Did a “Climate of Hate” Cause Jared Lee Loughner to Snap?

By Nicholas Stix

The raging Left is playing its “climate of hate” card again. Whenever a white assassin commits a political murder, the Left seeks to capitalize, and both blame the murder on their political opponents, and to foment violence against those opponents, all while hiding behind the mantle of “tolerance” and “non-violence.”

Bill Clinton notoriously played the same card immediately after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, many of them children. Clinton blamed conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh for the mass murder.

This leftwing, “Climate of Hate” framing device is actually much older than Oklahoma City. It goes back at least 50 years, and originally covered black as well as white assassins. That was before the MSM came up with the innovation of variously covering up black-on-white murder, or demonizing anyone with the temerity to ask, “Why are all these blacks murdering whites, when hardly any whites are murdering blacks?”

(I see that Pat Buchanan beat me to the punch, but I am going back in a different direction than him.)

Whoopi Goldberg responded to the Tucson Massacre,

When I was growing up, people talking and saying things, whipping folks up, caused a lot of people to get lynched.

Goldberg’s statement is true, but not in the way she intended. She is suggesting that white folks’ “talking and saying things” got black folks lynched.

The only lynching of a black that I’m aware of from Goldberg’s childhood is the Emmett Till case, in Money, Mississippi in 1955.

White lynchings of blacks had pretty much died out by then.

But there were still plenty of lynchings, and right in Goldberg’s Manhattan backyard, though she doesn’t want you to know about that.

I have occasionally mentioned a series of lynchings carried out by a racist black Manhattan gang, the Blood Brothers, against whites in 1963-64. The fearless libertarian writer, Arnold Stang, wrote about the lynchings in his 1965 book, It's Very Simple: The True Story Of Civil Rights.

On October 21, 1963, Jules Bulgach, a seventy-one-year-old white fruit peddler, was stabbed to death on a Harlem street by a gang of boys.(2) And rational men were aware at once that the act had something or other to do with "rightwing extremism."

You've heard of the "atmosphere of hate." What doubtless happened was that the atmosphere of hate worked its way into the physiology of these unfortunate lads, where it probably activated the evil present in us all, with the inevitable result that they just had to go out and stab somebody.

On March 23, 1964, David L. Watts, twenty-nine, a white man who had come from Idaho seven years before to live as a missionary in Harlem, was murdered. He was stabbed repeatedly in the chest and stomach. No one knew why.(3)

On April 11, Efleen Johnson, twenty-eight, a white department of welfare social worker, was stabbed to death on a Harlem street as she walked with a Negro co-worker. As usual, no one knew why.(4) .

On April 29 just before 5:00 p.m., Mrs. Magit Sugar, fifty, a Hungarian refugee, was stabbed to death by one of a gang of boys in her second-hand clothing store on West 125th Street. When she told one of the boys that she had no suit in his size, another drew a knife and stabbed her in the heart.(5)

You can't blame him, of course; no suit in his size, indeed!--and of course, there's the atmosphere of hate.