WorldNetDaily's Drum Major For Race-Baiting

Colin Flaherty keeps seeing "black mob violence" everywhere he looks, regardless of the actual facts -- and then plays dumb about the fact that he's race-baiting.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 2/20/2013

Of course, Flaherty's efforts at devising the appearance of an epidemic of violence by blacks does not equate to one actually existing -- all he has done is blow up isolated instances of "black mob violence" in a dishonest attempt to portray them as a pattern.

WND has continued to publish Flaherty's race-baiting articles, even as he places less emphasis on facts and more on keeping alive his dubious narrative that all blacks are mob-prone thugs. The fact that Flaherty completely ignores the fact that people of other races commit the very crimes he purports to be outraged about amply demonstrates this is all about race-baiting, not about the truth.

Getting it wrong

In a July 18 WND article, Flaherty yet again operated from the premise that only blacks are violent:

Ready to play the Knockout Game?

The St. Louis version is the most popular, so let’s start there: Begin with a bunch of black people. Anywhere from five to 50.

Find a white person, but an Asian will do. Alone is important. Older is better. Weak and defenseless even more so.

Without warning, punch that person in the face as hard as you can. You win if you score a Knockout.

If not, keep punching until your arms and legs get too tired to continue. Or the person dies.

You can play anywhere, but “vibrant and culturally mixed” South Grand District is probably best. That is where the victims are: Asians, “gay” people, artists, yuppies – people who won’t fight back.

By contrast, the St. Louis Riverfront Times pointed out that the "knockout game" is, in fact, not exclusively a black thing:

But Knockout King does not appear to be bounded by race. Jason, from St. Louis County, says two white friends were part of his punch-out crew. One Dutchtown woman, agreeing to speak on the condition that her name not be published, says police caught her son, who is white, playing Knockout King two years ago, when he was sixteen. He and some friends had been hiding between buildings on Gravois Avenue, and he popped out to club a bicyclist who'd come rolling along.

"It's not a black thing, it's a kid thing," the woman says. "It's teenage kids trying to be cool. My son's as white as can be. He doesn't have a black bone in his body."

Nevertheless, Flaherty has continued to promote the false premise that any "knockout game" must originate with "a crowd of black people," most recently on Feb. 14.

That's far from the only misrepresentation Flaherty has peddled. Salon's Alex Pareene documented numerous Flaherty falsehoods:

In addition to having decided to make racial fear-mongering his profession, Flaherty’s also a sloppy aggregator. He gets wrong the simple details of the stories he’s abusing to make his argument, and he also seems to invent facts from thin air. Some examples from his column on a series of random incidents in Minneapolis, which became a chapter of his silly book: A woman who was badly beaten by a group of teenage girls is said to have been attacked by “a gang of 20 black women.” The number of attackers appears nowhere in the linked story. (He also seems to intentionally elide the stated motive for the attack, which wasn’t anti-white animus but a missing pair of sunglasses.) “In September of 2011, a crowd of 1,000 black people rioted through downtown fighting, stealing, destroying property,” he writes. There’s no way of knowing how many people were in the crowd, but it doesn’t look to me like 1,000. In the book he seems to have changed number to 800, though he still has no possible way of counting. (The person who uploaded video of the crowd’s brief marauding wrote of “a few hundred.”) Flaherty says “a group of black people attacked a mobile alcoholic beverage cart in Minneapolis,” but there’s no such thing as “mobile alcoholic beverage carts” in Minneapolis. The thing attacked was a bunch of people on one of those stupid group bicycles with a beer keg. This is all pretty basic stuff, and my folks always taught me that if you’re going to use a bunch of random incidents to try to convince people of the existence of a secret nationwide pandemic of racial violence, it’s best to get the details right.

Pareene went on to point out that "If you look for every example of crimes committed by black people in every American city over the last three to five years, you’ll find enough examples to make it sound like a lot of crime, because America is a violent country with a lot of crime, a lot of poverty and a lot of impoverished minority neighborhoods located conveniently close to much wealthier white neighborhoods (and business districts where everything is also owned by white people)."

Colin Flaherty

Well, actually, not so much. Three days before Flaherty's article was published, Ball ran for a career-high 247 yards and scored three touchdowns, in the process setting a the Big Ten record for career TDs. And in November, Ball set an NCAA record by scoring his 79th career touchdown.

But never mind the facts -- Flaherty just wants to fearmonger, declaring that "Black mob violence is a new feature of life at college campuses around the country" with his usual cherry-picked compendium of isolated incidents he's trying to cobble into an "epidemic." He even references a "college black mob violence tour" despite the fact that he identifies no "black mob" roaming from campus to campus across the country beating up people.

In a Jan. 30 article, Flaherty did his usual blaming of "black mob riots" for incidents at a mall in Indianapolis. He writes that "Police and local media attribute the problem to 'unruly teens' – which local residents say is politically correct coded speech for black people," but he quoted no "local residents" who say that.

In fact, the local paper did point out that the incidents at the mall are "almost all involving juveniles" -- telling everyone except Flaherty that it's a youth problem, not a black problem.

And on Jan. 19, Flaherty latched onto a case in which the city of Chicago has agreed to pay millions to the family of a white woman who had been taken into custody for causing a disturbance at an airport but later released -- despite exhibiting signs of mental illness -- into a crime-infested black neighborhood, where she was sexually assaulted and fell from a 7th-story window, leaving her incapacitated.

Because the victim is white and her alleged perpetrators are black, Flaherty stopped his investigation right there and declares this "racial violence" even though he offers no evidence that race was a driving factor behind any of the events that occurred.

But who needs facts when there's race-baiting to be done? Not Colin Flaherty. In one article, he asserted that "People who say racial violence is 'random' either do not know what the word means, or they are not telling the truth." Of course, by portraying random incidents as an "epidemic," Flaherty isn't telling the truth either. Not to mention not knowing what "random"means.

The big list

In the tradition of WND's ongoing obsession with (female) teacher-student sex, which includes a continually updated "Big List" of stories about same, WND's race-baiting obsession has been given the same treatment.

On Sept. 19, Flaherty debuted his own big race-baiting list, with his usual excuse that he's doing the work "the media" won't:

America is the midst of an epidemic of racial mob violence and the media refuses to report it.

In my book, “White Girl Bleed a Lot,” I documented hundreds of examples of black mob violence in more than 70 cities big and small throughout the country.

Many of the episodes are on YouTube. I also documented how the media and public officials ignore, condone, excuse and even lie about this wave of lawlessness.

Despite a growing mountain of evidence, some still deny this problem exists. (Curiously, the same people who deny the problem are always the first to explain it away.)

So here are the links to racial mob violence throughout the country, following the organization of the chapters in my book: Some by city, some by theme, i.e. racial violence against Asians, “gays,” Jews, women and others.

I followed up many of the links with phone calls or emails to confirm the racial nature of the attacks and lawlessness.

Many of the individual links are definitive. Treat the others as clues that are part of an investigative package that help us determine the racial quality of the mayhem. And how public officials and media react to it.

Of course, WND claimed that teacher-student sex was an "epidemic" too, using the same desperate cherry-picking tactics to falsely suggest links that don't exist. All Flaherty has done is document instances in which blacks are involved in crimes, ignoring crimes by all other races -- the very epitome of race-baiting.

And some of the stories to which he links don't appear to be racially driven at all. For instance, one story about a fight involving football teams was apparently driven by one coach sending threatening text messages to opposing players. That's "black mob" violence? In Flaherty's world it is.

It's interesting that WND now considers "black mobs" to be the same kind of threat as teacher-student sex.

Dragging Obama in

As befits a website whose pain agenda is bashing President Obama at every possible opportunity, Flaherty even tried to drag Obama in to his race-baiting rhetoric in an Oct. 3 column:

And now for a few words from our commander in chief:

“And most of the ministers here know that those riots didn’t erupt overnight; there had been a ‘quiet riot’ building up in Los Angeles and across this country for years.

“If you had gone to any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or Hampton – you would have found the same young men and women without hope, without miracles and without a sense of destiny other than life on the edge – the edge of the law, the edge of the economy, the edge of family structures and communities.”

Thank you, Mr. President.

You may recognize these words as part of the newly re-discovered video of a speech Barack Obama made to black ministers in 2007. They sure answer a lot of questions.

[...]

But President Obama is one of the few to look racial violence right in the eye and tell us what it is all about, without flinching: Blacks are angry because racist white people are holding them back.

Funny that Flaherty didn't tell his readers about that. That would have contradicted his message that all black people are violent thugs, and he clearly can't have that. Indeed, Flaherty quickly pivoted to keeping up his black-people-are-scary obsession, repeating purported tweets from "black people promising violence if the election does not turn out they way they want it." He concluded: "No matter if you want to explain it, or justify it, or prepare for it, promises of even more racial violence are good to know."

Kill 'em all

In a July 29 article, Flaherty revealed his solution for dealing with all the scary black people he's been fearmongering about: Be prepared to kill them. No, really:

Jeremy Schenkel felt safe – right up to the moment he came face to face with one of the dozens of violent black mobs that terrorized Philadelphia last summer.

Schenkel survived the ensuing assault with no major broken bones. A few minutes later, the mob’s next victim was not so fortunate: They left him beaten, bloody and unconscious.

Roger McBride and Lulu Campbell did not want to depend on luck. They used a gun. It may have saved their lives. It certainly kept them from harm.

They are just two of the more than 100,000 people who last year defended themselves with guns when luck was not enough.

Remember, Flaherty portrays blacks only as mob-prone thugs who are out to rob and/or kill you. Therefore, he appears to be giving license to shoot any black who looks even vaguely menacing.

Flaherty added: No one knows how often guns are used for self defense. The Cato Institute says anywhere from 100,000 to one million times a year. But of course, the work of author John Lott is the best place to go for more of this kind of information."

In fact, Lott's research methods are suspect, and he has pushed numerous discredited claims.

Flaherty plays dumb

Flaherty's general response to accusations of race-baiting is to play dumb. He wrote a column in response to Salon's Pareene, in which he pretended he's not actually race-baiting:

I also write about 20 black people who beat up a white woman at a park:

“He also seems to intentionally elide the stated motive for the attack, which wasn’t anti-white animus but a missing pair of sunglasses.”

Note the word “seems” – a word I never use. Something happened and I confirmed it. Or I did not write it. There is no seems.

I do not say the attack was anti-white. I describe the attackers as a mob of black people as part of a pattern of dozens of such attacks in Minneapolis. I don’t do the mob minding-reading trick, so I do not speak to motivation. But I do keep my eyes open and watch what happens. It is called reporting.

Given that pretty much the entire oeuvre of Flaherty's work is about blacks gathering in mobs and committing crimes, most of them against whites -- and ignoring violence caused by those of other races -- the implication that the blacks are anti-white is built in. It's just silly for Flaherty to pretend that's not the point.

And then, later in his column, Flaherty again brought up "racial violence" -- thus reinforcing his point that blacks beating up whites is all about being "anti-white."

Flaherty played even dumber in a Oct. 26 WND column headlined "The psychos from Salon" -- a phrase he repeats in his opening paragraph, thus immediately surrendering any moral high ground to any argument he would go on to make. He claimed that "Salon has ganged up with the Guardians of the Liberal Universe known as the Southern Poverty Law Center to say that I am peddling White Nationalism."

In fact, all Salon did is reprint an SPLC article about Flaherty, which notes that Flaherty went on a "white nationalist" radio show to promote his work and that "Several articles from his WND series have been picked up by American Renaissance, a white nationalist hate group that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites."

Flaherty again insisted he's not a racist nor a "white nationalist," insisting that "Their only evidence of me peddling 'White Nationalist propaganda' is me saying I was not a White Nationalist." But he didn't explain his obsession with "black mob violence" or express any concern that his work has found an audience in the "white nationalist" circles he purports to abhor. He also didn't why he chose to appear on a "white nationalist" radio show, where he must have known his views would find a receptive audience.

Flaherty also failed to mention that the SPLC debunked his and WND's assertion that so-called "black mob violence" is being ignored by the media (the subtitle of Flaherty's self-published book):

As it happens, the “liberal media” has had much to say about the subject of violent “flash mobs” consisting of mostly black youths – particularly after several members of a such a group were arrested for attacking white people at 2011’s Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee.

The New York Times, which WND frequently holds up as a leading light of the “liberal media” conspiracy, has repeatedly covered (for instance, here and here) violent flash mobs consisting of black youths whose targets were primarily white people and their property.

So has The Root, a blog owned by the Washington Post­ that examines news “from an African-American perspective.” There, columnist Nsenga Burton wrote approvingly of a message delivered by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who is black and who said the mostly black teens who formed a series of mobs that wrought havoc on his city in 2010 and 2011 were “damaging the race.”

In June, We Are Respectable Negroes, a left-leaning blog that specializes in tackling sensitive racial issues, published two pieces on the issue of “black youth mob violence” (here and here) and the tricky politics of addressing it in writing. So, for that matter, did Hatewatch’s own Robert Steinback, in a blog post published a week after the attack in Milwaukee.

Flaherty concluded:

So here I stand. Willing to be judged by what I have written and said. Not who heard it. Not what it appears to mean.

What it is.

What I cannot figure out from Salon and SPLC is this: Are they unhappy with me for being wrong?

If so, show me. It should be simple.

Or are they mad at me for being right?

How about being mad at Flaherty for his strategic obtuseness in pretending that his fearmongering about "black mob violence" isn't something that those who hate black people -- like, say, people who listen to a "white nationalist" radio show" -- would find appealing? Or did the prospect of selling copies of his self-published book to a core audience trump any desire not to marginalize himself?

But then, he's already being published by WND, so not only is he already marginalized, it's automatically assumed that he's not telling the truth. Those are big hurdles to clear, no matter how much race-baiting Flaherty engages in.

And that's why it's called race-baiting, folks.