How Often May the Boy Cry Wolf?
A reader with the noble but gaseous name of Argon berated a column quoted here which called into question the loyalty and patriotism of Ilhan Omar, but berated the act of quoting it moreso, saying that it would be better to discuss issues rather than personalities, and not to accuse politicians of being bigots, antisemites, or disloyal to the nation.
Hold that thought for a moment while we discuss an issue currently raging in today’s headlines.
Erica Thomas, a Democratic state representative for Georgia’s 39th district, tearfully described in a Facebook video how she was insulted and browbeaten by a white man for using the express checkout line with too many items in her cart, and told to “go back where you came from!” Mrs Thomas claimed tearfully that this was an example of white privilege. In exactly these terms, so the absurdly minor incident was reported in the nationwide mainstream media as a legitimate story.
The man, Eric Sparkes, admitted that he had called her a lazy S.O.B. but that had been the “worst” of his verbal attack. “This woman, Ms. Thomas, is playing the victim for political purposes because she is a state legislator,” Sparkes told WSB-TV. “I’m a Democrat and will vote Democrat for the rest of my life, so call me whatever you want to believe. For her political purposes, make it black, white, brown, whatever. It’s untrue.”
Here is a list of over 300 fake hate crimes:
Here is a TLDNR list, mentioning only those receiving immense publicity recently from several networks, with repeated stories over more than one day.
It is worth quoting in full.
In the wake of the arrest of actor Jussie Smollett, who was charged with staging his own racist and homophobic attack, here are just some of the other crimes that have been given prominent play by the media since the 2016 election — often accompanied by politicians decrying, “This is America today” — that turned out to be frauds:
- Just before the 2016 election, the 111-year-old Hopewell Baptist Church was attacked with fire and graffiti that said, “Vote Trump.” “The political message of the vandalism is obviously an attempt to sway public opinion regarding the upcoming election,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). Turns out the arsonist was Andrew McClinton, 48, an African-American member of the church.
- “Heil Trump” and ”F-g Church” were spray-painted on St. David’s Episcopal Church in Indiana after the election. It was the gay organ player who did it. “Over the course of that week, I was fearful, scared and alone, too, in my fear,” George Nathaniel “Nathan” Stang, 26, explained to the IndyStar. “I guess one of the driving factors behind me committing the act was that I wanted other people to be scared with me.”
- Yasmin Seweid, 18, told police that three Donald Trump supporters harassed her and tried to steal her hijab on a No. 6 train in New York City. But the Dec. 1, 2016, alleged hate crime fell apart two weeks later when Seweid admitted she made the whole thing up because she’d been out late drinking with friends and was afraid her strict Muslim Egyptian father would be angry.
- Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti was vandalized for months by graffiti that said, “leave n—-s” and “KKK.” A former student, African-American Eddie Curlin, 29, was eventually caught. “It was totally self-serving,” said Robert Heighes, the university’s chief of police. “It was not driven by politics. It was not driven by race.”
- More than 2,000 bomb threats to Jewish institutions, including the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, were made in the first three months of 2017. “My personal take is it’s a statement of where we are in this country,” Michael Feinstein, the chief executive of the Bender Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, in Rockville, Md., told The Times. In March 2017, an arrest was finally made in many of the incidents: that of a 19-year-old Jewish Israeli-American named Michael Ron David Kadar. Kadar had been rejected from the Israeli Defense Forces over mental health issues and claimed in his defense that he had a brain tumor.
- A few of the threats didn’t come from the Jewish teenager. At least eight were the work of Juan Thompson, 32, who was trying to frame a woman who had broken up with him. Thompson, a black journalist, had previously been fired from The Intercept for making up sources and stories. In response to his firing, he blamed the “white New York media” and claimed his editors were racist.
- Forty-two Jewish tombstones were toppled in Washington Cemetery in Midwood, Brooklyn, in March 2017. While officials were worried it was an anti-Semitic act, after an investigation, the NYPD named another suspect: the wind. “[It was] due to neglect, or weather factors like soil and dirt and wind. There is no evidence to suggest this was a case of vandalism,” a police spokesman said.
- Five black cadet candidates were bombarded with hate speech on message boards at the Air Force Academy Preparatory School in September 2017. It turns out that the comments were written by one of the African-American cadets. CNN commentator Frida Ghitis didn’t think that point mattered much in a follow-up report, saying, “The election of President Donald Trump lifted the rock under which much of the hatred had hidden, allowing it to squirm out into the light.”
- African-American Adwoa Lewis, 20, of Long Island said four teens yelled “Trump 2016!,” told her she didn’t belong here and slashed her tires in September 2018, leaving a note that read “Go Home.” She later admitted to making the story up and putting the note on her car.
- Union Temple in Brooklyn was defaced by messages such as, “Die Jew Rats” and “Jew Better Be Ready” in early November 2018. The culprit? Gay African-American James Polite, who had previously interned for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and was raised by Jewish foster parents. He was charged for hate crimes for the graffiti and setting fires at four other Jewish temples and schools. But friends and advocates say bigotry isn’t to blame; Polite is bipolar and was convinced that the FBI and CIA had taken over the city’s homeless shelter system.
- More than 100 students marched to demand “safe spaces” after “KKK,” swastikas and the last names of four black and Latino students were scrawled in a bathroom stall at Goucher College near Baltimore in November 2018. But it turned out one of those graffiti’d names, Flynn Arthur, 21, was the person responsible. The biracial lacrosse player explained to cops that “he had been drinking and just did something dumb.”
- On Dec. 30, 2018, a 7-year-old African-American girl, Jazmine Barnes, was killed in a drive-by shooting. Witnesses said a white man in a pickup truck was nearby. “We’ve got to call it what it is. Black people are being targeted in this country,” said activist Deric Muhammad. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) insisted, “Do not be afraid to call this what it seems to be — a hate crime,” But the investigation led to the arrest of two African-Americans, Eric Black Jr. and Larry D. Woodruffe, who police believe shot into Barnes’ car in a case of mistaken identity.
- This past New Year’s Eve, three Savannah churches and a civil rights museum were vandalized, raising the specter of a hate crime. But it was an African-American, David Smith III, who had thrown bricks through the doors.
- Video went viral of a Jan. 18 confrontation at the March for Life in Washington, DC, showing a group of students from Covington Catholic HS in Kentucky, some in MAGA hats, in a confrontation with a Native American, Nathan Phillips. “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillips told the Detroit Free Press. “I was there, and I was witnessing all of this … As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong, and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong.”Other videos quickly proved that Phillips was lying. A group of Black Israelites was taunting the Covington teens with racial insults such as, “Christ is coming back to kick your cracker asses.”And Phillips wasn’t surrounded by the Covington students; he walked into the group and started banging a drum in the face of one of the kids, whose bewildered expression had online commentators quick to label a smirk.A lawyer for a Covington student has filed a defamation suit against the Washington Post for $250 million in damages.
My comment: Let us return to the question of when it is unfair to call a politician’s patriotism into question, or level accusations of bigotry.
Miss Argon’s objection was raised only after two years and counting of President Trump being accused falsely, each and every day, often several times a day, in news articles and commentary, both in print and broadcast, as well as in magazine articles and books, of being a soviet agent and a racist Nazi racist, guilty of treason so outrageous that he must be impeached and jailed immediately, if not assassinated.
I, and everyone I know, even non-Trump supporters, have been accused jointly and severally of being racists and bigots and phobic, that is, suffering a mental disorder of uncontrollable fear about everything from strangers to Mohammedans to sodomites, and loudly and as often as any of us engage in any conversation with a Leftist. The number of times it has not happened I can count on the fingers of one hand.
My career has been damaged, and my reputation tarnished in the international newspapers, including among those who otherwise would never have heard my name, by such unfounded, unfair, false and malignant accusations. So the preference of the Left to attack the person rather than debate the issue has real world consequences, none of them good.
The “proof” that Trump is a racist is given that he took out an ad in favor of the death penalty after a horrific gang rape in Central Park made national headlines; that President Obama’s biography claiming he was born in Kenya, and the suspicious lack of a birth certificate, brought his legal ability to be a Presidential candidate into question; when Trump announced his candidacy, as part of the argument in favor of prioritizing border security, he pointed out that criminal gangs were coming over the unwatched southern border; the Trump once said that when it came to the question of whether or not to tear down statues of Civil War heroes, there were good people on both sides; that he wanted to enforce the Obama-era executive order restricting unvetting travel from nations where terrorism is rampant, called in the newspapers a “Muslim ban”; that in a private conversation, one untrustworthy witness claims Trump called poor, crime-ridden, failed nations hellholes.
In order to misinterpret these remarks as racist, a simple mental self-deception is needed: one need only assume that in each an every case, the true motive was far more ignoble and wicked than the stated motive.
Given this assumption, a circular argument is then easy: from the assumption that bigotry motivates otherwise ordinary and common sense statements, the accuser concludes the accused is a bigot.
Calling for the death penalty for a black rapist is interpreted to be because he is black, not because he is a rapist, even if the call asks for all rapists of any race to suffer the same penalty.
Calling for strong borders to stop South American criminals is interpreted to be racist against South Americans, despite that they are clearly Caucasians of European ancestry, even if the call would halt all illegal migration.
Calling for a ban from terrorist nations where the terrorists are Mohammedans and the identities and histories of the travelers cannot be established is interpreted as racists even if Mohammedanism is not a race, and even if the call is a sound and self-evident common sense military practice for any nation in wartime.
However, since the accusation of bad faith is itself made in bad faith, the end result is merely to convince all uninformed onlookers that both sides are equally morally decrepit.
This is by design. If onlookers conclude both parties are lying skunks, no one bothers to discover that the scent comes from one party only.
In fact, there is one political party that is racist and had always been, and the other believes all men are created equal before the law, and always has.
The Democrat Andrew Jackson, the founder of the party, is responsible for the Trail of Tears; Democrat Jefferson Davis led the Confederacy in an armed rebellion to protect the institution of slavery from abolition at the hands of Republican Abraham Lincoln; Democrat Nathan Bedford Forrest founded the Ku Klux Klan to use murder and terror prevent freed slaves, Catholics, and others from exercising civil rights or influence in society; Democrat controlled states enacted Jim Crowe laws to segregate the civilian population; Democrat Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal military; Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the Japanese Internment during World War Two; Democrat George Wallace opposed segregation to the point of the silly publicity stunt of standing in the doors to University of Alabama to prevent black students from entering; Democrat Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students from attending Little Rock Central High School; Democrat Bull Connor turned the firehoses and unleashed attack dogs on peaceful Civil Rights protestors, including women and children.
The guilty accuse the innocent of their own shortcomings, in order to forestall their own creeping sense of guilt, and to throw the blame for the evils they bring upon themselves upon the purer, cleaner folk they resent and hate. It is an unfortunate natural assumption of any uninformed onlooker to assume, when both parties accuse the other of the exact same thing, both are probably somewhat guilty. The idea that all the blame fits on one side and that the other is innocent offends our natural American instinct of fairplay.
So Miss Argon, while her sentiment might be correct, has selected a rather odd moment in history to express it, and selected the wrong party to which to express it.
No one of her party, unless first prefacing any remarks by a sincere apology and reputation of the entire Democrat strategy of blaming Republicans for historical evils committed by Democrats, has a right to rule the question of a politician’s patriotism and honest character out of bounds.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking in its insolence.
Dear Miss Argon, allow me to end on a personal note:
Everyone I know, including myself, my Jewish in-laws, my Chinese daughter, my black roommate, the mixed race couple of my best friend and his wife, the various public figures and pundits on the Right I have read, some of them extensively, has been accused of racism over and over and over and over.
In the meanwhile, none of them, not one, has done or said anything in my hearing or to my knowledge showing even the slightest inclination toward racism, and they each and all denounce the concept as absurd and beneath contempt.
The only racism visible in America these days, aside from a few fringe kooks carefully cultivated by your side like hothouse orchids, is clear and open and on your side: listen to the contempt with which your side speaks of whites, and of black or Jewish conservatives.
As for racism in older times, this list might be instructive.
- Supreme Court Chief Justice White: a Democrat and the Chief Justice of the United States, was a known member of the KKK in his home state of Louisiana, where he had served as U.S. Senator.
- Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. In 1921, Hugo Black successfully defended E. R. Stephenson in his trial for the murder of a Catholic priest, Fr. James E. Coyle. Black, a Democrat, joined the Ku Klux Klan shortly afterwards, in order to gain votes from the anti-Catholic element in Alabama. He was not a member himself.
- Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat, the Governor of Mississippi and later the U.S. Senator for Mississippi, was a founder of the Mississippi chapter of the KKK.
- John Brown Gordon, a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Georgia, was a founder of the KKK in his home state of Georgia.
- Joseph E. Brown a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Georgia, was a key supporter of the KKK in his home state.
- Clarence Morley, a Republican and the Governor of Colorado. He was a KKK member and a strong supporter of Prohibition. He tried to ban the Catholic Church from using sacramental wine and attempted to have the University of Colorado fire all Jewish and Catholic professors.
- Bibb Graves, a Democrat, who was the Governor of Alabama. He lost his first campaign for governor in 1922, but four years later, with the secret endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, he was elected to his first term as governor. Graves was almost certainly the Exalted Cyclops (chapter president) of the Montgomery chapter of the Klan.
- Clifford Walker, a Democrat and the Governor of Georgia, was revealed to be a Klan member by the press in 1924.
- George Gordon, a Democrat and Congressman for Tennessee’s 10th congressional district, became one of the Klan’s first members. In 1867, Gordon became the Klan’s first Grand Dragon for the Realm of Tennessee.
- John Tyler Morgan, a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Alabama, was the Grand Dragon of the KKK in Alabama.
- Edmund Pettus, a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Alabama, was also a Grand Dragon of the KKK in Alabama.
- John W. Morton, a Democrat, was the Tennessee Secretary of State and was the founder of the Nashville chapter of the KKK.
- William L. Saunders, a Democrat, was the North Carolina Secretary of State and was the founder of the North Carolina chapter.
- John Clinton Porter, a Democrat, was a member of the Klan in the early 1920s and served as mayor of Los Angeles.
- Benjamin F. Stapleton, a Democrat, was mayor of Denver in the 1920s–1940s. He was a Klan member in the early 1920s and appointed fellow Klansmen to positions in municipal government.Elmer David Davies, a Democrat and a Federal Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, was a member of the KKK whilst at university.
- Edward L. Jackson became Governor of Indiana as a Republican in 1925 and his administration came under fire for granting undue favor to the Klan’s agenda and associates. He was apparently not a member himself.
…I do not wish my point to be misunderstood. I am not saying two wrongs make a right, or that the endless use of character assassination instead of rational argument to settle issues is allowed on oir side when your side did it first.
No, I am saying the hatred of Leftists for this nation, and their undisguised bigotry and their love of fanning the flames of race hatred, acts as a bar to their right to criticize others for discussing character flaws rather than policy.
You and yours allowed the liberals to be silenced, and gave homage and laud to the leftists. Liberals champion free speech, America, Israel, desegregation, nonviolence. Leftists champion the opposite.
In effect, by adopting leftism and eschewing liberalism, your side conceded all policy discussions long ago. When you kick over the chessboard, you forfeit.
Adopting identity politics makes there be no more policies to discuss. The only discussion is who shall do what to whom and in retaliation for what historical or imaginary grievence.
What policy is there to discuss, once your side has silenced all discussion?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
