Mugged (37 page)

A month later, Rachel Weiner warned in the
Huffington Post
: “As America’s first black president-elect, Obama is a walking provocation to racists everywhere.” Secret Service agents, she said, were “suddenly the only thing standing between the free world and catastrophe.” Her evidence was a man-on-the-street saying “some idiot out there’s going to put a bullet in that silver-tongued devil and then there’ll be a race war.”
¹²

Never has so much hysteria been experienced by so many, based on so little.

Much was made of Obama’s getting Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in history.
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich wrote about the fear that Obama’s “very presence unleashes the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King.” He then stated ominously: “After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history—in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.”
¹³

Similarly, columnist Leonard Pitts announced: “No other presidential candidate, no matter his or her polarizing positions, has felt it necessary to seek protection from the Secret Service. But last week we learned that Obama has sought and will receive that protection, the only candidate ever to do so this early in the process.”
¹⁴

ABC News reported that it had “learned that because of an undisclosed threat or threats, plural, the U.S. Secret Service is providing new protection for only one candidate, Senator Barack Obama.” Senator Dick Durbin—who was among those requesting protection for Obama—told ABC that the extra security probably had to do with race.
¹⁵
If he was the one requesting it, didn’t he know?

In the
New York Times
articles on the “hushed” worry about Obama’s safety, the paper also noted that “Mr. Obama has had Secret Service agents surrounding him since May 3, the earliest a candidate has ever been provided protection.”
¹⁶

Nine months after Obama’s Secret Service protection had begun, ABC again reminded viewers: “Last May, Senator Barack Obama…was issued a full-time Secret Service detail, an unusual event so early in the election season, but one that reflected the potential threat against him.”
¹⁷

In January 2009, an article in
Slate
said, “Barack Obama received Secret Service protection earlier than any other candidate in history because of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘the historic nature of the campaign’ (i.e., the fact that he is a black guy).”
¹⁸

None of this was true. The reason Obama’s Secret Service protection started so early was not because he was black. It had nothing to do with the ghosts of Lincoln and King. It was because campaigns start earlier these days. Hillary Clinton already had Secret Service protection as the wife of an (impeached) ex-president. Obama declared he was running for president on February 10, 2007. Three months later, he got Secret Service protection.

Reagan announced he was running for president on November 13, 1979. You know when he got Secret Service protection? The very same day. And you want to know why? For the exact same reason Obama got it: He was a major party candidate and he asked for it.
¹⁹

Drama queen, thy name is liberal.

In an interview with South Dakota’s
Argus Leader
newspaper in May 2008, Hillary explained why she was not dropping out of the Democratic primaries, despite angry demands from MSNBC hosts that she do so. She said: “You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”
²⁰

A normal person would read that and see that Hillary was pointing out that primaries had often continued well into June, citing her husband’s
case as well as a famous historic event that everyone would remember happened during June primaries.

Liberals would have been happier if a Republican had said it, but Hillary would do. It was just the provocation they had been waiting for, giving them an opening for another gusher about the dire threat facing a black man running for president in America. (One would think that Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian nationalist who shot RFK, would more likely be a campaign contributor to Obama than his assailant.)

There were hundreds of articles about Hillary’s monstrous gaffe, although she had said the same thing a few months earlier to
Time
magazine without anyone raising an eyebrow. But this time, the Obama campaign struck, wailing about fears surrounding his historic candidacy. Within hours,
Newsday
cited an Obama staffer saying Hillary was “done” and reported that Obama’s supporters interpreted the Clinton remark “as a suggestion the Illinois senator was a potential target.”
²¹
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Hillary’s remark, was “unfortunate and has no place in this campaign.”
²²

The
New York Times’
s Bob Herbert said the comment was “tasteless,” “purely self-serving” and sent “a shiver of dread through millions.”
²³
Also in the
Times
, Roger Cohen called Hillary’s innocuous reference to the date of Kennedy’s assassination, “stomach-turning.”
²⁴
The
Washington Post
’s Eugene Robinson called her remark, “ungenuine, unprincipled and insane.”
²⁵

Hillary was forced to apologize and, best of all, her remark led to a “special comment” from the gigantic fruit, suitable for framing.

With less melodrama, this was also the position of the same mainstream media that had been pushing the Obama assassination scenario from the moment he announced his candidacy.

And on it went, until finally, on December 3, 2009, the head of the Secret Service provided the one element that had been missing from all these maniacal reports: actual facts. At a Homeland Security hearing, Secret Service director Mark Sullivan was forced to cough up the truth while being browbeaten by Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton about the unique danger facing President Obama:

The threats against Obama were not up. He was getting the same number of threats as presidents Clinton and Bush had.

It appeared that the principal source of false information about the rise of racist hate groups in response to Obama was Mark Potok of the SPLC.
²⁸
Every few months, he would issue the same news bulletin about increased chatter from white hate groups regarding Obama, and the mainstream media would run all-new stories about racism on the rise against the first black president.

The media so dearly wanted to believe Potok’s reports that they never bothered running a simple Internet search to see if they were true. It was like the explosion of heterosexual AIDS we kept hearing about in the 1980s. It was always right around the corner, but thirty years later, we’re still waiting for that big heterosexual outbreak.

Steve Gilbert of the Sweetness & Light blog tracked the media’s endless repetition of Potok’s claims throughout Obama’s candidacy and presidency, running their articles next to charts showing that hate group activity on the Web had grown not one iota. Thus, in June 2008, the
Washington Post
reported that Obama’s clinching of the Democratic primaries had “sparked an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet,” citing the SPLC.

While the
Post
went the extra mile to interview the racist leaders boasting about their rising popularity, the newspaper didn’t trouble to check their actual Web site traffic. Sweetness & Light did, and it turned out that in addition to being racist nuts, white supremacists are liars.

There was no spike in traffic to their Web sites. In fact, Stormfront’s traffic had been on the decline in the months before the
Post
was reporting a burst of activity.
²⁹
As Gilbert said, “according to Google Trends online, interest from regular users in ‘white supremacy’ has remained about the same over the last year, [i]n contrast to our news media, whose references to ‘white supremacy’ have spiked twice.”
³⁰

A few months later, in October 2008,
USA Today
claimed: “Supremacist groups are on the rise.” It, too, cited the Southern Poverty Law Center.
³¹
Sweetness & Light again posted charts from Alexa showing absolutely no growth in hate group activity on the Web—at least for all those Web sites big enough to be ranked at all.

Then again, in January 2009, CNN reported that: “Hate crimes experts and law enforcement officials are closely watching white supremacists across the country as Barack Obama prepares next week to be sworn in as the first black president of the United States.”
³²
SPLC’s Mark Potok was cited for the claim that “leaders of these groups are frustrated by Obama’s win.”

Although CNN acknowledged that there was “no known organized effort to express opposition to Obama’s rise to the presidency,” it said that the Ku Klux Klan had called for members to wear black armbands. As many as one household did so.

Unaware of the many Internet traffic tracking Web sites, CNN reported that it was “difficult to pinpoint how many people subscribe to white supremacist views, because the Internet allows people to follow the movement under the cloak of anonymity.” Again, Sweetness & Light posted Alexa charts showing the white supremacist Web sites flatlining.

In June 2009, Potok was on MSNBC’s
The Ed Show
, again warning about increasing white supremacist activity. “We’ve seen a lot of activity,”
he said, “really in the last just half year or so. I think the election of Obama has definitely spurred some people to become very angry. I think it’s fairly clear, in fact, that this shooter at the Holocaust Museum was angered in large part because of Obama’s election.”
³³

The Holocaust Museum shooter was James von Brunn, who hated Bush, hated McCain and hated “neoconservatives.” He was a 9/11 “truther” and detested Christianity as much as what he called “the Holocaust religion.”
³⁴
He is what is known in professional law enforcement circles as a “nut.”

Most of the hate group Web sites repeatedly cited by Potok—and recycled in the mainstream media—didn’t even have enough visitors to register on Web site trackers. The two that did—Stormfront and the Ku Klux Klan—remained steady or declined since Obama first announced his candidacy.