquittal was highly likely on the basis of the actual facts of the case. Just for fun, KTLA’s producers and news directors piled up kindling, firewood and lighter fluid and waited to see what happened.
THE LA RIOTS
The LA riots were a calculated explosion—and a guaranteed media ratings booster!
In a poll, 87 percent of black respondents said they did not approve of the riots. 37 percent thought the riots were totally unjustified, period, while 50 percent disapproved of the riots but understood why the rioters responded to the acquittals the way they did. Only 9 percent thought the riots were justified.19 (Among white liberals, 99 percent agreed with the statement, “the riots were great TV.”)
A Los Angeles Times poll asked what would prevent a future riot. The runaway favorite, among several options, was “more moral leadership,” garnering 50 percent support from both blacks and whites, as well as from about a third of Latinos.20
We would not be getting that moral leadership from Congresswoman Maxine Waters. She responded to the officers’ acquittal in the King case by taking to the streets, chanting “No justice, No Peace!”21
U.S. News & World Report said the five days of mind-bogglingly destructive riots were “bred out of decades of racism and police brutality and nourished by the enraging conditions of ghetto life: unemployment, poverty, family breakdown, gangs, drugs, welfare and Reagan-era cutbacks in aid.” 22
KTLA shouldn’t have taunted the wolfpack, but that doesn’t mean we want to understand the wolves’ feelings.
In the most infamous incident from the riots, a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, drove his eighteen-wheeler into the middle of the mayhem, unaware of what was going on because he was listening to country music on the radio. At the corner of Florence and Normandie, rioters smashed his passenger window with a rock, dragged Denny from the car and began beating him to a pulp.
As Henry Keith Watson stood on Denny’s neck, other black thugs repeatedly kicked and stomped him, smashed his head with a claw hammer, and threw a five-pound oxygenator—stolen from another bloodied white truck driver—at his head. In a final gruesome act, Damian “Football” Williams picked up a slab of concrete and heaved it directly on Denny’s head, knocking him unconscious for five minutes and fracturing his skull in ninety-one places. Williams then did a victory dance around Denny’s body, pointed at Denny and flashed gang signs to the hovering news chopper that was filming the entire attack.
Other black rioters took photos of Denny’s brutalized body, spat on him and stole his wallet. One black man stopped on his motorcycle and fired a shotgun at the gas tank on Denny’s truck, mercifully missing.
Bobby Green, a black truck driver who lived in the neighborhood—one of the more affluent and stable in South Central LA—saw the beating of Denny on TV and rushed out to the street to rescue him. With the help of three other blacks running interference in their cars, Green drove Denny’s truck, with Denny in it, to a hospital. They got there just in the nick of time. Denny went into seizure as soon as they arrived.
The riots did finally produce a hate crime involving paint, but, unlike the hoax attack in the Bronx earlier that year, this one actually happened. It was captured on videotape. After savagely beating and kicking Fidel Lopez until he was unconscious, rioter Damian Williams painted the unconscious man’s face black, then pulled down Lopez’s pants and painted his penis and testicles black, as another attacker joyfully announced on his videotape of the attack, “He’s black now! He’s black now!”
Lopez would have been one of the dead, but an ex-con, ex-pimp black minister, Bennie Newton, threw himself over Lopez’s body and told the crowd, “Kill him and you have to kill me, too.”23 Where’s the Hollywood movie about Bennie Newton?
Representative Waters did not champion the heroic blacks like Green or Newton, who risked their necks to save the lives of brutalized victims. She championed Damian Williams and the other violent animals who did the brutalizing. Williams’s mother told the Los Angeles Times that no sooner had Williams been arrested than Waters “just showed up at the door” and said “‘I’m Maxine Waters’” and offered help to Williams and the other young men in the neighborhood, saying, “her doors were open.”24
Waters insisted on calling the bloody, pointless riots a “rebellion,” as if a larger cause were at stake, something other than thievery, murder and mayhem. As she explained: “If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion.” Yes, their cause juste was that they wanted new TVs and free liquor.
The people who bore the brunt of this “rebellion” were the Korean Americans who moved into South Central to do business, primarily running small markets after the big grocery chains pulled out, an act that had been a mystery…until the LA riots.
In one of the accounts of the riots, Sergeant Lisa Phillips said she and her partner were trying to rescue a Korean girl who was stuck in her car, being besieged by hundreds of rioters:
We ran up to her car. My partner, Dan Nee, grabbed her—she was bloody, strapped in with her seatbelt. We thought she was already dead.
We were running back to the car when my partner gets hit with a rock and goes down into the street. The woman goes flying out of his arms, and the crowd laughed. That is one thing I will never forget. The crowd spontaneously burst into laughter.25
That’s what Maxine said was “understandable, if not acceptable.” Calling their celebrated anger “righteous” and a “reaction to a lot of injustice,” Waters said: “There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. They are not crooks.” 26
U.S. taxpayers already supply the unlucky and the lazy with food stamps, free school breakfast and lunch programs, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), free and subsidized housing for the poor, free medical care for the poor, direct cash payments to the poor—all at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Half a dozen federal agencies administer a score of programs to ensure that the poor in America are housed, fed, clothed and cared for. The only thing missing is a government worker to lift the spoon to the poor person’s lips. The disadvantaged are fed so well, the leading health problem among them is obesity. But when a black mob erupts in a murderous rage, looting liquor stores and killing white and Korean victims, a U.S. congresswoman tells us it’s because they needed milk and bread.27
As w
as getting to be a habit, the media blamed the cops for the behavior of blacks. U.S. News & World Report said, “the prolonged, televised absence of police at the riot’s epicenter virtually invited thousands of would-be looters to believe they could steal and rampage with impunity.”28 Virtually invited! They pulverized Asians, Hispanics and whites and did a billion dollars worth of property damage. The rioters even attacked a carload of nuns. What else could the little darlings be expected to do? It was the cops’ fault for not stopping them.
The elites treated blacks like children—unusually violent children—who could not be held accountable, even when they were captured on news cameras beating random passersby nearly to death.
Fifty-four people were killed in the riots. Thousands more were injured—and consider that Reginald Denny counts as injured, not killed.
Every single member of the crack KTLA news team that deliberately fed the public the misinformation that led to this carnage ought to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, worried about a relative of Reginald Denny or a financially ruined Korean sneaking up on him.
But far from hiding, the people responsible for the misleading tape brag about their Peabody Award.29 At least we have their names.
KTLA’s Ryan Cowan was the first to see the tape.
Reporter Stan Chambers took the tape to the police for comment and was the on-air reporter who presented the deceptive tape to unsuspecting viewers. Before the tape aired, Lieutenant Fred Nixon of the LAPD’s Press Information Office made the obvious point to Chambers that “As you and I both know, it’s impossible to look at a videotape and tell precisely what the justification was.” 30 And he was talking about the full eighty-one-second tape.
There was some hint of the justification in the first thirteen seconds with King lunging at Officer Powell. So KTLA cut that part out. I could win all arguments, too, if I could alter the evidence. Chambers boasts on the KTLA Web site that the tape “spurred a national debate on race relations and excessive use of force by police.”
Newscaster Ron Olsen also touts his Peabody Award for the edited tape that incited the LA riots.
News director Warren Cereghino was the man responsible for putting the edited tape on the air and then giving it to other networks, according to author Lou Cannon.31
KTLA’s executive producer Gerald Ruben responded to criticism of the network for distributing such an inflammatory tape by saying, “If we hadn’t aired it, someone else would have.” That’s the perennial justification of the criminal: If I hadn’t raped her, somebody else would have.
Years later, KTLA arranged for lingerie models to traipse through the set during the weather forecast to spice up the news. At least no one got killed with that ratings ploy.32
A year after the riots, Accuracy in Media chairman Reed Irvine complained to ABC News about its use of the edited King tape. Vice president Stephen Weiswasser responded in a letter, saying: “It is our view that the part of the tape not regularly shown does not shed light on the jury’s action, one way or the other.” 33
As the kids say: Duh. Of course the altered video didn’t “shed light on the jury’s action”—the jury saw the full tape and did what any jury would do. The edited tape does, however, shed light on the riots, which was the point.
In the end, the elite’s more exciting version of the news became reality: The police officers who beat Rodney King were prosecuted a second time and two of the four convicted by jurors who were well aware not only of the deadly riots but of the calumnies directed at the first trial’s jurors.
Four months after the cops were duly convicted, the trial of Damian Williams and his cohorts began. Representative Waters sprang into action by demanding that the charges be dismissed. “The whole community,” she said, “is going to organize to ask the district attorney and the judge to dismiss the charges against Williams.”34 In her statesmanlike way, Waters suggested that the trial of Denny’s attackers was an opportunity to take “revenge” for the acquittals in the Rodney King case.35
John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, said he didn’t want Williams’s trial “to send out a message to all of the African American residents, and especially young African American men, that we’re going to throw the book at these three guys and the same thing is going to happen to you if you get out of line.”36
I’m sorry, but isn’t that precisely the message we want to send?
Reginald Denny’s assailants were acquitted of all felony charges—save Damian Williams, who was convicted on one count of mayhem. Williams and Watson were found guilty of only misdemeanor assault. The jury hung on all other charges.
In response, not one white person looted, despite being “virtually invited” to by the absence of police on Rodeo Drive. In that case, we were required to accept the jury’s verdict and not expect a reaction, much less a second, federal civil rights trial, despite the blindingly obvious fact that the defendants attacked Denny because he was white. The jurors had spoken, the case was over, the criminal justice system had run its course—let’s all accept that justice has been served and move on.
Upon his release from prison, Williams received a job from Waters.37 This lunatic was allowed to roam free, causing havoc wherever she went because, as Shelby Steele said, “the larger society feels it doesn’t have the moral authority to call her on it.”38 For years, it was required that, whenever race was mentioned, all thinking be shut down.
So much evil has been done by liberals in the name of race relations.
KTLA created a situation where if there were an acquittal of the Rodney King officers—highly likely given the facts—the city would burn.
The black stripper, Crystal Mangum, falsely accused Duke lacrosse players of gang-raping her, but was never prosecuted for her lies. Within the next few years, she was charged with child abuse, arson and attempted murder—and convicted of child abuse. (As we go to press she is on trial for murdering her boyfriend.)
Two years after Lemrick Nelson was acquitted for the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum—and the New York Times concluded that the verdict “leaves unresolved who killed Yankel Rosenbaum”39—he pleaded guilty to slashing a fellow student with a razor blade.
Within less than a year of being shot by Bernie Goetz, two of the “youths,” mere panhandlers according to much of the press, had committed violent crimes—Barry Allen had mugged an acquaintance and James Ramseur had raped and sodomized a pregnant woman.
Half a dozen white people were beaten, robbed or sexually assaulted in response to hysterical media coverage of a hoax paint attack in the Bronx and a gang attack in Howard Beach.
Rewriting the facts to prove racial discrimination in lending, in 1992, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston produced a famous study allegedly proving that blacks were discriminated against in mortgage lending. The study was a sham. It was riddled with preposterous errors, suggesting, for example, that some loans required the banks to pay interest to borrowers. Once the errors were removed, no evidence of discrimination remained.
But the study fit the America-is-still-racist myth, so the Federal Reserve charged ahead and imposed suicidal mortgage lending policies on banks. Among other things, the new guidelines directed that banks stop requiring borrowers to have a credit history and mandated that banks accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as down payments.40
It would be like ordering professional baseball teams to ignore how a player hits, runs and catches, but to accept broken bones as a qualification.
The bad loans, destined to default, were spread throughout the economy in the form of mortgage-backed securities—bundling the good loans with the crap loans. When the loans collapsed, so did the economy. Our financial system had to be blown up so that millionaires at the Boston Fed and Federal Reserve could feel good about themselves for rooting out nonexistent racial discrimination.
How many lives have been ruined to fulfill liberals’ fantasy that America is still a racist country?
And now the
media are impatient for another Rodney King explosion to help Obama’s reelection campaign. Then, if he is not reelected, the media will have primed the public to believe that only racism can explain it. Isn’t ObamaCare wildly popular with the public? College graduates love living at home with their parents! The economy is great! They plot their reporting of the news to make people believe Obama can’t lose—except for racism.
CHAPTER 9
TRIAL OF THE CENTURY
Mark Fuhrman’s Felony Conviction
In 1995, Americans discovered it was considered a graver offense to use “the N-word” than to cut a woman’s head off. (Unless you happened to be a black rap artist or comedian, in which case the nonstop use of that epithet would get you an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar or NAACP Image Award.)
Only one felony conviction came out of the O. J. Simpson trial for a double murder so brutal that one victim’s neck was severed to her spinal cord: the perjury conviction of Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman, for lying about having used the N-word nine and a half years earlier. Meanwhile, despite mounds of incriminating evidence, the jury acquitted OJ of murdering Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman after only three hours of deliberation.
The end of paralyzing groupthink on race began with the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial. Unknown to the elites, the world changed at 10:07 a.m. on October 3, 1995, when an estimated 150 million people1 turned on their TVs to watch the verdict. As blacks across the country erupted in cheers at the acquittal, it was the end of white guilt in America.
Thanks to the miracle of television, nearly everyone in the country had seen the same evidence the jury saw, unfiltered by the KTLA newsroom or hapless reporters like Jim Dwyer of the New York Times. Ninety-five million Americans had watched the slow-speed car chase that ended with OJ’s arrest.2 For the next year, a small cable channel, Court TV, was getting ratings as if it were running the Super Bowl every night.