Brooklyn Subway Shooter Frank James Is Already Being Memory-Holed
His identity doesn’t reinforce The Narrative.
By Robert Spencer
At 5 p.m. ET on Sunday afternoon, I did a Google search for Frank James, who shot ten people on the subway in Brooklyn on Tuesday. There was a grand total of one news story posted about this crime on Sunday, a “what you need to know” video from WPXI in Pittsburgh. Before that, there were three articles posted Saturday, one by a site called Complex, one from the UK’s Daily Mail, and a New York Post article. These were sparse results for a mass shooting in the nation’s largest city less than a week ago, but they weren’t surprising: when a story doesn’t fit the establishment media narrative, it tends to disappear quickly.
Remember Darrell Brooks, Jr.? On November 21, 2021, he plowed his car through the Waukesha Christmas Parade in Wisconsin, murdering six people and injuring 61. Remember Noah Green? On April 2, 2021, he rammed his car into a barricade at the U.S. Capitol, murdering one person and injuring another. You don’t hear very much about them nowadays, because their cases don’t fit the media narrative, either.
Brooks, Green, and James shared the same ideology: they were all black nationalists who hated white people and believed that they could never get a fair shake in an America dogged by systemic racism and white supremacy. In other words, they hewed closely to the standard Leftist worldview of today, but their violence didn’t fit the media’s idea of how you should perceive reality.
This is supremely important but not generally well understood. Many Americans still believe that the likes of The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the rest of them are still news sources, but that is not the case and has not been the case for many years. The establishment media outlets do not exist to disseminate news, but to spread propaganda that favors the interests of the political and media elites. Those elites are today propagating that white people are selfish, privileged oppressors, and black people are noble, aggrieved victims. Every news item must reinforce that narrative. If it doesn’t, it is ignored. If it cannot be ignored, like the violent acts of Brooks, Green, and James, then it has to be given coverage as cursory and glancing as possible, and then ignored. The specter of a black person mercilessly and savagely attacking innocent white people doesn’t fit the beliefs and views that powerful people want to inculcate in the American people, and so it doesn’t exist.
Thus we are not likely to be hearing much more about Frank James. But it is useful to examine his beliefs and assumptions while we can. According to the New York Post (one of the media outlets that is sneered at as “right wing” for daring to break ranks with the establishment and report on such matters), “the social media rants of the 62-year-old suspect reveal a man consumed with hatred of white people and convinced of a looming race war.” James posted a meme that said: “O black Jesus, please kill all the whiteys.”
Like many black nationalists and their allies today, James was a segregationist, saying: “White people and black people, as we call ourselves, should not have any contact with each other.” Lamenting the fact that new Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom Biden appointed because she is a black woman, is married to a white man, James said: “You hear black people [inspired by Jackson] say my daughter…dreaming to be a part of something that does not want you be a part of it … You’re not white, you’re not European…You want to force yourself on these people and they’re going to kill you.” He claimed that the Russia-Ukraine war was a precursor to a genocide of blacks in the United States: “These white motherf—ers, this is what they do. Ultimately at the end of the day, they kill and commit genocide against each other. What do you think they gonna do to your black a**?”
James, not surprisingly, hated Jews as well. In 2017, he posted a video on YouTube in which he showed photos of Hitler and the Holocaust and said, “This is gonna be about Jews and my personal relationship with Jews, and the utter contempt that all the f***ing Jews I’ve dealt with show me at the end of the day.” He continued, “This is an FYI about these f***ing Jews, and how they will smile in your f***ing face while stabbing you in the back in a heartbeat. And they do it so smoothly, you don’t even realize you’ve been stabbed in the back … those motherf*****s don’t contribute to s**t to life on this earth but s**t, piss, pollution, and death and destruction.”
This sort of thing used to be on the FBI’s radar but after accusations of (what else?) racism, the corrupt and compromised bureau dropped the term “black identity extremism” and began insisting risibly, as it does to this day, that “white supremacists” constitute the nation’s biggest terror threat. The FBI, too, must conform to the narrative, however far from reality that narrative may be.
By the way, James is a big CNN fan.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.