-By Warner Todd Huston
Over the New Years weekend I published a story at Breitbart News detailing how a story about the lynching of a black man back in 1899 turned out to be fake news when new research revealed it never happened. After my story went live a liar named Callum Borchers published a piece at the Washington Post that imputed all sorts of vile motives to my piece. Naturally he never once called me to discuss the piece before his hate-filled screed went live.
My story, “Fake News: 117-Year-Old Story of Pittsburgh ‘Lynching’ Busted,” was published on December 31 and detailed the legend of a black man named David Pierce who was supposedly lynched in Pittsburgh by an angry mob of white people in 1899.
The story has been used for nearly 100 years by activists wishing to prove how badly blacks were treated in the area. But in an attempt to verify the account for inclusion in a new history of the area, modern researchers discovered that the tale is just that, a tale.
It turns out that this lynching never happened. Not only was the real black man in the incident never threatened with any lynching, but he was given a fair court hearing and even a lighter sentence based on the evidence. Further, his name wasn’t even “David Pierce.”
Today’s researchers discovered that the initial sensationalist newspaper stories reporting the incident in 1899 got nearly all the facts wrong. While later newspaper reports did contain the correct information, it is the early, incorrect, or “fake news,” reports that ended up fueling the legend of the lynching of David Pierce
In my story I focused solely on the “fake news” aspect of the revelation that the tale is a myth. That was the sole point for my decision to write the story. With everyone going around with the hair on fire over “fake news” these days I wanted to remind readers that the media in the U.S. has ALWAYS been chock full of news filled with lies and misconstructions and that this 117-year-old story is the perfect example of how a false story is misused for activism.
That was my sole point and the ONLY point I mentioned in my piece.
Ah, but then comes lair Callum Borchers who decided that all I was *really* doing was pushing dog-whistle racism, that I was *really* attempting to promulgate the false claim that blacks were always treated wonderfully in the U.S.A., and that civil rights activists must be all evil mud people… or some such nonsense.
Liar Borchers headlined his January 5 screed, “A reality check on claims of vintage ‘fake news’.”
“Reality” is an interesting word to choose for his title because not a thing he wrote about my story has anything to do with “reality” at all.
Here is how Calumny Borchers attacked my piece:
The subtext, for white readers: Just look at this bogus account of a lynching; it never actually occurred — and if this story wasn’t true, it’s probably fair to question any similar story. The true injustice is the guilt-tripping of contemporary white people by the media, academics and activists for stuff that happened a long time ago — or not at all.
Uh, no, there is no such “subtext,” you lying piece of shit.
No where in my piece did I make any attempt or even hint at discounting racism and injustice in America.
My story was very clear about what my point was. It had noting to do with minimizing the long and terrible history of lynching in the U.S.A. It was ALL focused on a warning against the fake news of badly reported stories.
Naturally, this little weasel never once bothered to call me or email me (and my email address was right at the bottom of the piece) to ask me what my point was in writing the story. After all, if he had he would have discovered that I had no racist “subtext” in mind and his big attack piece would have been rendered as just another Washington Post fake news piece — which it is anyway.
Of course, to a liberal cretin like Borchers, no one on the right deserves to have any benefit of the doubt nor should they be treated like a human being worth giving consideration before a broadside is launched. So, naturally he didn’t bother to do any due diligence and call me to ask any questions about my Breitbart piece.
So, Calumny Borchers, you suck as a writer and you are a liar.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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