MICHELLE MALKIN AND THE KNOXVILLE MURDERS: DID RACISM PLAY A PART…IN HER COVERAGE?

Right-wingers are often their most shameless when crimes are committed. To them, it always seems to be the ripe moment to advance their agenda against a certain group of people – especially racial groups. The saving grace to all of that is the rest of society usually catches themselves before they get caught up in the propaganda, and in the end those right-wingers are left chattering away about how all immigrants are to blame for drunk driving deaths, to note one recent example. Where it gets really effed up is when the mainstream conservatives turn to neo-Nazis to write the talking points on a case. This happens a lot, so much so that one of the reasons One People’s Project was formed in the first place was to point out when they do that. The World’s Darkest White Supremacist just helped us out in our mission. Michelle Malkin has taken up the case in Knoxville of a young white couple who were University of Tennessee students that were brutally murdered, allegedly by four black men and one black woman. Immediately, the neo-Nazis jumped on this and made it all about them and their agenda, which is that this was a hate crime and should be national news. One week before there is supposed to be a rally in Knoxville put on by WPs around this case, Malkin decides to take up their position and make it mainstream. Y’know, sometimes you have to ask what the hell is wrong with her, then you have to remember that if there were not these sick, insane people in the world, we might not be doing what we are doing. Let this serve as yet another reason not to take this idiot seriously.

One People’s Project

KNOXVILLE, TN – There is no denying that what happened on January 6 was a brutal, horrible crime. That night, Hugh Christopher Newsom, Jr., 23, and Channon Gail Christian, 21, went on a date at a restaurant in Knoxville. They never returned home. Hours later, Newsom’s body was found near railroad tracks wrapped in a sheet, shot three times and burned. His shoes, socks ID and iPod were missing. That Monday, Christian’s parents found her SUV two blocks away from the home of Lemaricus Devall “Slim” Davidson. An envelope found in the vehicle had his fingerprints on it. When police went to the home the next day, they found her body in a trash can in the kitchen. She had been dismembered and was found in five separate trash bags. According to the Grand Jury Presentment, Christian was raped vaginally, orally, and anally, and Newsom was raped anally. There was an attempt to remove DNA evidence by bleaching and burning the bodies and clothing. It didn’t take long for police to round up suspects, five of them to be exact. Lemaricus Davidson, 25, was one of them, along with Eric DeWayne “E” Boyd, 34, George Geovonni “Detroit” Thomas, 27, Letalvis “Rome” Cobbins, 24, and Vanessa Coleman, 18. The case is now going through the court system, and if convicted of the charges of rape, robbery and kidnapping, the five may face the death penalty.

In a sane society, those who read this case would be shocked at the brutality and the tragedy, and express their sympathy for the victims and their family, and this indeed happened – at least among the sane in this society. Sadly, they are but a small voice. Those that one will hear talking about this case the most come from that ugly, smelly place called white nationalism, and with all five suspects being black, this crowd decided to forgo true concern for those hurt by this tragedy and instead use this case to further their political agenda. It is the same game they played with what they called the “Wichita Massacre” where a group of whites were brutally murdered by two African-American brothers, and with the 1999 Jesse Dirkhising case where the 13-year-old boy was raped, tortured and killed by two gay men. Those cases were played up by hatemongers and their mainstream conservative sympathizers in an effort to deflect attention from brutal crimes committed by those within those racist/far right circles. Sadder still is the fact that those mainstream conservatives in this country followed the lead of those circles and defended the white supremacist’s position that this crime was motivated by race and that the national media is intentionally ignoring the story because the victims were white and the alleged assailants were black, or in regards to the Dirkhising case, the victim was a young, straight boy while his killers were two homosexuals.

This time around with the Christian-Newsom murders, one can thank right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin for pushing that line into the mainstream. On May 16, Malkin covered the case on her video blog Hot Air. She said that the case is one that has been given life to the story nationally while the national media ignored it, by bloggers concerned with the case. What she doesn’t say is that those bloggers were, until she came on board, almost exclusively from white supremacist circles. Even more curious than that is her timing. Her coverage of the case comes week before posters to the white supremacist Vanguard News Network, including Jim Leshkevich of Hurley, NY, an associate of white supremacist internet radio host Hal Turner, and among the first to write about the case on his blog, plan a Memorial Day Weekend rally in Knoxville in Christian’s and Newsom’s name, despite the fact that the family wants no part of it.

It is no secret that Malkin has championed the paleoconservative cause, which is to say that she supports this somewhat new form of white racism where conservatives support much of the positions that one would hear from neo-Nazis, and would even work and associate closely with them, but would distance themselves – a little – from the more damning ones. That means they would also associate with Jews and people of color to an extent. That extent would be for those Jews and persons of color to adopt those other positions that paleoconservatives would defend. That is why one can read Michelle Malkin on a white nationalist website called VDARE complaining about diversity and “civil rights absolutists”, which has been the foundation upon which she has championed fights against immigration and Arab Muslims. Rare are the times when she would actually take a stance against someone who disparages someone because of their race, and that often comes if it is her that is being disparaged, or if it is rival conservative pundit Ann Coulter.

This case is being discussed along racial lines simply because the aforementioned white supremacists began playing the case up almost immediately in an attempt to get the country to go their way. Jim Leshkevich participated in Hal Turner’s Kingston, NY rally on Nov. 19, 2005, which was a vain attempt to turn a fight among two high school students into a hate crime. He posted the story about the murders on his just a few days later on January 13. “While these savage murders have absolutely nothing to do with the Hudson Valley (in New York State) I felt the need to remind White people of all we have to be thankful for on MLK Day,” he wrote.

Soon one could see others within this circle talking about it, and by March, Leshkevich was floating the idea to rally in “support” of the couple. Soon, the date was set and supporters began promoting the rally to the Knoxville press. For months, white supremacists remained the only ones talking about this case, and to that end it became more and more apparent that this was not a campaign for justice, but rather to see how sensational they can make the propaganda around the issue. Those talking about the case even started salacious rumors about how the couple’s bodies were sexually mutilated. That brought out John Gill, special assistant to D.A. Randy Nichols to say, “Claims made over the Internet that the couple were sexually mutilated are absolutely not true.” In fact, Gary Christian, father of Channon, said that although the victims had been tortured, 75 percent of the internet speculation surrounding the crime is untrue.

In fact, there has been no evidence that this crime was even racially motivated, and Christian and Newsom families do not believe that race played a factor in the murders, although Chris Newsom’s father thinks it might have denigrated into that during the couple’s ordeal. Even Wikipedia is trying to keep the propaganda and rumormongering down on the case by locking the entry on it, so it cannot be edited by outside persons.

In her report on the case, Michelle Malkin ignored the concerns for clarity and truth and instead repeated the claims of the rumormongers and white supremacists, even saying, “There are unconfirmed reports that both Newsom and Christian were sexually mutilated.” Most importantly, she took their position saying that unlike other cases that involved white assailants, the national media did not want to talk about this case because the victims were white and those suspected of killing them were black. “The national media isn’t interested in this case because it doesn’t commit to any useful politically correct narratives,” she said, citing the Duke Rape case and the story of James Byrd, a black man dragged to his death behind the truck of white racists as an example. Malkin, however, had once complained just a few years prior about how this same national media always seemed to be focused on missing white girls, something that also does not fit a “politically correct narrative”, and even gave her reader her aforementioned rare stance against racism. “Why do so many people seem to care so much?” Malkin asked on her blog in 2005. “I’m very sorry for the (missing then-18-year-old Natalee Holloway’s) family, but no more so than I am for the families of several missing children–of all races and backgrounds–in my own backyard.”

After Malkin covered the case, other news outlets followed suit. First came the Fox News Channel, who has maintained a story on this every day since. Soon, ABC News was on it as well. No one was happier than the white supremacists who promoted the position being played up, and it was expressed best by one of the posters on the white supremacist discussion board Stormfront, who are planning their own campaign around this case in Knoxville June 14-16. “This is AWESOME!” poster “suepeace” wrote. “This is exactly as we hoped this would go! I want to say thank you to EVERYONE who played any kind of part in keeping this story alive.” Some at the Vanguard News Network forum even praise Malkin, although many are offended that it took a dark-skinned Filipino woman with a Jewish husband and two biracial children who works for what they routinely call the “Jew Media” to advance their position.

Regardless, Michelle Malkin continues to do her part. On Tuesday evening, Malkin was guest host for Bill O’Reilly’s program on Fox News and she covered this case with columnist Elias Henican. While she maintained the position she always had with this case, Henican, who noted that while tragic, this case was sadly one of thousands of similar murders that happen every day in this country, asked Malkin point blank that given the fact that the local law enforcement and the families have said repeatedly that it wasn’t a racial issue in regards to the murders, why she wanted to play up a nonexistent racial angle. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?” Michelle shot back. Ironically, One People’s Project repeatedly tried to contact Malkin to discuss that particular issue but she did not respond.