Right after the Howard Beach assailants were convicted, a year later, a white cab driver was beaten and robbed by eight blacks in Harlem, who said it was for Howard Beach. Only one newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, mentioned the attack, according to Nexis archives.66 A week after that, two black men dragged the white wife of a police officer into the back of a van in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, pulled her pants down and robbed her saying, “This is for Howard Beach” and “This will happen to other white women.” That attack merited short, unsigned items in only two newspapers, the Miami Herald and the newspaper in the town where the attack occurred: the New York Times.67
ANN VINER AND EVELYN WAGLER
A corollary to the hysterical overreporting of any white-on-black crime is that black-on-white hate crimes will be utterly unreported by the media, except in the town where it happened.
Hollywood made a movie about Howard Beach (and the brave prosecutor who brought racists to justice). A street in New York is named after Michael Grimes. The New York Times still celebrates anniversaries of the Howard Beach attack. Michael Stewart, artist, is memorialized in paintings and songs. The shooting of black immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York City cops who thought he had a gun has been featured in songs by Bruce Springsteen, Lauryn Hill and Cyndi Lauper and about four dozen other musicians. It has been written about in more than a thousand New York Times articles.
But does anyone know about Ann Viner? A week before the Howard Beach attack there was another interracial attack in a white neighborhood only a little father away from the New York Times’s building than Howard Beach is. A sixty-three-year-old white woman, Ann Viner, was attacked at her home in New Canaan, Connecticut, savagely beaten, dragged to her swimming pool and drowned by two twenty-year-old black men. It was the first murder in the affluent town in seventeen years, since a disturbed man killed four of his family members in 1970. That seems like a newsworthy story. But if you remember the wall-to-wall coverage this case got in the mainstream press at the time, immediately stop taking Ambien and call your doctor right away.
The Times briefly mentioned the New Canaan murder in three short news items, totaling less than a thousand words. The longest article, five hundred words, was the initial report on the murder—when there was still hope that the killers were not black.68 No other major newspapers or magazines mentioned Viner’s murder.
Twenty years later, the home invasion murders of a mother and two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut, another white-picket-fence town, received, appropriately, a lot of coverage, including more than fifty articles in the Times. The killers were white.69
Say, has anyone heard of Evelyn Wagler? At twenty-four, Wagler, who was white, had just moved from Chicago to Roxbury, a black part of Boston. At around 9 p.m. one evening, she was set upon by six black youths, forced to douse herself in gasoline, and set on fire. Only a few newspapers picked up the AP report on her tortuous death in 1973.70
CHANNON CHRISTIAN AND CHRISTOPHER NEWSOM
There were so few cases of white-on-black crimes that each one could be lovingly covered for months on end—while equally heinous, and far more numerous black-on-white crimes barely made the police blotter. This suggested the possibility that, at least by the 1970s, white racism against blacks wasn’t the country’s most pressing problem. But the media and their designated black spokesmen kept everyone so riled up about ghosts, no one seemed not to notice that blacks weren’t advancing. (They were probably living in fear of the black criminals white liberals kept defending.)
About the same time that the New York Times was giving saturation coverage of a stripper’s (false) claim that she had been raped by white Duke lacrosse players, there was a non-hoax rape case also involving white college students in North Carolina’s neighboring state of Tennessee. Channon Christian, twenty-one, and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, twenty-three, were carjacked by five blacks. Both were repeatedly raped, sodomized with objects and tortured—bleach was poured down Channon’s throat and on her bleeding genital area to eliminate the evidence while she was still alive. Newsom was shot in the head and set on fire, while Christian was tortured for several more hours before being put in a plastic bag and left in a garbage bin where she suffocated to death.
Other than a TV listing mentioning the Investigation Discovery channel’s program on the crime,71 the following constituted the Times’s entire coverage of this gruesome interracial rape-torture-murder, which itself was from the Associated Press:
A man convicted in the killing of a young college student and her boyfriend has been sentenced to death. The man, Lemaricus Davidson, showed no reaction as jurors announced the sentence. Mr. Davidson, 28, was found guilty of abducting Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, 23, in Knoxville during a 2007 carjacking by several armed men. Both victims were raped. Mr. Newsom was shot and Ms. Christian suffocated after she was choked and stuffed in a garbage bag and a trash can. Mr. Davidson’s brother was also convicted in the attack in August and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Two other defendants await trial.72
Since the OJ verdict, the non-Fox media still refuse to cover black-on-white hate crimes, but at least they no longer ferociously defend the killers. The Tennessee murderers are not being defensively profiled by ABC’s Lynn Sherr or New York magazine’s Barbara Campbell. There are no New York Times editorials weeping over the guilty verdicts or Village Voice articles claiming the defendants were “just too black for [their] own good.”73
If “hate crimes” were honestly prosecuted, we’d have another crime category where minorities lap the field. But the profusion of black-on-white hate crimes doesn’t fit the “racist America” thesis the media have been trying to sell us, so these spectacular crimes don’t make national news.
The people who report the news simply would not show a black person in an unfavorable light. When wild claims of racism were proved false, they’d just drop the matter, leaving wrecked lives in their wake, and tell themselves, “Our cause was good.” With no disincentive to manufacture even the most preposterous claims of racism—and plenty to be gained by crying “racism”—the charlatans ran riot.
How on earth was defending criminals helping the black community? And why were only black people expected to instantly defend any member of their group?
One big change since the OJ verdict is that people will now openly talk about the obvious guilt of black criminals who are obviously guilty. No longer is that a social faux pas. There is also a lot less newsprint dedicated to exploring the difficult lives black criminals have had.
Apart from everything else, criminals are also incredibly lazy, rarely venturing beyond their neighborhoods to rape, kill and plunder. Why should we care about the criminals’ tough luck when they’re busy destroying the lives of other black people who have also been dealt a bad hand? But the victims of black criminals weren’t the ones writing editorials on how to “heal” after this or that black criminal was shot by the police. White liberals were.
CHAPTER 4
HEY, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THAT STORY…
Whenever a much-celebrated claim of racism turned out to be a hoax—which was almost always—you’d just stop hearing about it. There would never be a clippable story admitting that the media’s harrumphing had been in error: Attention readers! That story we’ve been howling about for several months turned out to be a complete fraud.
The hoax aspect was never what was heavily reported. Part one would be widely broadcast—the lie part. But only obscure right-wingers ever bothered with the follow-up when it turned out to be false. Liberals forgave the act of falsely reporting a crime on the grounds that that even though there wasn’t a wolf, it raised our consciousness of wolves. Ordinary people just wanted to know: But was it true?
A little time would pass and then we’d get an all-new “Got racism?” media campaign. No matter how many times “hate crime” stories were disproved, reporters never tired of credulously reporting every allegation of racism to com
e down the pike. The media were incapable of remembering to get all the facts before launching moral crusades.
A normal person would hear some of the more outlandish allegations and think, “I can’t believe it!”—not meaning, “Wow! What a blockbuster story!” but rather, “I would like to hear the facts because I literally don’t believe it.”
As soon as the truth emerged on each racial incident and the America-is-still-racist thesis collapsed, the story would just quietly disappear from the news pages, like Kennedy’s trouble at the Chappaquiddick bridge. As a result, the official record shows some hate crimes and some unverified hate crimes with no clear resolution one way or another. As long as the fraudulent “hate crimes” didn’t get counted as strike-outs, liberals always looked like Ted Williams. Since they didn’t keep an accurate batting average, I’ll do it for them.
WHITE GANGS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY—1987
In March 1987, eight months before Tawana Brawley became a household name, black students at Columbia University made the rather incredible charge that mobs of white students were beating up black students on campus. About a dozen blacks claimed to have seen or been victims of these racist attacks.
In the 1980s, American colleges were sturdy sentinels against the merest hint of a racist thought. There were seminars on racism, posters against racism, bake sales against racism, racism “awareness” days, articles denouncing racism, consciousness-raising sessions about racism. More resources were devoted to studying racism than studying history, chemistry or math. It would be hard to find a single person on an American college campus, at least post-1980, who would have one good thing to say about racism.
Moreover, the alleged perpetrators of these racist beatings at Columbia weren’t teenaged toughs with criminal records in a working-class neighborhood: They were college students at an Ivy League school.
But blacks claimed that whites were so terrorizing them that they were afraid to walk alone on campus. According to their spokeswoman, Barnard student Cheryl Derricotte, it was “open season on black people.”1
The usual nonsense ensued. There were sit-ins, administration building take-overs, and noisy rallies outside the fraternity house said to harbor the white racist thugs. Fifty people were arrested as a result of the anti-racism protests. Most of them were white.2 Twenty-three Columbia students staged a sit-in at 1 Police Plaza in lower Manhattan to demand the arrest of the white students they claimed were beating up blacks on campus.3
Black students formed a group to protect themselves from the marauding white mobs and—in what was always a good sign—hired C. Vernon Mason as their lawyer. “The message has gotten out,” Mason said, “that black students are not safe on the Columbia campus and someone is going to have to answer for this.”4
Newsweek quoted Frank L. Matthews, publisher of Black Issues in Higher Education, saying that he blamed the surge of college racism on white students’ “reading the messages” from the Reagan administration.5 Of course, another theory is that it was black students “reading the messages” from a media that gave full-court press to even simulated racist incidents and refused to hold black people accountable for false reports.
If you are not a journalist, it will come as no surprise that, after painstaking investigations by both the police and the very politically correct university, the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. According to dozens of eyewitnesses, it was black students who had started a fight with white students late one night after a dance, and then made up the cock-and-bull story about roving white gangs targeting blacks.
None of the newspapers and magazines that had reported the original story about white racists stampeding through an Ivy League campus ever got around to mentioning that it was a lie—not the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsweek or Time magazine. Careful readers had to wait for this admission in the Christian Science Monitor about a year later:
[T]he the university report on the incident, which relied on the signed statements of 22 eyewitnesses…differed substantially from the account given by the blacks and used by the news media in reporting the story. [I]n the Columbia account, the actual brawl was provoked by a group of five to seven blacks outside the hangout. [T]heir story of ‘a white lynch mob’ has since been discredited.6
No charges were brought by the university or the police against the students for filing a false police complaint.
The national news coverage of a story about Ivy Leaguers as latter-day Bull Connors triggered dozens more of these incidents at campuses around the country. These were all hoaxes, too. But no matter how absurd the idea of marauding white students attacking blacks on college campuses, the false charges kept coming and liberals kept believing them.
SABRINA COLLINS, EMORY UNIVERSITY
A few years later, in 1990, Sabrina Collins, a black premed student at Emory College, claimed to have been the victim of a campaign of racial harassment—“die, [N-word], die” had been painted on her floor, bleach poured on her clothes and typed death threats slipped under her door. Even her stuffed animals had been mutilated. As a result of these incidents, Collins fell mute and had to be hospitalized.
Hundreds of students held a rally to protest racism as a result of what had happened to Collins. One student, Leonard Scriven, denounced what he called the “pervasive system of racism” at Emory.7 At a meeting of students and faculty about the incident, a newly formed black student group, Students Against Racial Inequality, submitted a list of demands, including more black students and faculty members, two new centers for the study of African American culture…and the firing of the director of public safety, Edward A. Medlin.
The public safety office had already responded to Collins’s allegations by equipping her dorm room with additional locks, a portable motion detector and an alarm system. Safety officers patrolled her hallway as well as the area outside her dormitory building. The office of public safety had called in local, state and federal investigators. But the students against racial inequality wanted this poor guy’s head.
After a thorough inquiry, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Collins had perpetrated the racist acts on herself. Her fingerprints were the only ones on the letters and were arranged on the page in a pattern indicating that she had put the letter in a typewriter; the letters had been composed on a typewriter in the library she frequented; and, finally, the letters also spelled “you’re” as “your”—as was Sabrina’s habit.8 The incidents had begun just as Collins was being investigated for an honor code violation for cheating in a chemistry class.9
No charges were pressed against Collins. The story vanished. Let’s just hope the head of public safety was allowed to keep his job.
GILBERT MOORE JR., WILLIAMS COLLEGE—1993
Fake racist incidents on college campuses became as common as Madonna’s music. Against a background of daily lectures against racism, some racist letter or graffiti would materialize, there would be a generalized gnashing of teeth about the pervasiveness of racism and then the perpetrator would always turn out to be a black student.
At Williams College in 1993, hideous racist messages were found on the door of the Black Student Union. An uproar ensued. Two days later, Dean Joan Edwards announced to general relief that the culprit had admitted responsibility and was being punished—but neglected to mention that the student was black until two weeks later, as the rumor mill went wild.
Junior Gilbert Moore Jr. said he had put up the racist notes as a response to actual racism at Williams—of which there was no evidence or he wouldn’t have needed to fake it—and to encourage more dialogue about racism, because twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week was not enough. The college rose to the challenge—by suspending him for one semester. Enraged that a black student would be held responsible for anything he did, some black students denounced the harsh penalty, threatening to leave Williams. Moore concluded: “The system…has failed me.”10
ALICIA HARDIN, TRINITY INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY—2005
Federal investigators must have been getting bored with the hoax hate crimes on college campuses they kept being asked to investigate. After OJ, even the media’s hysteria was muted. Nonetheless, when three students at Trinity International University, a small Christian college near Chicago, received threatening racist letters in 2005, scores of newspapers across the country ran with the news.
A New York Times article on the alleged hate crime was bristling with references to the Christian nature of the school: “Christian College Secludes Students after Hate Letters…a small Evangelical Christian college…a conservative Bible-based school…more than 20 students held hands in a circle to pray…Affiliated with the Evangelical Free Church of America, the university mission statement says that its education is based on ‘the authority of God’s inerrant word, Holy Scripture,’ and that it seeks an international identity with ‘people drawn from every tribe and tongue.’”11
As is required by law, Jesse Jackson met with the victims of the letters, reporting that they “feel like a target is on their back because they are black.” Charlie Dates, a black student getting his masters in divinity, did not sound especially worried. He told the Times, “Crazy people do crazy things. It’s nothing to be terrified over.”
There was big coverage for the initial allegation. You would not read in the New York Times, however, that the perpetrator turned out to be a black student, Alicia Hardin. She had staged the racist incident because she wanted to switch schools. But as soon as she confessed, the Times lost interest in the story.
So did most of the newspapers from around the country that had given banner coverage to the original story. Only a handful bothered informing their readers about the investigation’s results. When the hoax part of the story was reported at all, it usually showed up in demure, hundred-word items buried deep inside the newspaper.12