By John Tremain
01/11/2022
Earlier, by Peter Brimelow: In Memoriam: Colin Flaherty — Cheerful Chronicler Of Black Crime
The evil that men do lives after them. Unless they are part of, or useful to, the Woke Ruling Class — in which case all is forgiven.
That introductory line is fitting for several reasons. Colin Flaherty was an afficionado of Shakespeare, from whom the line is stolen. And he loved to point out the hypocrisy of the far-Left media, which beatified their martyrs like “St. George of Floyd” and “St. Michael of Brown” while excommunicating Thomas Jefferson and even Abraham Lincoln. And him, and countless others.
Finally, it’s fitting because in the coming year we should expect to see a deluge of celebration and schadenfreude from the Main Stream Media, gleefully noting the passing of another old white guy without any self-awareness or even a hint that they’re just validating the ironic observations of both Mark Antony and Mr. Flaherty.
Colin Flaherty, an award-winning journalist and best-selling author whose career spanned over four decades, died on Tuesday at home, surrounded by friends and family. The cause was cancer, a family member said.
In 1992, Colin Flaherty was the darling of the liberal press, for exposing the truth. At some point in the next decade or two, he would be vilified for the same thing.
Thirty years ago, Colin used his extensive investigative skills to exonerate Kelvin Wiley, a black man wrongfully accused of attempting to murder his white ex-girlfriend. Flaherty won numerous awards for this work, and the case was later featured in the Los Angeles Times [Conviction Set Aside as Boy Recants, by Carol Masciola, August 20, 1992] and on Court TV.
But when the journalism profession’s orthodoxy moved on to become a publicity mill for the far Left, Flaherty stubbornly clung to his training, his ethics, and his conscience.
So he became a Thought Criminal and needed to be canceled. First by YouTube, then PayPal, then Facebook, and finally Amazon — the tech monopolies moved swiftly to punish Flaherty for his Wrongthink. Twitter remained the only social media giant that put up with him.
— ColinFlaherty (@colinflaherty) September 3, 2021
Colin’s Thought Crimes were legion. In two best-selling books, purchased by thousands of other Thought Criminals, he documented the epidemic of black criminality, vastly out of proportion to their presence in the population, and the Regime Media efforts to conceal it. He called this phenomenon “the biggest lie of our generation.”
Future PC Enforcers seeking to sanitize the past for the Ministry of Truth will have their work cut out for them trying to erase Colin’s massive content footprint. He leaves behind thousands of hours of videos, podcasts, and interviews, countless articles on rogue sites like American Thinker, VDARE.com, and American Renaissance.
He also leaves behind about two million subscribers that he had had on YouTube when they canceled him in the middle of last decade; a son and a daughter who had been estranged but with whom he had recently reconciled; and his older brother, who lived with him in Wilmington.
Often accused of racism by the same media whose lies he exposed, Colin was lauded and befriended by many black conservatives, notably Thomas Sowell and Jesse Lee Peterson, below, both of whom wrote laudatory jacket blurbs for his banned books.
Vilified by the MSM who once loved him, Colin had for the last decade focused his considerable talents on “the biggest lie of our generation,” the false Narrative of black victimhood and white racism. Beginning with White Girl Bleed A Lot, published in 2011, Colin covered stories that were either neglected or whitewashed by the MSM, who refused to acknowledge the tremendously disproportionate violence perpetrated by blacks in the US. His follow-on book, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, sold even more than the first one and cemented his legacy as a serious exposer of media hypocrisy.
Colin stopped making podcasts about a year and a half ago, but we are reminded of his prescience every day. He was amused by the recent discovery of Critical Race Theory by the MSM, which claimed that conservatives “can’t even define it.” For several years, he had defined it thusly: “White racism is everywhere. White racism is permanent. White racism explains everything” [A New Poster Child for Black on White Crime, American Thinker, December 26, 2014].
And years before the Ruling Class opened the jails and legalized most black crime in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Colin observed that “crime is the new black entitlement.”
It doesn’t take much digging to see that recent crime statistics bear this out.
In Colin’s penultimate podcast on August 6, 2020, he began with a monologue that encapsulated both his raison d’etre and his acerbic wit:
So what we’re trying to do here is figure out what’s really going on, that’s why I love the video, why I love using these podcasts, using the audio from the videos; once I get my health back, I’m looking forward to getting full tilt into my videos. That’s what I used to say, but man, if you think I have confirmation bias, let’s meet out on the street at high noon and we’ll match video for video, ‘cause I think for every video you have of a white guy behaving badly, I think I have 25 to 100 of a fella misbehaving in a very masochistic, psychopathic way. And just to make it interesting, I think we should make a little wager to see who runs out of videos first, runs out of stories first.
No one ever wants to take me up on this. I mean, what kind of movie would Gunfight At The OK Corral have been if Kirk Douglas [as Doc Holliday] and Wyatt Earp got out there in the street and the Clanton boys didn’t come out to face them down. The Clantons never come out to face us. They always go to the next town over and talk trash about us, about how we have confirmation bias.
This quote, unscripted and yet well-spoken, also gives us a brief peek at Colin’s unbridled optimism that he’d eventually beat his disease.
Sadly, that was not to be. But Colin died as he lived: in his words, “without racism, without rancor, and without apology.”
As those of us who knew him would attest, he was well-deserving of another Shakespeare encomium:
“He only in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
John Tremain was a friend and admirer of Colin Flaherty.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.