All but two of the ten victims
. . . interviewed were white (one was black and was Latino), and all of the players were black. 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 One Dutchtown woman, agreeing to speak on the condition that her name not be published, says police caught her son, who is white, playing Knockout King. . . .
“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.”
How could Torres read this article and yet still come to the conclusion that the assaults are on the rise and that “most” of them involve black assailants and white or asian victims? In his defense,
other pundits have drawn the same conclusion, despite the lack of evidence.
Of course, there
are some things we can confidently say about these crimes: “Most criminologists and youth experts agree that unprovoked attacks by teenagers on strangers are a real, if extremely rare, phenomenon,” notes Tucker. What’s more, unquestionably these attacks are horrid and inhumane, Mark Steyn is right that these perpetrators lack a basic moral fortitude, the guilty parties must be apprehended and punished, and the public should be warned about the realities of random violent crime. And we might even admit that
some of these assaults appear to have been hate crimes. None of these claims are objectionable because
we have evidence for them.
What we don’t have evidence for is the claim that this “game” is becoming increasingly popular or that it is part of a larger problem of black mob violence which the media is ignoring. To support such absurd claims we need to turn elsewhere, away from the experts and the data, to a man who has made a name for himself peddling a book which purports to show that a covert race war is being waged by blacks against whites all across the country, and the knockout game is just one weapon in their arsenal.
Before almost anyone else was talking about the “knockout game,” Colin Flaherty was reporting on it and other incidences of what he calls “black mob violence” for WorldNetDaily, the notoriously deceptive, far-right news and opinions site. His schtick is simple: every time he finds a report of black “mob” violence or black on white violence, he writes about it. He’s compiled many of these incidences into his book,
White Girl Bleed A Lot, which is ranked #1,455 under “Books” at Amazon as of Sunday evening, 24th of November. Its high ranking is undoubtedly due to the press he’s been getting.
Hannity had him on his radio show. And Thomas Sowell’s article on the knockout game, which was published in the
New York Post and the
National Review Online, cites Flaherty and repeats much of the WND author’s rhetoric about the national epidemic of racial violence that the media has covered up. This isn’t too surprising, since Sowell’s
original review of the book was actually published on the NRO’s website, where he gave the book high praise. His book has also received praise from Allen West, David Horowitz, and American Thinker.
What’s surprising about all the positive press Flaherty has received is that his articles purporting to prove this epidemic of black racial violence are incredibly, basically absurd. And that absurdity, the lengths Flaherty is willing to go to support his assertion about the secret race war can really only be interpreted as bigotry. Flaherty deceives his readers to sell his book, peddling the classic white fear of the savage, violent, black man, mixed in with a little contemporary rhetoric about how the “liberal,” politically correct media is covering up for black thugs. This narrative fits nicely into the larger perception that Obama has created a nation of entitled, lazy, and violent blacks, which
I have written about before.
The most basic flaw in his argument is that his entire project is one big stacked evidence fallacy. If you only cite examples of black crime, of course you’ll conclude that there’s a national racial crime wave! Using that “logic” I can prove that any group is waging a secret race war (it is interesting to note that
Robert Spencer of JihadWatch uses a very similar method to argue that Muslims are dangerous). On top of that egregious error, Flaherty entirely ignores all other characteristics of the crimes: social class, education, setting; nothing else matters except race to him. Any respectable criminologist would scoff at such a methodology, not because they want to be politically correct, but because it’s a gross reduction of the factors that
actually contribute to crime. Next, Flaherty fails to recognize that correlation does not equal causation. So, because a black person commits a violent crime, his blackness
must have caused it, in Flaherty’s logic. And
because a black party got out of hand, it’s a “race riot.” Yes, that’s right, because the partiers were black, it was a “race” riot. Because “black” is a race. Makes perfect sense, right?
When the media doesn’t mention that a violent crime was committed by a black person, that’s evidence of a cover up for Flaherty.
In one article, he describes calling and emailing the police to try to learn the racial makeup of a party that turned into a “mob”:
“What happened? Was this a case of black mob violence?”
No reply. I get that a lot. It is a red flag.
So, he called the police and explicitly asked if an incident was “black mob violence,” and when he got no reply, it was confirmation to him that the police were hiding the truth. My guess is that in most of these cases, the media and police are silent about the race of the perpetrators because “race” isn’t really a factor in the crimes.
Flaherty regularly stacks and exaggerates the evidence (also see
here, or
here, or
here). Colin Flaherty and his project have been cited repeatedly to support the claim that the “knockout game” is really about racial violence against whites. He’s been cited to this end not just in far-right publications like WND, or FrontPageMag, but in the National Review Online, one of the most respected conservative journals, and one that I like to recommend. His conspiracy is extremely racist, as Flaherty reduces everything down to the color of the criminal’s skin, regardless of the facts. He consistently distorts the truth in order to portray black people as the savage, animalistic, and Other.
We need to be honest and accurate about these crimes, neither sharing the hysteria and racial fear-mongering nor trivializing the reality of these crimes. This isn’t easy to balance. We have the right to be concerned about random violence and the authorities have the responsibility to protect us and prosecute violent criminals. But we also have the responsibility to tell the truth about our neighbor and the world.
Further resources:
For more on this “trend,” I highly recommend
John H. Tucker’s longform piece from 2011 and this
interview with Dr. Jeffrey A. Butts.