Increasingly hard to Stand With the Facts when the facts undermine your own reporting

In its continued rapid slide into ideological partisanship, trumpeting Social Justice as the cause, NPR led with their predictable Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters by Hannah Allam on Sunday, June 21st.

We are under assault by anarcho-marxist extremists of Antifa, that much is clear. But that is not who NPR wants to target. They are obsessed with white supremacists. All the violence at the protests, the "mostly peaceful" protests? White supremacists. No matter what your lying eyes might tell you.

It is the bogeyman they constantly invoke in their reporting but have an immensely difficult time revealing. There are white supremacists, both peacefully ideological and simply natively violent. In the latter group, the incidence rate of demonstrated ideological conviction tends to be low, the history of mental illness high, and the history of anti-social behavior higher still.

It is an accusation easy (and often profitable) to make but usually very hard to prove. Sometime in the past couple of years, I fisked a SPLC "study" on white supremacists groups. On the hard terrain of defining exactly what are the distinct identifiable attributes of a white-supremacist, they came down to "people with tattoos" or some similar nonsense. They were unable to produce the numbers of white-supremacists they needed so they had to relax the definition of what constituted white supremacy to the level of nonsense.

And NPR is still obsessed with the ever vaporous white supremacism and still coloring their reporting with phenomenon undefined and unclear.

A current example is here in Atlanta. After the shooting of Rayshard Brooks, the Wendy's where the shooting occurred was burnt down. Video immediately circulated from on-lookers to the effect that "these arsonists aren't from around here. This isn't us."

Given Antifa's tactics, perfectly plausible. And were they Antifa or were they white supremacists, fanning the flames of a race war? A little less likely, but still possible.

And now the Atlanta Police Department is circulating a wanted poster for Mr. Brooks' apparently white girlfriend who seems to have led the effort to burn it down. White supremacists of NPR's imagination? I suspect not.

The God's of the Copybooks Headings have a malicious sense of humor though.

A couple of days ago, NPR ran the above mention story from their standard playbook, Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters by Hannah Allam.

It was so low cog I barely skimmed it, basically to confirm it was as fact free as it appeared.

Right-wing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of at least 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests against police violence erupted nationwide in late May.

OK, a study. 50 incidents. I am seeing a lot of video of drivers getting caught in protests and being threatened, then driving through crowds to escape, not infrequently striking some of those threatening them.

Just this weekend in Atlanta we have such a video. A driver approaches a cross street now crowded with chanting protesters. He exits his car, get's his AR-15 or similar long gun from the trunk and puts it in the driver's seat just in case.

He then tries to turn around to exit the area but is surrounded by protestors, one of whom pulls a handgun and fires into the car. The driver accelerates away, striking one of the attackers. Perhaps it will turn out to be a white supremacist. But I kind of doubt it.

So the obvious question of this study is, "Did you distinguish between car attacks that are responses to assault and those which are true, unprovoked attacks?"

It appears not.

At least 18 are categorized as deliberate attacks; another two dozen are unclear as to motivation or are still under investigation, according to a count released Friday by Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at the University of Chicago's Chicago Project on Security and Threats. Weil has tracked vehicle-ramming attacks, or VRAs, since protests began.

The 20 people facing prosecution in the rammings include a state leader of the Virginia Ku Klux Klan, as well as a California man who was charged with attempted murder after antagonizing protesters and then driving into them, striking a teenage girl. Video footage of some attacks shows drivers yelling at or threatening Black Lives Matter protesters before hitting the gas.

So they have 50 incidents but of those, only 18 (36%) are known to have been deliberate (whether offensive or defensive unspecified). And of the 18, only one seems to have been known to be racist, i.e. state leader of the Virginia Ku Klux Klan. 2% of the attacks are known to have been conducted by a white supremacist in a deliberate fashion.

That 2% is doing a lot of work to support the headline Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters.

But the Gods of the Copybook Headings aren't done with their mocking of NPR.

Their original story is here.

Right-wing extremists are turning cars into weapons, with reports of at least 50 vehicle-ramming incidents since protests erupted nationwide in late May. https://t.co/jM0hx6W3Rs

— NPR (@NPR) June 21, 2020

Originally it was illustrated by a photo of a "white supremacist" mowing down "mostly peaceful" protestors in a Buick LeSabre.

Now it is illustrated by the Charlottesville attack of 2017. It would seem to me that if there were 50 such attacks in the past month, there might be at least one picture of such an attack. Apparently not. They have to go three years into the archives for a picture.

But as so often happens with NPR these days, the story they are telling is not the story that happened.

Independent footage almost immediately arises of the behavior of the "mostly peaceful" protestors against the driver who is said to have been an African-American woman "she was assaulted in her car and dreadlocks pulled out."

Here's a fuller video of what you're calling a "right-wing extremist attack" ... a driver is harassed by a group of people, tries to get away, is then attacked by a larger group... and uses their vehicle to defend themselves and get away.

This story is leftist bullshit. pic.twitter.com/771gEebiqg

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) June 21, 2020

Now I have seen NPR be expansive in their definition of white supremacist but "peaceful black woman with dreadlocks in fear for her life" seems going a little far.

A further still from seemingly a different video seems to show the protestor who stopped the car, now holding a handgun pointed towards the driver.

Double click to enlarge.

Of course, still photographs have to be taken with a grain of salt. They can be taken out of context or manipulated. Perhaps this doesn't show a peaceful protestor pulling a gun on an innocent woman. But apparently it does.

From Two charged after vehicle hit protester in Louisville; driver not charged by Ben Tobin of the local Louisville Courier Journal.

According to a police incident report, around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, a group of protesters blocked the intersection of Liberty and Sixth streets and would not let the driver, operating a Buick LeSabre, pass.

The driver, whose name was redacted in the report, told police that protesters surrounded her car and "a verbal altercation occurred after which the protesters began to reach into her car, scratching her vehicle window ... and assaulting her, pulling her hair (pulling out a dreadlock)." Police say the driver sustained a minor injury.

The report goes on to say that the driver told police that after seeing one of the protesters with a handgun, she was "in fear for her life and drove away from the crowd." She subsequently hit one of the protesters running toward the vehicle.

The driver then stopped for a red light at the intersection of Liberty and Fifth streets when one of the protesters, Darius Anderson, approached the vehicle with a handgun and pointed it at the driver, according to report. The driver then drove off again.

Anderson, 21, was identified by video and later arrested later Wednesday morning, according to the report. He admitted to the incident in an interview after waving his Miranda rights and was charged with first-degree rioting, first-degree wanton endangerment, tampering with physical evidence, third-degree criminal mischief, second-degree disorderly conduct and obstructing a highway.

According to the report, after the incident with the driver, Louisville police officers observed Anderson handing off his handgun to Brioanna Richards, who then hid the weapon in a vehicle to "in an attempt to conceal evidence of the crime." Police then located the vehicle, consent searched it and confiscated the handgun.

Richards, 19, was also identified by video and arrested Wednesday morning. She waved her Miranda rights, admitted to the incident and was charged with first-degree rioting, tampering with physical evidence, first-degree disorderly conduct and obstructing a highway.

So the National Public Radio, publicly funded, pursuing their Social Justice and Critical Theory reporting handbook, claim (one is tempted to use their new formulation, "without evidence") that there is a rash of 50 cases of White Supremacists attacking mostly peaceful black protestors with their cars.

They offer as evidence an apparently real case in Virginia involving the head of the local KKK and they offer a photograph of a white supremacist car mowing down mostly peaceful protestors.

A single KKK individual in Virginia seems a weak foundation for "Vehicle Attacks Rise". The other 50% of their evidence is then shown to be precisely the opposite of what they represented. Violent African American protestors physically attack a peaceful civilian African American woman in her car and then pull a gun on her as she flees the scene, striking one of her attackers as she drives away.

NPR then has do the requisite public mea culpa at which they are becoming increasingly practiced.

Note: A previous version of this post and story included a photo of a protester being struck by a car in Louisville, Kentucky. The photo, chosen by editors, does not appear to be an example of the assaults described in the story, and has been replaced.

No kidding.

In fact, it appears to illustrate the great majority of incidents of which I have been aware. The mostly peaceful protests, if not violent at the beginning, evolve into a violent demonstration, or at least culminate in a coda of violence. A frequent tactic is surrounding and harassing private citizens in their cars as they attempt to transit or exit an area and not uncommonly the citizen ends up fleeing in their car, occasionally striking one of the attackers.

This, NPR is unwilling to report. Until the police reports and citizen video force them to do so.

That is no way to run a news business. Especially not one that is publicly funded and whose claim is to Stand With the Facts.

IowaHawk, always prescient, caught the new NPR style manual back seven years ago.

Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 9, 2013