(Scott Olson/Getty)

The Left slams the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart.

Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart stopped toeing the liberal policy line for just a moment. That was long enough for the Left to denounce this black man as a race traitor.

“Sellout,” carping online critics called him. “House Negro,” snarled others.

Capehart’s crime? In a March 16 op-ed headlined ‘“Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie,” he explained that he wrongly advanced the narrative that exploded after the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old cigar thief, at the hands of former Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson. Capehart cited the Department of Justice’s final report on Ferguson. DOJ says that eyewitnesses that day

all establish that Brown was moving toward Wilson when Wilson shot him. Although some witnesses state that Brown held his hands up at shoulder level with his palms facing outward for a brief moment, these same witnesses describe Brown then dropping his hands and “charging” at Wilson.

For this, Capehart got slammed on Facebook and elsewhere online. As he explained, some “said I did it because I wanted ‘white people to like me’ or that I ‘did it for the money.’ No, I didn’t. I did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Jonathan Capehart

By the ignorant, twisted logic of the anti-Capehart crowd, Attorney General Eric Holder also is a “house Negro.” After all, his department wrote the report that debunked the “hands up” myth and declared that the physical, forensic, and eyewitness evidence “corroborates Wilson’s account of the struggle.”


And, for that matter, Holder works for Obama. Therefore, as I observed on Sunday’s Fox & Friends, these critics also should label Obama a “house Negro.” The Obama administration prepared and released the study that exposed this compelling story as a fascinating fiction.

#related#The Justice Department, in a separate report, chronicled aggressive police behavior elsewhere in Ferguson. DOJ also detailed how the Ferguson cops acted as de facto tax collectors, slapping all manner of tickets, mainly on black residents, in order to raise revenue.



Big government? Yes.

Bigotry? Maybe.

Racist killer cops? No.

The increasingly furious Left launched an entire movement on an incident that never took place. A St. Louis County grand jury reached this conclusion, as did the DOJ’s second opinion.

Whatever one thinks about the police and race relations, Americans need to live within reality. Otherwise, we inhabit Fantasyland.


RELATED: The Injustice the DOJ Uncovered in Ferguson Wasn’t Racism

Alas, too many liberals can’t handle the truth. Rather than intellectual engagement, leftists foam at their mouths and resort to the racist name-calling of which they accuse the Right. This ugliness has a disparate impact on black conservatives and even honest black liberals who stop reading the collectivist cue cards and think for themselves.

White liberals call white conservatives wrong, mistaken, cold-hearted, and mean. But whites on the right never are accused of being bad white people or betraying their fellow Caucasians.

Black conservatives and libertarians should be so lucky.

Black liberal attorney Leo Terrell appeared opposite yours truly on Hannity last March 9. After I answered Sean Hannity’s question about the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma, Terrell erupted and screamed like a caged animal. He was enraged that I did not mention that day’s news about members of the University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter singing a truly deplorable song about lynching blacks.

Hannity and I switched topics, denounced the fraternity, and applauded the school’s immediate decision to padlock this house of hate. But that was not enough for Terrell, who hollered even more loudly. Indeed, the more that Hannity and I agreed with him, the more unhinged Terrell became. This was one of my most otherworldly experiences in three decades on television.


But the fun wasn’t over.

Behold a few of the racist and often ungrammatical comments left by some who watched this surreal encounter on TalkingPoints Memo.com and YouTube.

• Thaddius Lee denounced “ . . . Hannity and his Uncle Tom ass negro . . . ”

• Carol Woodous wrote, “Fox news seems to always find them a Uncle Tom House Nigger﻿.”

• ThunderclapNewman remarked: “It’s nice to see Deroy Murdock — the living definition of ‘Uncle Tom’ — called out for his behavior.”

• Atlanta rex called me “Uncle tom mother f*****.” That was the extent of Atlanta rex’s comment, by the way. It contained no verb or other parts of speech. Perhaps he meant to say, “I was so impressed with that charming and eloquent Uncle tom mother f*****.” But that is mere speculation.

(If people could use pseudonyms in letters to the editor, America’s newspapers would be filled with this garbage. Website editors should scrap the anonymous handles that let people spew this kind of bile while hiding behind avatars like “Atlanta rex.” Instead, people who leave comments at the ends of articles should sign them with their real names and home towns. This would begin to flush the sewers that carry so much of the sludge that passes as “Internet discourse.”)


Representative Mia Love (R., Utah) should be familiar with this sort of hate speech. During her first, unsuccessful House bid, this black conservative delivered well-received remarks in September 2012 to the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

As I wrote at the time, the Left could not stand this. After her speech, a liberal hacked Love’s Wikipedia page. She was denounced as a “token” and an “Aunt Tom.”

Next, this vandal hammered the daughter of Haitian immigrants as a “dirty, worthless whore who sold out her soul in the name of big business.” The attacker then added: “She is a total sell-out to the Right Wing Hate Machine and the greedy bigots who control the GOP and love to see people like Mia Love be exploited like the House Nigger she truly is.”

So much for liberals being compassionate, open-minded, and tolerant. They are the ones sowing rancor and division from coast to coast. If you seek bitter, nasty, vulgar bigots, look Left.