They don't care if you call it racist. “In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering,” says Limbaugh.
Amy Sly for BuzzFeed
It was near midnight on April 14 when the Chevy Cavalier carrying Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami rolled to a stop at a red light in Norfolk, Va. As the pair waited, one of a crowd of teenagers on the sidewalk threw a rock at the passenger seat window, prompting Forster to get out of the car and confront the aggressor.
That's when the beating began.
Forster later said the crowd swarmed, taking turns punching and kicking him in the ribs and face. When Rostami got out to help, the attackers moved on to her, pulling her hair and dealing one blow after another. Police eventually arrived, the crowd dispersed, and the victims were left shaken and bruised, but not gravely injured. Local authorities wrote it off as an all-too-routine assault in a city whose violent crime rate is well above the state average. Even the Norfolk newspaper where the victims worked, the Virginian-Pilot, skipped the story, which the editor deemed un-newsworthy. That was before Bill O'Reilly found out about it.
The Fox News host turned the incident into national news by adding one detail: The attackers were black, and the victims were white.
If you've spent much time consuming conservative media lately, you've probably learned about a slow-burning "race war" going on in America today. Sewing together disparate data points and compelling anecdotes like the attack in Norfolk, conservative bloggers and opinion-makers are driving the narrative with increasing frequency. Their message: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.
This notion isn't necessarily new to the right, which has long complained about stifling political correctness in the media and the rising tide of "reverse racism." But the race war narrative has gained renewed traction during the Obama years, as various factors — from liberals' efforts to paint the Tea Party as racist, to the widely-covered Trayvon Martin shooting — have left conservatives feeling unfairly maligned, and combative.
"I wouldn't call it political correctness, I would call it lying," said Tucker Carlson, editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller, describing what he considers to be the media's racial double-standard. "To the press, the only hate crimes are straight white men somehow committing acts of violence against people who are not straight white men. When in fact, the real world is a lot more complicated than that."
Conservatives have been fighting allegations of racism for years, regularly crying foul when liberals demonize them for opposing policies like affirmative action. But the catalyst for the latest pushback on the right was Democrats' attempts to brand the Tea Party "racist," said Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative scholar of race and George W. Bush appointee U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
"I think the 'R-word' is the worst, most damning word in our vocabulary now," she said. "So of course Morgan Freeman comes out and calls the whole Tea Party racist, and the media treats it like it's OK. This had been a source of annoyance for some time" — but the absurdity of the racist-Tea-Party narrative was enough to spark vocal dissent, she said.
"I think it's only recently that there have been outspoken voices, particularly on blogs, saying, 'Shut up Jesse Jackson, we're tired of you,'" she said. "There's been increasing impatience with the media's indulgence of people who have no moral legitimacy."
The conservative media's in-your-face reporting of black-on-white crime is a sort of demonstration project — a rebellious response to decades of fielding charges of racism from the cultural elites who run the mainstream press. And to many on the right, the Norfolk story is emblematic of the bias Carlson described.
Outraged that the national media didn't give this story the same extensive coverage as the Martin shooting, O'Reilly launched into a campaign that has stretched over several nights of Fox's top-rated show. Along the way, his team has uncovered an early police report that described the assault as a hate crime (authorities said it was a clerical error), and found neighborhood kids who speculated on camera that the assailants were exacting racial revenge for the death of Trayvon. O'Reilly has also publicly shamed the local newspaper for ignoring the story, and even called on Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to intervene in the investigation.
"This is a major story," O'Reilly said on his show one night earlier this month. "We cannot have Americans of any color being set upon by violent mobs. That cannot stand in this country. The Factor will continue to demand justice in Virginia."
But while Norfolk may be the most high-profile chapter yet in the "race war," it's hardly the only one conservatives have highlighted. Over the past four years, the Drudge Report has run dozens of headlines chronicling acts of violence against white victims — often by black youths.
