Shifting sands of Trayvon case: Now, it's not about race

Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, who has done better work on the Trayvon-George brouhaha than most, writes:

No one can deny the legitimacy and urgency of the points raised by [Shelby] Steele, [Bill] O’Reilly and [Juan] Williams. Black-on-black violent crime is a national disgrace — all you have to do is take a look at the numbers. 

What lacks legitimacy, however, is the underlying intent of the Steele-O’Reilly-Williams argument, and that is to somehow strip the Martin case of its standing as a national preoccupation — of civil rights leaders and of the media. Those folks, along with the general public, have latched onto Trayvon Martin for a combination of several compelling reasons: How could a 17-year-old kid doing nothing wrong wind up shot to death walking home from the convenience store? How could the authorities bungle the case in so many ways? Do neighborhood watch captains provide protection or menace? What’s the deal with the stand-your-ground law? 

Those issues may not have the heft of black-on-black crime. But there’s no law directing the media to obsess only over the country’s most socially pressing problem at any given point in time. The media responds to stories, and the tragic incident that went down on Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla., qualifies many times over. The more attention to this case, the better.

You'll recall how, initially, the Trayvon case was worthy of being a national whoop-tee-doo because it told us all about Race in America. But, now, as the initial clear-cut story line of evil white and innocent black has blurred and it has become apparent that the prestige press whooped up the story because anti-white hatred sells big time in modern America, the white liberals are starting to abandon the racial angle in favor of claiming that they are only interested in the case for nonracial, idiosyncratic, procedural reasons, like the four that Wemple lists. This must really peeve blacks, who continue to want the case to be all about their being oppressed.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The NBC editing "error"

Mickey Kaus has some interesting speculation on the Nameless Scapegoat (N.S.) whom NBC is blaming for that editing "error" that had George Zimmerman telling 911:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

One fascinating aspect is how little old-fashioned shoe leather reporting the prestige press has done on the whole Trayvon story. For example, why is the NBC editor still the "Nameless Scapegoat?" Surely, much of the press has the contacts to figure out that mystery within their own ranks.

Mickey explains that NBC has to walk a delicate line with their employee, and, presumably, the rest of the mainstream media has been abetting them:

As JustOneMinute‘s Tom Maguire reminded me, when you publish something so bad you face a giant adverse defamation verdict–well that’s exactly when you try not to fire the reporter or editor responsible. If you fire them, they’re likely to cut a separate deal with the plaintiff and testify in court about how sloppy your editorial practices were, how you had it in for plaintiff all along, etc. 

Zimmerman finally has a new lawyer, so now he's likely to sue NBC for defamation and/or if he goes to criminal trial, launching all sorts of motions based on prejudicial publicity. After this, and the national media claiming he used the "C" word, and all the other wrong things they put out there, can George Zimmerman get a fair trial anywhere in the U.S.? Can they move a trial to New Zealand?

But, with a libel case in the wings, things get interesting. Mickey writes:

In this case, I suspect the N.S. might have some valuable information to offer a plaintiff’s lawyer. Like how maybe there was a surge of enthusiasm at, yes, the highest levels of NBC News for turning this story into a clear cut emotional morality play (fueled by trendy social media!) and riding it to higher ratings for days, if not weeks. If you go to the March 20 Nightly News broadcast (available here) you can see NBC’s Ron Allen letting viewers imagine the racial epithet Zimmerman used for the man he was following.  Oh, wait. … 

The N.S. was reportedly a “seasoned” producer. Seasoned producers (and reporters) know what the bosses want. …

About 95% of the Trayvon brouhaha has been about racial hatred, and it would be amusing to get a court to put a legal imprimatur on that.

Another interesting legal question is whether all the deep-pocketed media can be sued for defamation for initially calling Zimmerman "white." Zimmerman's father, a judge, saw that it was very much in his son's interest, legally and politically, to not be white. That would be an interesting precedent to establish: is calling a mestizo "white" for purposes of riling up racial hatred against him an actionable slur? Lots and lots of media outlets kept calling him "white" even after his picture became available. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Talking about The Talk

The Los Angeles Times recently ran one of the many articles about The Talk that black parents in our racist society have to give their black sons to keep them from being gunned down by white racist cops:

When Martin A. Gordon talks to his 19-year-old son about the history of race relations in America, he invokes the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr.and the watershed moments of the civil rights era. It's a story of hard-won rights that fills the '60s-era activist with pride. 

Then the conversation turns urgently personal, survival its theme: On the wrong street, at the wrong time of day, he tells his son, pride might be his undoing. "I know my son can be a moment away from being killed if he acts the wrong way, if he's arrogant," Gordon said. "He started to learn about this as a child." ... 

The incident, which remains under investigation, followed the controversial shooting death of an unarmed black teen in Florida by a neighborhood watch leader. For many black parents, the shootings have given fresh relevance to a painful generations-old conversation. "The Talk," some call it.

"Certain things are a reality for him — he needed to understand that early on," Jim Collins, a longtime Pasadena resident, recalled of his conversation with his son. "The Talk is because they have to know what to do and not do." 

Parents say some version of the conversation, ubiquitous in African American life, is necessary regardless of how high they climb on the socioeconomic ladder. It is about learning to say "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" when a policeman pulls you over, no matter how unjustified the stop seems. It is about keeping your hands on the steering wheel and giving officers no cause for panic. It is about swallowing your anger and pride and coming home alive. ...

Walker said that when his grandson, now 20, was learning to drive a few years ago, he started hammering home certain realities about dealing with police. 

"I tell him one of the worst things to do is be belligerent with police," Walker said. "Whether you're right or not."

My sons aren't black, but I have given them the exactly same Talk about cops, although mine was probably less polite toward cops. I made ensure to emphasize that "Cops have guns, with which, if you piss them off or make them feel uneasy, they might kill you. The kind of people who become cops have personalities where they want to dominate others around them. (If they just wanted to save people, they could have become firemen.) So, let them. Remember, cops have guns."

When a federal agent and a deputy in plain clothes "debriefing" after serving a drug bust behind a fashionable watering hole in my neighborhood gunned down an 18-year-old violist, I couldn't find out the names of the two shooters for many months after the killing. The thick blue line had formed up pretty solid. As far as I can tell, this shooting, which is still being litigated (so far as I know) was about as ambiguous as the Trayvon Martin shooting. But the victim in my local shooting was white, so, basically, nobody cared other than friends and family in the other end of the San Fernando Valley and few locals from my end.  Media coverage was grudging and never made local TV much less the national news. 

Similarly, nobody considers it a national disgrace and tragedy, a violation of everything that Martin and Malcolm died for, that I felt the need to give The Talk to my sons. Of course, in a sane world, that would raise the question of whether our culture's obsession with black victimization doesn't, on the whole, contribute to more knuckleheaded behavior on the part of young blacks. There are a whole bunch of people in modern America, such as Josh Barro, who benefit in terms of status from punishing other people for noticing the bad behavior of young black males. With all the influential people who benefit from bad black behavior and thus encourage it and/or punish those who discourage, then, not surprisingly, we get a lot of bad black behavior. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Time to erect a Victims of Crime Memorial on the National Mall

Have you ever visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington? It's quite moving how people who lost a loved one in that war have a place -- a large, serious place set aside by the government -- to bring flowers or otherwise make a tribute in memory of their loss. 

Far more people have lost loved ones to crime over the decades, and they deserve a serious memorial on the National Mall to commemorate their tragedies. We also have a Victims of Communism Memorial, a Holocaust Museum, and and increasing number of ethnic victim remembrance sites under the names of museums. It's time for a tasteful, somber memorial to all the people whose losses disappear down the memory hole because their loved ones were random citizens brutalized by criminals. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

More Shaima Non-Shockers

ABC News, teaming with the San Diego Union-Tribune, has doing a good job on the latest Hate Hoax, this one the Million Hijab conjob over how the brutal beating murder of an Iraqi immigrant housewife, Shaima Alawadi, was the work of an anti-immigration, anti-Muslim hate killer.

[Daughter] Fatima was also distraught over her pending arranged marriage to a cousin, according to the documents. 

The investigation into Alawadi's death revealed that a neighbor reported seeing a dark-skinned teenager or 20-something man running away from Alawadi's house around the time of her death, carrying a donut-shaped cardboard box. Police searched the home of the man Fatima was found having sex with months earlier, and took items from his home as part of the investigation, according to the U-T San Diego newspaper. 

Alawadi was also planning to divorce her husband, according to a search warrant in the case. Divorce papers were found in Alawadi's car, and a relative told police Alawadi was planning to divorce husband Kassim Alhimidi and move to join her mother and siblings in Texas.

Back before the Iraq War, I explained that one reason America wasn't going to be able to turn Iraq into Switzerland was the off-the-charts level of cousin marriage in Iraq. Moreover, Muslim immigrants in Europe frequently force their daughters into arranged marriage with cousins back in the Old Country as a mean of immigration fraud. 

So, let's say, just for the sake of brain exercise, that daughter Fatima was told that if she didn't marry her cousin, there just might be an honor killing. Would having her boyfriend kill her mom qualify as pre-emptive self-defense? The defense could have Ahmad Chalabi and Dick Cheney explain the concept of pre-emptive war to the jury.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Oops, Again ...

Remember how last week the New York Times was trying to whip up a new hate crime frenzy with the headline "Iraqi Immigrants in California Town Fear a Hate Crime in a Woman’s Killing?" This was right after the NYT's analysis of how the anti-Semitic murders in Toulouse, France were due to the French being allowed to debate immigration policy.

Well, the dopier sorts of Americans have been ginning up a A Million Hoodies and Hijabs protest to tie together the whole Trayvon / Shaima meme. And, predictably, the fire-breathers in the Islamic World have taken this as another reason to hate Americans. 

Yet, the whole story, with the xenophobic racists leaving a note by the dead body of an Iraqi housewife in El Cajon, sounded implausible from the git-go, and the police were already signaling that the victim probably knew her killer. 

Well, Kristina Davis of the San Diego Union-Tribune has been doing some work and today she reported:

Records Hint Iraqi Woman's Death Not a Hate Crime 

During a search of the home and the couple’s vehicles in the hours after the attack, police found court paperwork to file for divorce in Alawadi’s Ford Explorer. The packet was not filled out, but a form requesting a court fee waiver was filled out in handwriting with Alawadi’s name, address and phone number.

That's hardly conclusive, but it sounds more plausible than the NYT's SPLCized version of the story.

There are patterns that people can notice if they let themselves. And once you let yourself notice the pattern, it's easier to notice more. For example, an awful lot of the hate crimes that make the news turn out to be hoaxes. That doesn't mean there are no such things as hate crimes, just that hate crimes like, say, Matthew Yglesias getting stomped for Walking While White is too boring and depressing to be news. The stuff that becomes big news is, typically, a noose is found in the Diversity Nook at some hyper-liberal college.

One of these days, I'm going to have to write up something on What We Can Learn from Claude Shannon about What Makes the Newspaper.

And there was some other drama in Alawdi family not long ago:

… On Nov. 3, police found [daughter] Fatima with a 21-year-old man after responding to a report of two people possibly having sex in a car, the documents state. Officers called her mother, who came to the location and picked up the girl. As they were driving away, Fatima said, “I love you, mom,” before jumping out of the vehicle onto Mollison Avenue at 35 mph. 

She was taken to a hospital with several injuries, including a possible broken arm. She refused to talk to police at the hospital but reportedly told paramedics and hospital staff that she was being forced to marry her cousin and didn’t want to.

Hey, well, what do you know, cousin marriage ... It's almost as if reality contains partly predictable repeating patterns.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Whatever happens, it's the white man's fault

From the NYT, a classic statement of how only white people possess moral and empirical agency, and everybody else today is just a puppet of how white people felt generations ago. It's not like new immigrants would be so uncouth as to believe their lying eyes about African Americans; instead, they must be picking up the white man's vibes from Jim Crow days. Blacks and Hispanics in 2012 are just automatons under the control of powerful brainwaves sent out by Lester G. Maddox from the Great Beyond.

March 31, 2012
In Florida, a Death Foretold
By ISABEL WILKERSON
Tampa, Fla. 

... Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother. 

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive. 

A study released in 2006 by Duke University on attitudes on race in Durham, N.C., a city with one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the country, found that an overwhelming majority of Latinos — 78 percent — felt they had the most in common with whites, while 53 percent of them felt they had the least in common with blacks. 

So it would make sense for those respondents to act with the same assumptions about blacks that they perceive are held by native whites. In fact the Latino respondents, many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America, actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites. Nearly 60 percent reported feeling that few or almost no blacks were hard-working or could be trusted, while only 10 percent of whites held that view. 

On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.” 

But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ” 

This uneasy coexistence has had tragic consequences in the past. A series of riots broke out in Miami in the 1980s after several black men were shot dead by Latino police officers who claimed self-defense and were later acquitted. In 1982 in Miami, a 20-year-old black man named Nevell Johnson Jr. was killed at a video arcade by a white, Cuban-born police officer. Seven years later, after a routine traffic stop in that same Miami neighborhood, a black man riding a motorcycle, Clement Anthony Lloyd, was shot dead by a Colombian-born police officer. The motorcycle then crashed; another black man who was riding on the back died the next day. 

Just last year in California, a gang of 51 people, mostly Latinos, were indicted in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, after a 15-year campaign of assaults and firebombings of African-American residents, whom they were trying to force out of the neighborhood. 

In this atmosphere, blacks are the target of the highest number of hate crimes in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — higher by a wide margin than any another group of Americans by race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability. While blacks make up 12.6 percent of the country’s population, they were 70 percent of the victims of racial hate crimes in 2010. 

WHATEVER role caste may have played in the Trayvon Martin case is unknowable, and it is far too early to tell whether Mr. Zimmerman will be arrested, tried or convicted. But that encounter unfolded in Seminole County, where Latinos have overtaken African-Americans as the dominant minority group, rising to 17 percent from 11 percent in the last decade. Blacks now make up 11 percent and whites, 66 percent. The area had a history of vigilante justice long before the new arrivals, dating back to 1920, when blacks in the nearby town of Ocoee were burned out of their homes after two black men tried to vote. 

Despite all that has gone before, there is reason for optimism. One of the great tragedies of the last century was the pitting of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe against African-Americans who had migrated from the rural South to the industrial North. Both groups were seeking the same thing and were pretty much the same people — people of the land trying to make a way for their families in forbidding and alien places. Fear, suspicion and uneven access to unions, jobs and housing kept them apart. Firebombings and white flight followed, and we are still living with the aftereffects of those divisions. 

The arrival of a new kind of immigrant to a country that has endured so much discord offers a chance for re-examination and redemption. Indeed, one of the most encouraging signs noted by Mr. Jones-Correa is that Latinos are maintaining a distinct identity and are increasingly choosing to be identified as “other” rather than black or white. “We have a history of immigrants coming to America and proving themselves as American by identifying as white,” he said. “Latinos see themselves as a third category. I think they will continue as a third position beyond the black and white rhetoric.” 

Isabel Wilkerson is a former national correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

Whatever happens,
Whites have got
Culpability,
And we have not.

P.S., the graphs used to illustrate this essay are a real hoot.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Thinking like Tom Wolfe about Trayvon and Zimmerman

So far, all we know of the last phone conversations between Trayvon Martin and his anonymous girlfriend is snatches of dialogue overseen by Martin family lawyer Benjamin Crump (which, by the way, sounds like a name chosen by Tom Wolfe for a Bonfire of the Vanities character as a Dickensian tribute). Unfiltered by Crump and under oath, what might the girlfriend have to say?

Let's try thinking like Tom Wolfe: for maximum discomfiture. Here's a possibility that might come out at, say, a trial of George Zimmerman if Crump dares put the girlfriend on the stand and expose her to cross-examination: It's hardly implausible that Trayvon Martin might have worried that this strange man was following him in the dark for homoerotic purposes, and he might have mentioned that concern to his girlfriend over the phone. 

Of course, if he did, he probably wouldn't have used the term "homoerotic purposes." 

What if Trayvon used the (heavens) "3-letter F-word" to describe Zimmerman? What if he said to her, "I'm going to punch that f__ because I hate f___?"

Chaos in the courtroom ...

Of course, then we would be treated to learned disquisitions on how gaybashing is actually okay as long as the bashee isn't actually gay; or that what Trayvon actually meant was that he wanted to punch that pedophile and pedophile-bashing is A-OK.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Google News: "Trayvon" and "Omar Thornton"

Google News is a great tool for quantifying the Narrative. 

If you type in in "Trayvon Martin" into Google News (not overall Google, just into Google News), you get 34,700 results. So, that's our baseline.

Type in "Emmett Till" and you get 430 hits. Emmett Till is not as breaking news as Trayvon Martin, but he's by no means ignored in the press

Type in "James Byrd" and you get 146 hits.

Type in "Omar Thornton" and you get ... 1. It's just kind of a fluke that Google News still has it, since the story is from 2010:

Omar Thornton: "I Killed the Five Racists" - Crimesider - CBS Newswww.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20012557-504083.html
Aug 3, 2010 – Suspect Called Family After Massacre Read more by Kevin Hayes on CBS News' Crimesider.

Actually, it was not five but eight white men that Thornton murdered and then charged with racism in his call to 911, but who can remember that far back? That was over a year and a half ago. When the Attorney General asks to hold a national conversation about race and racism, this is not what he wants to talk about: the possibility that the long-running war on white racism jumped the shark some time ago into negative marginal returns and is now causing more murder than it prevents by firing up hotheads like Omar.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

It depends on what the meaning of the word "existence" is

Naive me had always assumed from all the news reports that the news media had access to a recording of Trayvon Martin's last phone call. After all, Matt Gutman of ABC News had trumpeted back on March 20:

Trayvon Martin's Last Phone Call Triggers Demand for Arrest 'Right Now' 

A phone call from slain black teenager Trayvon Martin to his girlfriend seconds before he was shot dead by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain "blows ... out of the water" the shooter's self-defense claim and he should be arrested "right now," a lawyer for Martin's family said today. 

Attorney Benjamin Crump spoke after ABC News reported exclusively the existence of a phone call between Martin and his girlfriend, which detailed the last terrifying moments of Martin's life as he was pursued, accosted and shot dead by George Zimmerman. 

I didn't really think about it, so I just assumed from the word "existence" that the contents of the phone call were recorded by, uh, Echelon, or that kids these days have an app that puts every word of every phone call they make on their Permanent Records, or something like that. Obviously, I'm not really up on the latest technology, so I just assumed that if everybody is talking about the existence of a phone call, then it exists.

But, now, Gucci Little Piggy has pointed out that this phone call's existence is not "existence" in the sense that there's any record of what was said on the phone call other than what the girlfriend and attorney Benjamin Crump said weeks later was on the phone call. When ABC claimed:

Martin's father, Tracey Martin, and mother, Sybrina Fulton, listened to the call, along with ABC News, ashen-faced.

It may sound like they mean ABC News listened to Trayvon's last call, but, in reality, they all just listened to attorney Crump put the anonymous girlfriend through her paces for their benefit, and they weren't even allowed to watch her, just listen to her over the phone.

G.L. Piggy was wondering what the relationship between Crump and ABC's Gutman is. I suggested that he should read the sections in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities where attorney Albert Vogel, an ally of Rev. Bacon, takes reporter Peter Fallow out to lunches to feed him bits of the story.

It's called access journalism, and that's how the game is played. The cops and the D.A. have their favorite reporters, as well.

Movie stars play the game, too. If they slip up, like Tom Cruise did when he fired super-publicist Pat Kingsley and nepotistically replaced her with his amateurish sister, their media image can suddenly go from World's Greatest Guy to Manic Repressed Homosexual Cultist overnight. (If you look at Tom Cruise's actual movies, he continues to appear in consistently above-average films. All that happened was that he lost control of the access journalism game.)

G.L. Piggy points out that people shouldn't get over-invested in believing in George Zimmerman's complete innocence. There may well be evidence against him right now that is being sandbagged for use at a later juncture. That, by the way, was one of the late Andrew Breitbart's favorite tactics -- don't release everything right away. Release some of it now and then when the other side goes all in, whomp them with some more facts you already had in hand. Repeat as necessary. 

The best guidebook to how this story will play out is of course Bonfire, with Trayvon Martin as Henry Lamb. Think back to how that plot ambiguously unfolds. Is anybody completely innocent? 

Wolfe's Bonfire, by the way, is 25 years old, but nothing much ever changes. Every few years we go through another one of these re-enactments of Bonfire, like the Duke lacrosse hoax. Isn't it about time to admit that Bonfire has turned out to be, just as Wolfe bragged, the Great American Novel of our lifetime? Sure, the setting gets pushed out from NYC to some exurb in the middle of nowhere, the reporters are less alcoholic, and the Great White Defendant morphs into the Pudgy Mestizo Defendant, but the basics are here to stay. Heck, Al Sharpton is still around!

In case you are wondering, yes, the Rev. Bacon in Wolfe's novel is more or less Al Sharpton functionally, but their personalities are very different. Bacon is cold and serious, while Sharpton is very funny. Reporter Peter Fallow is not particularly Christopher Hitchens. He's more Anthony Haden-Guest, the illegitimate brother of actor / aristocrat Christopher Guest. Lawyer Albert Vogel is presumably radical leftist attorney William Kunstler. The Mayor of New York is roughly Mayor Ed Koch. The tall, rawboned explosively crazy white man who appears briefly in an early courtroom scene is likely Hunter S. Thompson.  

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Everything's a travesty with you, man

In this country of 300,000,000+, it shouldn't be too hard for the national media to come up with actual news stories to illustrate its favorite themes of White Racism, the Invalidity of Stereotypes, and so forth. And yet, when the prestige press decides to go all in on a story to Push the Narrative, like Duke Lacrosse case or Jena Six, they usually seem to wind up with another travesty, playing Walter Sobchak with poor Donnie's ashes at the end of The Big Lebowski (video).

The Trayvon Martin story was supposed to demonstrate how white people invidiously stereotype young black males and get away with murder because they are white. First, though, it turned out that George Zimmerman wasn't what most people are told to think of as white.

Then it turned out the poor Trayvon had never gotten the anti-stereotyping message himself. In fact, judging from his Twitter account, Trayvon loved stereotypes of young black males as violent, criminal, and dangerous, and was working hard to polish his own thug image.

For his Twitter handle, he chose the title of a rap song that I won't repeat (but you can listen to it here and read the lyrics here), by Kane and Abel and featuring C-Murder. According to Wikipedia, "Corey Miller (born March 9, 1971), better known by his stage name C-Murder, is an American rapper and convicted murderer."

(By the way, what's the deal with the gold foil on the teeth? I guess I'm out of touch with today's youth because I don't get that at all.)

This, the three suspensions from school, the school's suspicion of jewel thievery or fencing ... well, none of this is terribly conclusive, but it should give pause to the mainstream media's drive to rile up lynch mobs to go after the shooter. First, it suggests that Zimmerman's assessment of Trayvon as a potential burglar was, in fact, quite reasonable. He was found by his school with a backpack of silver jewelry for which he had no persuasive explanation.

Second, it adds weight to the notion that Zimmerman's version of the fatal encounter is conceivable. That doesn't mean it's wholly accurate, it just means that it doesn't sound terribly implausible.

Being a frothing at the mouth extremist, unlike the mainstream media, my view of this case has been that patience is the best advice. It reminds me of the homicide case against Michael Jackson's doctor for giving him that sleeping drug, in which the criminal justice system took over a half year to decide whether or not to arrest him. The doctor wasn't going anywhere, so what's the hurry? Get all the facts and think through the law. (I still don't know if that case was rightly decided, but I feel a little better that the authorities took their time about it and weren't stampeded into overly quick actions.)

As more facts emerge, the criminal justice system's behavior seems fairly reasonable. The myth is that the racist cops immediately let Zimmerman go due to White Privilege, but, in reality, they cuffed him and took him down to the station. There, he was questioned and the prosecutors decided that they didn't have a strong enough case to arrest him at present. Presumably, he has enough ties to the community relative to the only moderate severity of any potential charge, so he wasn't likely to go on the lam before they might change their mind.

One interesting argument I saw in an anonymous comment was the assertion that Zimmerman's father, who is some kind of judge, brought some sort of influence to bear on the prosecutors, or that at least the state listened more sympathetically to Zimmerman's story because of who his father was. I don't know of much evidence for or against this claim, one way or another, but it does not sound utterly implausible. But since it's too idiosyncratic to fit well into the main Racial Narrative that everybody is worked up over, it's been largely ignored.

What general lesson can society draw from the Trayvon case? Well, there's a win-win solution for how to get people to stop stereotyping young black males as thugs. Blacks should stop trying so damn hard to act like thugs.

P.S. A commenter writes:

"And yet, when the prestige press decides to go all in on a story to Push the Narrative, like Duke Lacrosse case or Jena Six, they usually seem to wind up with another travesty..." 

They've eaten their own dog food. On the conscious level they actually believe their message. If they didn't, they'd look hard for the extremely rare cases of actual white-on-black rape and unprovoked violence. But since they do believe the message that they're spouting, they think that white racism is everywhere and that they don't have to look hard for it at all. Almost any case that involves whites and blacks will do. And when their message is reliably contradicted by that almost-any-case, they just think that THAT's an exception.

Yes, that makes sense. Everybody is an amateur statistician, and most people behave in their personal lives like pretty accurate ones (e.g., Jesse Jackson feels relief when he discovers that the people walking behind him down a dark street are white). But a working definition of a person who feels himself elite in modern America is that he doesn't integrate what he's learned from his daily life with his understanding of public affairs. There is mundane knowledge that you use when picking out where to live or where to send your child to school, but only ignorant people apply that knowledge to thinking about what's in the news. Instead, people with class only apply to their Higher Thought the Higher Knowledge that they picked up from reading, say, To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high school.

My view, in contrast is that, as the motto of Faber College in Animal House, pointed out: "Knowledge is good." The more we know, the better for everybody, overall. There shouldn't be disreputable knowledge that's kept apart from reputable knowledge. All knowledge is good.

I've been told that the reason it's bad for me to quote the Justice Department statistics on homicide rates by race is because everybody knows that and takes that into account when it comes to public policy, so it's just rude to mention it. But I see little evidence that elites are able to take into account Justice Department statistics in their Higher Thinking without articulating them in public. Instead, we just see repeated travesties in the press.

I'd add to the commenter's point that the media wants to find examples of whites not only doing terrible things to blacks but getting away with them because of White Privilege. And that turns out to be especially hard to find in 2012, contra so much that you are told by Hollywood and the press.

For example, here is an account of the sentencing to life imprisonment of a white teen in Mississippi last week who killed a black man for racist fun. (I suspect it was also a gaybashing, but that seems to have been not emphasized, for whatever reasons). This case got a fair amount of national publicity, much more than a case of blacks killing a white for fun would have. I watch about an hour of TV per week and yet even I'd seen it on a national news show many months ago.

Nonetheless, it was ultimately unsatisfying to the prestige press. They couldn't flog it too hard because there wasn't much controversy over it. It was understood to be a horrible crime, and justice was served. So, it's ultimately another boring and depressing story about lowlifes, just with the races aligned in the approved manner.

In contrast, the Trayvon tale sounded to the mainstream media like the case they'd been dreaming of since J-school: white man kills black child in cold blood and is freed because of White Privilege! So, they fell hard for a story molded by a lawyer and pushed by Al Sharpton. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a lot more complicated and ambiguous, but by now they are all in, so they'll just have to push harder to denounce skeptics as racists. When you own the Megaphone, that's what you do.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Here we go again ...

They never learn, do they?

Just a week ago, the New York Times was explaining how the upcoming French election would be affected by how immigration-restrictionist talk had inspired that neo-Nazi to kill those Jewish kids in Toulouse.

Then, it was all about all the time how an evil white racist had hunted down and murdered in cold-blood cuddly 12-year-old Trayvon Martin. (Here's the Daily Mail's capacious account of the current state of a story that is hard to get in one piece from the American press.)

Now, splashed big on the New York Times today:

Iraqi Immigrants in California Town Fear a Hate Crime in a Woman’s Killing 

By IAN LOVETT and WILL CARLESS 

EL CAJON, Calif. — Shaima Alawadi’s family says they found the first note taped to the front door of their house on a quiet suburban street here. It said: “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist,” according to her 15-year-old son, Mohammed. 

Ms. Alawadi’s husband, Kassim Alhimidi, says he wanted to call the police. But his wife said no, insisting the note was only a child’s prank. Like many others in the neighborhood, the couple were immigrants from Iraq. In 17 years in the United States, they had been called terrorists before, he said. 

But last Wednesday, Ms. Alawadi was found in the family’s dining room by her 17-year-daughter, lying unconscious in a puddle of blood with a severe head wound. Nearby lay another threatening note, similar to the one the family found a week earlier. 

Ms. Alawadi, 32, died three days later. The police caution against jumping to conclusions, saying they are still trying to determine whether she was targeted because of her religion or ethnicity, calling that just one possibility. 

Yes, 32 minus 17 equals 15.

“At this point, we are not calling it a hate crime,” said Lt. Mark Coit of the El Cajon police. “We haven’t made that determination. We are calling it an isolated incident, because we don’t have any evidence of anything similar going on at this point.” 

Whatever the police eventually determine, the crime has shattered the sense of security for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, exposing cultural tensions and distrust that have often simmered just below the surface since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

I dunno. Maybe the El Cajon Klan did it. It could be.

On the other hand, does this sound like a normal hate crime? Compare it to a typical hate crime, such as the assault on blogger Matthew Yglesias last May: man walking alone after dark through another racial group's neighborhood gets beaten up by a couple of strangers. No notes are left.

So, does this suburban San Diego story strike you as a little dubious? The local hate crimeists don't start with say, graffiti or window-breaking, they go right to home invasion and murdering a housewife, but not raping her. And, then, instead of burning a fiery cross, they leave a note. Okay, I suppose ...

From the L.A. Times, a more cautious account:

Alawadi was discovered by the couple's 17-year-old daughter, Fatima, who also reported finding the note near her mother's bloody body. A similar note was taped to the front door several days earlier, she told police, although that note was not preserved. 

El Cajon police have not ruled out the possibility that the killing was a hate crime. But Police Chief Jim Redman also said that there is "other evidence" besides the note and that police have not determined a motive or identified a suspect or even a "person of interest." 

Redman said police are confident the killing is "an isolated incident" and not part of a campaign of violence aimed at the large Iraqi immigrant community in the suburbs east of San Diego.

Colleen Curry of ABC News is even less rabble-rousing:

Despite a hate-filled note found at the murder scene of an Iraqi mother in California, police today are emphasizing that other evidence found during the investigation has them convinced the killing was an isolated incident that poses no danger to other Iraqis. 

Police in El Cajon, Calif., said they will still look into whether the murder of 32-year-old Shaima Alawadi could be classified a hate-crime, but Police Chief James Redman said that "based on the evidence thus far, we believe this is an isolated incident." 

The beating death of the Iraqi mother of five sent shock waves through the community of El Cajon, which has one of the largest concentrations of Iraqi immigrants in America. Twitter and Facebook users created hashtags and pages in Alawadi's honor, comparing the targeting of Alawadi for wearing a hijab to that of Florida teen Trayvon Martin for wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Police, however, have not said that Alawadi was targeted for wearing a hijab. 

"I want to stress there is other evidence in this case that we are looking at, and the possibility of a hate crime is just one of the aspects of this investigation," Redman said today.

The ABC News report made it clearer what Chief Redman's statement that he believed this was "an isolated incident, means:

"Police declined to elaborate, but crime experts said that usually suggests the victim knows the attacker."

So, why is the New York Times making a big deal over a police blotter item from 3,000 miles away? Especially because by giving their international credence to the hate crime supposition, they might spark who knows what kind of violence among hot-heads in Iraq?

It could be that this is some hate conspiracy. But it sure sounds like the cops know more than they are telling, so why didn't the New York Times wait until they found out what the cops know that they don't yet know before splashing this big?

People give Freud a hard time these days, but his concept of "projection" remains a valuable one when reading the newspaper. There is, as always, a lot of hatred and hysteria in the world today. And there's clearly money to be made by fanning the flames of hate.

The growing SPLCization of the prestige press is frightening. I realize that times are tough for everybody, and that the Southern Poverty Law Center has a gold-plated track record of piling up hundreds of millions of dollars via spreading fear and hate in the guise of fighting hate, so it's not surprising that the national media is following the path the SPLC has pioneered. But this is scary stuff to play around with to make money.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Trayvon: How the Case Was Spun

From the NYT:

March 25, 2012 

In Slain Teenager’s Case, a Long Route to National Attention 

By BRIAN STELTER 

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, was fatally shot on Feb. 26 in Sanford, Fla. The next day his death was a top story on the Fox-affiliated television station in Orlando, the closest big city to Sanford. Within a week it was being covered by newspapers around the state. 

But it took several weeks before the rest of the country found out. 

It was not until mid-March, after word spread on Facebook and Twitter, that the shooting of Trayvon by George Zimmerman, 28, was widely reported by the national news media, highlighting the complex ways that news does and does not travel in the Internet age.

To me, the obvious comparison is to how fast the news spread in the local shooting of an 18-year-old by a federal agent and a local cop that I did some amateur snooping into a few years ago. However, that wouldn't be an obvious comparison for anybody else because the news of that shooting never spread much at all. Exactly 168 hours after the killing, my wife and I ran into the dead youth's parents standing alone at the scene of the crime trying to figure make sense of the sketchy handful of datapoints the police had deigned to release, and the fishy-sounding spin they had put on the story. We encouraged the mother to pursue a lawsuit to bring the facts out.

It's not surprising that that case didn't spread because Stuff Happens all the time in a huge country like America, and the dead kid didn't have an identity politics team rooting for him.

That Trayvon’s name is known at all is a testament to his family, which hired a tenacious lawyer to pursue legal action and to persuade sympathetic members of the news media to cover the case. Just as important, family members were willing to answer the same painful questions over and over at news conferences and in TV interviews.

Indeed, but it definitely helps to have a racial angle. (Or have a beautiful white daughter.) There is a deep hunger in America for Real Life Cases of evil white racists slaughtering black children to validate all those countless works of fiction. In the case I looked into, the dead youth turned out to be white, so there was no

Notably, many of the national media figures who initially devoted time to the shooting are black, which some journalists and advocacy groups say attests to the need for diversity in newsrooms. The racial and ethnic makeup of newsrooms, where minorities tend to be underrepresented relative to the general population, has long been a source of tension for the news industry.

In other words, the Trayvon story was promoted by affirmative action beneficiaries who want to use the story to get more affirmative action.

... National coverage increased somewhat the week of March 12, but really intensified only after March 16, when tapes of 911 calls were released, showing that Mr. Zimmerman had been told by a dispatcher that he did not need to follow Trayvon. Having the audio — which the police had previously declined to release — was critical because it gave radio and TV reporters more material for their segments and because it aroused more suspicion about Mr. Zimmerman.

The criminal justice system holds most of the cards that news stories can be constructed from. In my local shooting, for instance, there was one eyewitness, whose name was not released by the cops to the parents in the first 168 hours. The cops first arrested him, then released him, then arrested him again, then released him. Eventually, he posted his version of the story online in a blog comment, which I forwarded to the mother's attorney.

The other main players in the game are civil suit attorneys, who are entitled to eventually see the police files. They mold a lot of stories for the press.

Within days of the national media scrutiny, the Justice Department said it would investigate the case, and on March 23, President Obama addressed it directly, furthering the media dialogue.

 Of course, as it turns out, there were a huge number of other facts that the national media and the President didn't have. None of these facts, like that young Trayvon was working hard on developing a Thug Life vibe for himself, shouldn't have come as a surprise.

In theory, this should prove embarrassing to the press and President, but, you are forgetting that they hold the Microphone, they promote the Narrative, and you are just an Evil Racist, so Shut Up with all your little hatefacts.

On television, the family spoke early and often to the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist who has radio shows and an MSNBC television show. He was made aware of the shooting by Mr. Crump, who had previously enlisted Mr. Sharpton to speak out against the death of a Florida boy at a boot camp in 2006.

As you go through life, it's a good idea to learn and remember the name of the appropriate local sleazebag attorney who is plugged into your appropriate national identity politics sleazebags like the Rev. Al. For example, if you are a woman in California and you want to sue a man for anything, get in touch with Gloria Allred.

“The attorney called and said, ‘I need you again,’ ” Mr. Sharpton recalled in a telephone interview from Florida, where he staged a rally Thursday night to call for justice. He took his radio and TV shows with him, thereby amplifying his call.
Mr. Sharpton has used his shows for all manner of advocacy He analogized radio, with its hours of airtime and calls from listeners, to “ground forces” and MSNBC as “air strikes” and said, “If you have a war, you’re going to need both.”

And who has a better track record of credibility than Al Sharpton? As I wrote in 2005:

Indeed, the reputation of [Tom Wolfe's] first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, has suffered because its plot is now often thought of as a pastiche of stories ripped from the headlines about Al Sharpton's Tawana Brawley hoax, the arrest of the bond king Michael Milken, the Crown Heights anti-Semitic pogrom, the Rodney King riots, and the O.J. Simpson case. 

But Bonfire appeared in 1987 … before all those events it seemingly reflects. 

America's most distinguished jurist-intellectual, Richard A. Posner, has admitted this in his book Overcoming Law: 

"When I first read The Bonfire of the Vanities … it just didn't strike me as the sort of book that has anything interesting to say about the law or any other institution…. I now consider that estimate of the book ungenerous and unperceptive. The Bonfire of the Vanities has turned out to be a book that I think about a lot, in part because it describes with such vividness what Wolfe with prophetic insight (the sort of thing we attribute to Kafka) identified as emerging problems of the American legal system… American legal justice today seems often to be found at a bizarre intersection of race, money, and violence, an intersection nowhere better depicted than in The Bonfire of the Vanities even thought the book was written before the intersection had come into view."

Thank God the prestige press has such close contacts with a man with such a disinterested obsession with truth as the Rev. Al. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Real Story on the Trayvon Story

The Trayvon Martin - George Zimmerman brouhaha is just a hoax generated by Tom Wolfe's publisher to push his upcoming novel set in Florida, Back to Blood. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Was Trayvon a burglar?

From Slate:

George Zimmerman's Long, Lonely War Against Black Youths Doing Things 

By David Weigel | Posted Friday, March 23, 2012, at 1:37 PM ET 

Adam Weinstein and Matt DeLuca have pulled the logs of 911 calls that George Zimmerman made before this year's shooting. Spot the pattern. From Weinstein: 

In August 2011, he called to report a black male in a tank top and shorts acting suspicious near the development's back entrance. "[Complainant] believes [subject] is involved in recent S-21s"—break-ins—"in the neighborhood," the call log states. The suspect, Zimmerman told the dispatcher, fit a recent description given out by law enforcement officers. 

Three days later, he called to report two black teens in the same area, for the same reason. "[Juveniles] are the subjs who have been [burglarizing] in this area," he told the dispatcher. 

From DeLuca: 

On April 22, 2011, Zimmerman called to report a black male about “7-9” years old, four feet tall, with a “skinny build” and short black hair. There is no indication in the police report of the reason for Zimmerman’s suspicion of the boy.

Add this to Trayvon call, when Zimmerman apparently muttered a racial slur, and you have to ask if Zimmerman had a hang-up about young black men in the gated community.

It's okay for Weigel to spot the pattern that Zimmerman apparently spotted the pattern of which demographic is most likely to engage in crime against his community, because Weigel is engaging in pattern recognition in the service of approved Who? Whom? morality.

Keeping that in mind, we can therefore see that this new story from the Miami Herald showing that poor Trayvon apparently had been connected to burglary only makes Zimmerman's pattern recognizing that much more culpable:

From the Miami Herald:

As thousands of people gathered here to demand an arrest in the Trayvon Martin case, a more complicated portrait began to emerge of a teenager whose problems at school ranged from getting spotted defacing lockers to getting caught with a marijuana baggie and women’s jewelry. 

The Miami Gardens teen who has become a national symbol of racial injustice was suspended three times, and had a spotty school record that his family’s attorneys say is irrelevant to the facts that led up to his being gunned down on Feb. 26. 

In October, a school police investigator said he saw Trayvon on the school surveillance camera in an unauthorized area “hiding and being suspicious.” Then he said he saw Trayvon mark up a door with “W.T.F” — an acronym for “what the f---.” The officer said he found Trayvon the next day and went through his book bag in search of the graffiti marker. 

Instead the officer reported he found women’s jewelry and a screwdriver that he described as a “burglary tool,” according to a Miami-Dade Schools Police report obtained by The Miami Herald. Word of the incident came as the family’s lawyer acknowledged that the boy was suspended in February for getting caught with an empty bag with traces of marijuana, which he called “irrelevant” and an attempt to demonize a victim. 

Trayvon’s backpack contained 12 pieces of jewelry, in addition to a watch and a large flathead screwdriver, according to the report, which described silver wedding bands and earrings with diamonds. 

Trayvon was asked if the jewelry belonged to his family or a girlfriend.
“Martin replied it’s not mine. A friend gave it to me,” he responded, according to the report. Trayvon declined to name the friend. 

Trayvon was not disciplined because of the discovery, but was instead suspended for graffiti, according to the report. School police impounded the jewelry and sent photos of the items to detectives at Miami-Dade police for further investigation. ... 

No evidence ever surfaced that the jewelry was stolen.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

New News

Gucci Little Piggy has a fine series of posts updating developments in the Martin-Zimmerman tragedy.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Why no police investigation of a racial hate crime?

Now that the Trayvon Martin case has raised awareness of racial bias and hate crimes on the streets of America, it's time to look into other cases that were ignored by the cops. 

For example, on May 14, 2011, Matthew Yglesias, now of Slate and a prominent advocate of urban ambulation, was walking home from dinner with pundits Megan McArdle of The Atlantic and Peter Suderman of Reason. In a neighborhood about a mile north of the U.S. Capitol building, he was assaulted from behind by two black males who knocked him to the ground and kicked him when he was down, then ran off without trying to steal anything. Several months later, he confirmed on his blog that the attackers were black.

That evening Yglesias blogged about the attack, blaming it on a lack of population density. This wonkish concept was taken up and discussed seriously in the blogosphere for a couple of days, with only the ruder corners suggesting that the real issue here was that Yglesias appears to have been the victim of an unprovoked racial hate crime of the Polar Bear Hunting or Knockout King ilk, having been picked out solely because he was white and alone.

Since our awareness of the need for good police investigation of racially-charged violence has been raised, isn't it about time for a police report to be made public on the apparent racial hate crime committed against Yglesias?

Or, am I being naive and missing the point that blacks attacking a white for no reasons other than animus and intimidation aren't really a racial crime when viewed through the proper lens of "Who? Whom?"

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Meanwhile ...

While America has been riveted on that single low-rent fiasco of a shooting in Florida the previous month, the Chicago Tribune ran their weekly round-up of all the mayhem in Chicago over the previous weekend:

Weekend of violence claims 10 shooting victims across Chicago 

March 19, 2012 

By Liam Ford, Peter Nickeas and Rosemary Sobol 

At least 10 people were killed, including a 6-year-old girl, in shootings over the weekend in Chicago. 

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The solution for unwanted statistics

Earlier, I was whining about how the CIA no longer bothers to update its fascinating table in the CIA World Factbook on countries' military expenditures as a percent of GDP. For example, the U.S. number still says, comically, "2005, est." Heckuva job, CIAie!

There's another federal website featuring unpopular data that would be too embarrassing to delete, to which the feds have found a similar solution: just let it wither on the vine by never updating it. That's the Bureau of Justice Statistics' page on Homicide Trends. It's still there, but the latest data is for 2005. I started looking at it when debating Steven Levitt in 1999, and it was annually updated with each year's new numbers. But, now, it doesn't appear to have been updated in a half decade.

I'll just paste the top part of this Justice Department webpage right here:

Homicide Trends In The U.S.

Trends by race

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented
among homicide victims and offenders

In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher
than the rates for whites.

To view data, click on the chart.

[D]

For more information about racial patterns in violent victimization
see Key Facts at a Glance.

In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher
than the rates for whites

To view data, click on the chart.

The genius behind this is that if the Obama Administration simply deleted it, Rush Limbaugh would have a field day. But by never updating it, it's increasingly not news. It's so far out of date that it gives the news media an excuse to ignore it. Who knows what could have happened since 2005? Maybe whites have higher homicide rates than blacks today. Who can say? So, best to just ignore the whole subject until the feds post some newer numbers, whenever that might be.

P.S., You can find the Homicide Offending by Race graph extended out through 2008 by downloading this PDF, and then paging down to p. 11. What could be more convenient? Apparently, PDF is the hot new technology sweeping aside outmoded HTML. It's so much easier to cut and paste!

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

DSK: "La danse de joie"

Here's Sofitel security camera video from the day of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest last May. It was broadcast on France's BFM-TV. Starting a little after 3:00 minutes into the video, you can see what BFM calls "The Dance of Joy:" after Sofitel management calls the NYPD to have the IMF supremo / French presidential frontrunner arrested, two burly Sofitel employees in suits who had been escorting the complainant maid step into a back room and celebrate. The big black guy wraps the big white guy in a bear hug, lifts him into the air, spins him around, and then does what looks like either an NFL touchdown dance or the Charleston.

The Daily Beast reports:

The two employees said they couldn’t recall the exact reason for their fleeting celebratory behavior but that they believed it may have involved sports, which they frequently talked about, the source said.

Okay, well that clears that up. Glad we won't have to listen to conspiracy nuts yammering on about their crazy conspiracy theories. Amy Davidson at The New Yorker in "A Dance to the Music of Conspiracy" finds the sports talk explanation more plausible than the suspicion that DSK might have been set-up:

Once you’ve accounted for the jerkiness of the video, it doesn’t seem outlandish, given the sorts of things men do in New York, particularly when talking about sports. 

A commenter at The New Yorker adds that Edward Jay Epstein, who brought up the dance of joy in a New York Review of Books article, is a conspiracy theorist:

Many years ago, Mr. Epstein had written about the diamond industry. I knew a top adviser for De Beers,who couldn't believe how Mr. Epstein had invented so many details to support his claims. The adviser decided then that he would never again read anything written by this conspiracy theorist. He called Epstein a "sensationalist". I myself wonder why the NYRB would publish an article that had nothing to do with books.

If you can't trust "a top adviser for De Beers," who can you trust? Certainly not a wacko investigative journalist like Epstein who published some nutty theory in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982 that De Beers was a giant conspiracy to prop up the price of diamonds via a global diamond cartel. After all, the reason De Beers top executives never set foot in America during the second half of the 20th Century is, well,  you know, just one of those things. I can't recall the exact reason for De Beers executives' fleeting behavior of avoiding anywhere they could have been served with a subpoena for Sherman Anti-Trust Act violations, but I believe it may have involved sports.


P.S., a commenter points out that Epstein's website has more videos that allow you to better evaluate the competing theories.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer