The white supremacist who wasn’t

Amazing how many stories like this end up being hoaxes. Colton Brodoux, a white man, says on Facebook that he’s outraged that America elected a black president. He says he wants to kill blacks, and issues a death threat to a black student at Nicholls State University in Louisiana.

Turns out Colton is actually Dyron Hart, who is black. Hart just pleaded guilty to impersonating a white supremacist. The Facebook account was fake, and the death threat was a prank intended “to get a reaction.” cnn reported,

“This is an extremely odd case, a very unusual case,” said U.S. Attorney Jim Letten of the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Unfortunately, that’s really not true. Far too often, the media seize upon news of race-related attacks that create a lot of hostility and bad blood—attacks that later prove to be trumped up (remember the Duke lacrosse team?). This story, like the recent “racial profiling” of Henry Gates—which turned out to be nothing of the sort, not on the part of the woman who phoned in the possible burglary, nor by the policeman who had to deal with the unnecessarily belligerent Harvard professor—was a manufactured racial grievance.

That’s not to say whites aren’t instigating race problems. It’s more an illustration of how racial tensions have a tendency to escalate irrespective of facts. It’s an enormously combustible issue; emotion rules; tempers are short. Biblical prophecies of race problems exploding into violence are on the verge of fulfillment.