03/20/15

The Ferguson Hoax and Media Truth-telling

You know the standards of the media have hit rock bottom when a liberal commentator makes news for telling the truth. Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post and MSNBC has become a media star for his belated recognition of the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie out of Ferguson, Missouri. Better late than never, except for the fact that this liberal narrative was always in dispute. There was never any legitimate reason to believe that Police Officer Darren Wilson had simply fired on Michael Brown for no reason.

The appropriate reaction to Capehart’s Damascus Road conversion to the truth should be: What took you so long? And what will you do to make sure you never fall for such a vicious lie again?

Don Irvine, the chairman of Accuracy in Media, notes in his blog on the AIM website that Capehart admitted the narrative was wrong after the Department of Justice found Wilson’s side of the story to be true. Capehart said, “What DOJ found made me ill.” Irvine commented, “I would be ill too if I had helped push a false narrative that gave fuel to the riots in Ferguson that have cost businesses and taxpayers millions of dollars, and ruined the career of Officer Wilson.”

The people who should be ill are those who depend on Capehart and others like him for the truth. Capehart is just trying to recover some of the credibility he never had in the first place.

Those of us who don’t take Capehart and his ilk seriously as arbiters of truth are watching this celebration of his one-time truth-telling as an example of how, for much of the media, lies and distortions are the standard fare. Otherwise, why would telling the truth be so controversial?

But this case is much more than a few liberal commentators like Capehart taking the side of dishonesty and then waking up, months later, to what actually happened.

Colin Flaherty, an award winning reporter and author of Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry: The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it, says that what happened in Ferguson was a carefully orchestrated hoax. He notes how in an amazing turnabout, the false claims about an unprovoked murder of a young black man became complaints about too many traffic tickets for black people.

“We now know the Ferguson riots were all about racist traffic tickets and not the relentless white racism and violence that killed yet another black person,” Flaherty notes. “The greatest bait and switch of our generation and few reporters even seemed to notice. Why would they? They are used to it by now.

“First they told us about ‘hands up, don’t shoot.’ When that turned out to be a lie, they told us about the Gentle Giant. It continued for months, one lie after another, each discarded, replaced and sometimes recycled.” Flaherty reminds us of several of the lies. We were told that Michael Brown was shot in the back, that he was minding his own business, and trying to surrender.

Flaherty adds, “The racial grievance industry and their beards in the press put on and took off each lie like a cheap suit. Cute kids made viral videos with the ‘hands up don’t shoot’ pose, and reminded white people of their relentless racism. Members of Congress followed from the floor of the House.

“The President talked about racists in Ferguson at the United Nations. The parents of Michael Brown were honored guests at the gala dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus. The President greeted them from the podium during his keynote speech to extended applause. Then he talked about Ferguson racism.

“The Attorney General traveled to Ferguson and made [a] ‘personal promise’ that he would stand with the people of Ferguson. As long as those people were not cops.”

Flaherty goes on, “Entire cable networks repeated the lie day after day, guest after guest, promo after promo. Death. Murder. White racism. How could we not see it? Were we so blind, so immersed in white privilege, like a fish unaware of the water?”

It turned out, according to the DOJ, that Ferguson was all about traffic tickets. “Funny: At the time, no one mentioned the traffic tickets that now stand with the firehoses and police dogs of Selma as icons of racist oppression,” Flaherty notes.

The facts were such that the Attorney General had to grudgingly admit what many others had been saying from day one. “The facts of the death and the fairy tale that followed were all concocted, spoon fed to a willing press corps that did nothing but ask for more,” he points out.

Then, suddenly, in another diversion from the essential truth of what happened, the media picked up on another narrative—that blacks were the victims of too many traffic tickets. “The day after the Attorney General’s confession, the manufactured outrage of Chris Cuomo of CNN was on full display as he and the Brown family attorney railed against the injustice of too many traffic tickets,” commented Flaherty.

The media moved on to another issue, without bothering to emphasize how wrong they had been in the months before. This is the performance of a media that promotes and even prefers lies over the truth. The lies, after all, gin up racial controversy and ratings.

Flaherty asks: what about the CNN anchors who were holding the “Hands up, don’t shoot” signs on the air?

That’s a good question indeed. These included what we called a prominent example of the “fake conservatives” in the media, such as when Margaret Hoover joined her fellow CNN panelists in a “Hands up, don’t shoot” display based on the fiction that Brown was surrendering to the police when he was shot.

Hoover has written a book titled, American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party. This self-described conservative thinks she has the answer to saving the Republican Party. She engaged in that display despite the fact that she said the narrative had been discredited because of witness testimony from the grand jury.

So Hoover engages in something she knows to be untrue, simply because it is the fashionable thing to do. What does this say about her ethical standards? “As a reform Republican, who works for the GOP to broaden its base and reach new constituencies, I see no contradiction between supporting law enforcement and the policy solutions highlighted by these protesters,” Hoover says.

The “protesters” were not highlighting “policy solutions,” but a deadly and false narrative about alleged police violence. She could have told the truth. Instead, she participated on the air in a display of a false narrative.

Why doesn’t she have the decency to apologize? Why doesn’t CNN apologize?

Flaherty also wonders why, after the hoax was exposed, we didn’t hear one apology from the media. It’s because our media have no standards of ethical behavior and conduct. Instead, the media went on with their business, acting as if traffic tickets “justified all the rioting, vandalism, fire-bombing, looting, assaulting, attacks on police, gunfire and other mayhem in and out of Ferguson.”

The praise for Capehart for eventually telling the truth may be one way the media can attempt to atone for their sins in this coverage. But it’s not good enough.

01/7/15

Stonewall is not Selma

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

President Obama has celebrated anti-police riots at a New York City gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, saying, “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma and Stonewall…”

With the new film “Selma” opening on Friday, Obama’s claim deserves some serious scrutiny from the media. In Selma in 1965, protesters were met with force and violence from the police. Martin Luther King, Jr. had led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators from Selma, Alabama to the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. At Stonewall in 1969, gay protesters waged war on the police. Obama apparently can’t see the difference. (Seneca Falls is the name of the city in New York that served as the location for an 1848 conference on the rights of women in society.)

Our forebears were rioting homosexuals at a bar waging a war on the police? That’s what Obama is saying. What’s more, he’s comparing homosexuals fighting the police to blacks marching for their rights, including the right to vote.

The truth, as the video “From Selma to Stonewall” shows, is that the homosexual demands for political power based on their sexual needs and desires were far different than black people peacefully seeking their civil rights through protests and demonstrations. “Gay is not the new black,” notes the narrator, Eric Holmberg.

What’s more, in 1969 Stonewall was a location for men known as chicken hawks wanting sex with underage boys. Some of the homosexuals were, indeed, harassed by law enforcement. But the police who raided the place were also getting complaints about homosexuals having sex on the streets and in public bathrooms, and their use of illegal drugs.

Nevertheless, the date of the raid and the riots, June 28, 1969, is now “celebrated” as a “gay pride” event.

The far-left view, which has been embraced by Obama, is that violence can be a necessary part of progressive “change,” and that the Stonewall riots were a milestone on the road to equality.

In the case of the riots in Ferguson, the latest example of progressive change, recent documents obtained by Judicial Watch show high-level Justice Department involvement. Judicial Watch reported that the documents “suggest that the [Justice Department] unit deployed to Ferguson took an active role in working with those fomenting unrest and demanding the prosecution of police officer [Darren] Wilson. As indicated by their own activities, the CRS [Community Relations Service] agents were not there to impartially advance the broad public interest. Instead, we learned from the documents that the CRS made every effort to advance a political agenda in tandem in special interests whose only goal was to stir up racial unrest.”

So while we face foreign threats of violence, our own Justice Department stirs things up domestically. In New York City, that has meant the murder of two police officers.

The complete story of the “Ferguson rebellion,” as the Marxists call it, has yet to be written. Meanwhile, under Obama’s direction, the National Park Service is actually designating the Stonewall Inn as a National Historic Landmark, saying, “Stonewall is nationally significant because it is associated with events that outstandingly represent the struggle for civil rights in America.”

These attacks on police are celebrated as “progress” on the road of Marxist dialectical change. So perhaps the Ferguson riots will also become the scene of a national historic landmark.

We had noted back in 2009 in our piece titled, “Obama Celebrates Anti-Police ‘Gay’ Riots,” that “Several police officers trying to enforce the law at the sleazy establishment [Stonewall] were injured by violent homosexuals.” Police had to defend themselves and the community against violent protesters.

Police reports say that one of the victims was a police officer “treated at nearby Saint Vincent’s Hospital after being bitten on the right wrist by a Stonewall rebel.” One officer was beaten about the face with an “unknown object,” one was hit in the eye and injured, and another was shoved and kicked.

Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced earlier this year “a new theme study to identify places and events associated with the story of LGBT Americans for inclusion in the parks and programs of the National Park Service.” She made the announcement outside the Stonewall Inn. This was followed, on June 10, by a National Park Service “scholars roundtable” regarding this initiative.

Jewell declared at the event, “I had a great day, one of the best days in my 14 months or so in this chair about 10 days ago. That was at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village when we announced the National Park Service’s undertaking this theme study. It was a great day.”

Tim Gill joined Jewell at the Stonewall event. He is the founder of Quark, Inc., a computer software company worth $500 million. The Gill Foundation, which now claims assets of $260 million, has been described as the largest funder of gay and lesbian causes in the United States.

Gill is also the major financial supporter of the National Park Service campaign to “celebrate” the riots at Stonewall, and find other places to designate as critical to the homosexual struggle. The study is called a “public-private partnership,” with funding provided by the Gill Foundation through the National Park Foundation.

How far will the recognition of “gay rights” go? Just a few doors down from the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York City is a place that sells various sexual devices, blindfolds, handcuffs, and even a cage for one’s sexual “partner.” So-called “leather pride” is a prominent aspect of homosexual rights today. A few doors down is a “New Age” shop with crystals, incense, and books about witches. In the same vicinity is a “head shop” featuring marijuana smoking devices.

The life and times of Harry Hay, a communist agitator for homosexual rights and “man-boy love,” could receive a special designation as well.

A “Spirit of Stonewall” proclamation was issued in 1994 arguing that “man-boy love” had to be recognized as an important part of homosexual history and conduct. Hay, the founder of the modern gay rights movement and member of the Communist Party, was one of the signers. Hay had been upset that sexual abusers of children were not permitted to march in the regular gay pride parade.

The North American Man-Boy Love Association celebrates his contributions to their “struggle.” NAMBLA calls them “intergenerational relationships.”

The National Historic Landmark Nomination form for the Stonewall Inn notes that Hay had spoken of the “magnificent Stonewall Rebellion [which] erupted here in New York City…revealing in a flash our next new concept…gay—as a socially viable collective identity.” It refers to Hay’s demonstration for adult-child sex as merely an “alternative march” in 1994.

But Hay is not alone in the homosexual rights movement for his support of sex with children.

On October 10, 2009, Obama mentioned Stonewall, as well as his “great friend and supporter, Terry Bean,” a co-founder of the major homosexual lobby, the Human Rights Campaign. Obama referred to “the story of the Stonewall protests, when a group of citizens—(applause)—when a group of citizens with few options, and fewer supporters stood up against discrimination and helped to inspire a movement.”

Bean has since taken a leave of absence from the Human Rights Campaign after he was arrested on sexual abuse charges involving sex with a minor.

Charles C. Johnson of GotNews reports that through the Charles M. Holmes Foundation, Bean financed a film called “Dream Boy,” described as a gay, love story about a shy high school kid who gets seduced by his neighbor and school pal. We confirmed that the foundation, which Bean chairs, lists an investment in Dream Boy LLC in its 2010 income tax return, and that Dream Boy LLC was the registered agent for the film when it was featured at a 2008 “Outfest” homosexual film festival. The film was rated R for sexual content, with some violence, including a rape involving teens.

The Holmes Foundation is based on assets accumulated by homosexual pornographer Charles M. Holmes, a friend of Bean who died of AIDS and owned Falcon Studios, which is said to be the world’s largest producer of “high quality gay male videos.”

The Bean arrest has put the focus back on the fact that the idea of having sex with children, in addition to anti-police violence, has been part of the homosexual rights movement in the United States all along. This is what “Stonewall” has come to represent.

Obama wants the taxpayers to sponsor this “celebration” of perversion.

Our first president, George Washington, who court-martialed sodomites and kicked them out of the revolutionary army, must be turning over in his grave.

Considering how the Obama administration regards Stonewall, it is not unreasonable to assume that the location of the “Ferguson rebellion,” as the communists call it, will be designated in the next two years as a national historic landmark. Perhaps the actual location will be a looted or burned-out building.

It will signal yet another phase in the fundamental transformation of the United States.

The new Republican Congress has the opportunity to stop official historical recognition for a gay bar that featured an anti-police riot. But will any GOP House or Senate member challenge Obama’s version of history?