On the far fringes of the Wingnutosphere is a growing meme about mobs of black youth randomly attacking white people, and the “media blackout” surrounding it. It’s been going around for awhile now, but it’s gaining momentum as the George Zimmerman trial has gone to the jury, and mainstream conservatives are promoting talking about the spectre of race riots if Zimmerman is found not guilty.

The Southern Poverty Law Center published a report last year about one Colin Flaherty, who began writing about this meme for World Net Daily in an article entitled WorldNetDaily Now Peddling White Nationalism:

WorldNetDaily (WND) says it opposes racism in any form. That’s why the online publication has added a series of articles on “black mob violence” to its usual fare of antigovernment conspiracy theories, gay-bashing, anti-Muslim propaganda, and End Times prophecy.

The series, which began in mid-2012, is penned exclusively for WND by one Colin Flaherty, who according to an editor’s note posted at the top of his pieces, “has done more reporting than any other journalist on what appears to be a nationwide trend of skyrocketing black-on-white crime, violence and abuse.”

“WND,” the editor’s note says, “considers it racist not to report racial abuse solely because of the skin color of the perpetrators or victims.”

Flaherty is a marginal media figure whose main contribution to American literature is a 2011 self-published memoir titled Redwood to Deadwood: A 53-year Old Dude Hitchhikes Around America Again. He caught WND’s attention with 2012’s White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence and How the Media Ignore It, also self-published, which argues that “black-on-white” attacks have gone through the roof and the only reason you don’t know about it is because the “liberal media” has colluded to keep the story under wraps.

However, like much of everything else you’ll read in World Nut Daily, much of what Flaherty claims about a “liberal media blackout” is false, as the New York Times, among other deeply loathed “liberal media” outlets, has in fact report on outbreaks of so called “black mob violence.” But what is most insidious about all of this is that the usual hayseeds known as ‘White Nationalists” have responded to Flaherty’s dog whistles air ride sirens as you’d expect:

But unlike mainstream (and, yes, liberal) writers who have pondered the causes and consequences of mob violence among black youths, Flaherty has become popular in white nationalist circles. Several articles from his WND series have been picked up by American Renaissance, a white nationalist hate group that promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.

In July, Flaherty appeared as a guest on the Lowell, Mass.-based Malevolent Freedom Radio, a white nationalist show whose motto is “embrace white culture” and whose logo is the Schwartze Sonne, or black sun, a Nazi occult symbol. Telling Malevolent Freedom host Dean Anderson that he’s not part of “the [White Nationalist] movement,” Flaherty declared, “I’m just a guy that likes to write … I just have my eyes open. My attitude is, I’m going to tell you what’s happening now, and if you want to freak out about it, I really don’t care.”

The worrisome thing is that this “black mob violence” meme is now making it’s way into the mainstream conservative media. The Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher (the “Obama Ate Dog” guy), for instance, had this lovely item yesterday:
Why is Joshua Chellew less important than Trayvon Martin?

The first sentence in the story is:

WARNING: THIS POST IS RACIST

And it goes downhill from there, reporting on the beating of a 36 year old white man named Joshua Chellew by four African American gang members, followed by a smiling picture of Chellew, and four scary pictures of four very scary looking black men. Treacher then boldly says:

If Obama had four more sons…

Courtesy of Top Conservative News, which notes:

If the races had been reversed, this would be the biggest news story in the United States. It would have knocked the Zimmerman trial out of the news.

Yep. Or, if Chellew had been able to defend himself against one or all of them, he’d be the new George Zimmerman. We’d be seeing baby pictures of his attackers. Al Sharpton would be marching. Jay Carney would be filibustering away all questions about Obama’s latest race-baiting. MSNBC would be on full alert.

But Chellew wasn’t able to defend himself. He probably deserved it, right? I mean, just look at him. You can’t get any whiter than that.

Just another creepy-ass cracker.

I will gladly eat crow if I’m wrong, but I think we’re going to see more and more of this twaddle in the coming weeks, regardless of how the Zimmerman trial ends.