The Oncoming Starbucks Conundrum

Life in New York City includes being on frequent scouting missions for public restrooms. Most subway stations did have some at one time, but those are now closed or off limits to actual paying passengers. If you live and have a social life in New York City, you will also likely become adept at public urination at a certain level.

Clean public restrooms are a sought-after commodity for people in the city. There are even mobile applications for smart phones that help people find the nearest public restroom. This phenomenon is not exclusive to New York, of course, but like everything else, it is more of an intense challenge here. There are too many people vying for comfort and ease in our Gotham, and breakneck competition for the good life means someone has to lose.

Starbucks was the subject of good-guy America’s two-minute hate a few months back when two African American men were arrested a Philadelphia location after using the bathroom and refusing to order anything. The Seattle-based coffee chain closed 8,000 of its stores in the U.S. this past Tuesday for “a conversation and learning session on race, bias and building of a diverse welcoming company.” One note: while it closed all of its “company operated” stores, its 7,000 “licensed stores” at airports, hotels, major grocery stores, and universities, remained open.

Maybe the whole mess could have been avoided if some of the people who objected to the arrests had bought the two men some coffee, but apparently the fight for justice is worth shooting video with your smart phone but isn’t worth springing for an $8 latte.

Outrage quickly spread and there were calls for boycotts of the ubiquitous coffee chain.  I was way ahead of the curve before it became uncool to get coffee there. Starbucks injects unneeded pretention into buying coffee. I refuse to use its bogus jargon that calls a small coffee a “tall.” Just let me order a large coffee (which I never see on their menu; you have to know to order the “coffee of the day” if you want to get anything resembling a regular cup of coffee—please spare me that nonsense). I prefer to drink the free coffee they have at the office where I work. If I’m going to get coffee from a store, I’ll go to 7 Eleven or to any local corner deli or bodega, which usually have decent coffee and will be happy to take your money without putting on airs.

Just about everyone agrees that arresting people for loitering in a coffee shop is excessive. If police arrested everyone who went into a Starbucks just to use the bathroom there would be more Americans in jail than out of jail.

Starbucks’ continuing mea culpa included a public announcement that anyone can use any Starbucks bathroom at any time without making a purchase.

That’s both good and bad news. The good news is: If you are starting to get desperate for a restroom you know you can walk into a Starbucks and stand on the (now likely longer) line to access a legal toilet. The bad news is: Now everyone knows that. The company is going out of its way to welcome people who are not customers. When people can’t be turned away, the kind of people who show up are people who would normally get turned away.

This will make everything more crowded, and will also bring in more homeless people. This will get worse in the winter time, and if homeless people can’t be dissuaded from camping out there, customers will start turning away.

A few months ago, I met a friend for coffee at Grand Central Terminal, where they have tables and several coffee shops. The MTA has let the homeless problem at Grand Central get out of hand again, and while I was able to find a place to sit and have coffee with a friend, the presence of the homeless was everywhere.

Another issue that arises with unlimited bathroom access is that of drugs. We are in the midst of a drug use crisis that few have seen in their lifetimes involving opiates. Will Starbucks be the new injection site for addicts? The bathroom lines will be even longer when more people start overdosing in them.

One issue that’s become lost in this discussion is the welfare of Starbucks employees. Their jobs are tough enough, especially in light of this recent publicity, and they now have to clean up after a bigger swath of the general public, including more homeless and drug addicts. All official hand-washing aside, do you want someone who just cleaned a horrendous restroom to be handling your iced coffee and banana bread? Me neither.

If Starbucks becomes an overcrowded mess as America’s new homeless shelter or heroin shooting gallery, it will no longer be America’s preferred “third place.” Why shouldn’t people bring a bagged lunch when they visit the city and take advantage of the space, bathrooms, and free Wi-Fi at Starbuck’s? So what is the plan to counter the potential deluge of homeless and drug addicts?

I wish the chain the best of luck in navigating this. I will add them to my own mental list of available public restrooms, but only to be sought in desperate times, and I’ll try to buy something.  

Both sides in America’s great divide

I had promised myself I wasn’t going to spend money to see the Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor fight. McGregor is a great mixed martial arts fighter and proud Irishman but a perpetual shit-talker who took the low road in promoting this fight. Floyd Mayweather is one of the best boxers the sport has ever produced but is a wife-beating jerk no sane person wants to make richer.

But some friends invited me to meet them for the fight and I enjoyed seeing Conor McGregor’s last fight with them, so I met up with them at Hooters of Farmingdale on Long Island.

There is no charming way you can tell your wife you are going to Hooters. I have disliked Hooters because I think if you want to go to a strip club you should man up and go to a strip club. Hooters wants to treat its waitresses like strippers but not pay them like strippers. But I wasn’t going to argue against a night out.

The great racial divide in America was easy to divine looking at the dining room of Hooters, which is a better place to take the pulse of the nation than The Palm Court at the Plaza. I think I saw two tables that were not racially homogenous. There was no bad blood that I saw. No one had any harsh words for anyone else, but the essential tribal nature of human life was on full display. Some of the white customers had t-shirts that read ‘Fook Mayweather,’ poking fun at McGregor’s Irish brogue while insulting the experienced boxer. When Mayweather won the fight, a black customer at a neighboring table stood on his chair to gloat.

America’s house is definitely divided, even the Hooters on Long Island. I was expecting there to be more quality fights in the parking lot than on the pay-per-view screen; likewise with the crowd at the fight in Las Vegas. It didn’t play out that way. There was no violence at the Hooters at the end of the night, just people settling their bills and going their separate ways.

We all like to think that we’re the open-minded exception to the pervasive divides of our time, but we all have an intrinsic need to draw our lines and take an accounting of our allies and enemies. You are forced to choose sides in life once fists start to fly, even if you are disgusted with the whole sham.

I certainly wanted McGregor to win. No self-respecting Irishman would root against him, no matter how obnoxious his pre-fight conduct was. But wanting him to win and expecting him to win are two different things, and the odds were such that I would happy if he lasted more than a few rounds.

After a long undercard and several helpings of wings and appetizers, it was time for the fight. McGregor went 10 rounds in his first ever professional boxing match with a fighter who is arguably one of the best ever. Mayweather came out of years of retirement to fight one of the best combat sports starts of today who is more than a decade younger. They both walked out of the ring with their heads held high, and rightfully so.

After the bout, both fighters were gracious and respectful. It was heartening to see these men be civil after spending months insulting one another. Then again, they had exploited America’s great racial divide to make millions of dollars on a fight that had no business taking place.

The crowd dispersed to either curse or celebrate the fortunes of their proxy combatants, but those fighters came away the big winners. And therein lies the more telling divide: the millionaires in that fight have more in common with each other than they do with anyone who shelled out for the pay-per-view. A foreigner who was on welfare five years ago and a black man who can barely read rode this race-baiting shit show all the way to the bank and had the last laugh on the rest of us. That’s the American way. 

The Queens ethnic supermarket shuffle

When a local supermarket closes down, people scatter like ants seeking safety. Our area of Queens is seeing two stores close down over the next few weeks. It will be interesting to see where shoppers will go before these stores are reopened.

The scene in the Waldbaum’s on 20^th Avenue in College Point, Queens was a sad one. More than half the shelves were empty. Where abundant displays of vegetables once stood were now vacant. Everything was on sale. Products in the aisles were consolidated onto a few shelves. As I was checking out, a woman asked if she could have my shopping basket when I was done; she couldn’t find another one anywhere.

Local supermarkets throughout Queens are being sold or closed after the A&P, which owned several supermarket chains, declared bankruptcy earlier this year. The local ones near where I live are supposed to be reopening. The Waldbaum’s will reportedly reopen as a Shoprite later this year. The Pathmark near our home is supposed to reopen as a Stop & Shop. Both are closing down in the meantime leaving people wondering where they are going to shop.

Food shopping, like much else in New York City, is a generally ethnically segregated affair. There was a Key Food in the shopping center right behind our home. It closed and is now Good Fortune, a grocery store that mainly caters to Chinese shoppers. All the announcements on the PA are in Chinese and many of the people who work there speak no English. Some of our neighbors refuse to go but it’s not a bad store. If you’re looking for fresh fish they have a lot of it, and they even kept a real deli, but if it’s too early in the day and the deli person isn’t there, none of the multitude of Chinese workers will help you other than to tell you in the best broken English they can that you are shit out of luck.

One thing I noticed when I first visited Good Fortune is that there is no cash register #4. The cash registers skip from register #3 to register #5. The Chinese believe that #4 is bad luck. The word for the number four is similar to the word for death in Chinese, so Chinese will go through great lengths not to have the number four in their addresses or phone numbers. Similarly in western cultures there is often no 13^th floor of an office building because of bad luck associated with that number.

A few blocks down the street is the H-Mart, a Korean grocery store. It’s smaller and does not have a wide selection, though on Fridays you can go through there and practically eat an entire lunch’s worth of food in the form of free samples. This supermarket also has odd sections of electronics and other things you don’t normally find in a grocery store; maybe that’s a Korean thing. Their selection of non-Asian foods is pretty dismal and we rarely go there. A few years ago supermarket union workers protested outside of this store asking people to boycott it because it had no black or white employees. I haven’t seen these protesters in a while. I don’t normally go to this store but I’ve never seen a black or white employee there to this day.

So some people are not going to shop at the Asian supermarkets and they’ll soon get the chance to shop at their old stores, renovated and under new management. Some have taken to shopping at some of the smaller stores in Whitestone and some will shop at the nearby Target. 

New York’s ethnic cauldron will continue to boil and churn. Luckily I don’t mind shopping among the Chinese and will stay well fed. 

New York City Eats Activist Mayors for Black Brunch

It is frustrating to see gifted people throw away opportunities and waste their talents, and that’s the impression I get when I read about New York City’s current mayor, Bill de Blasio. Mayor de Blasio set out to be a more liberal Fiorello LaGuardia but may go down in history as the white David Dinkins.

            Our mayor is in trouble because he’s pursuing a very liberal activist agenda and New York mayors never really get a mandate to pursue a liberal activist agenda.

The problem isn’t that New York City voters aren’t liberal, it’s that New York City is comfortable enough with its liberal political leanings that the large cultural issues that consume debate in the other parts of the country have long ago been settled here. Gay civil unions in the city started more than 20 years ago. In New York even the Republicans are all pro-choice. New York City’s gun laws are among the strictest in the nation (unconstitutionally so in my opinion).

So a liberal Democratic mayor who has big ambitions to make waves on social issues is largely going to be preaching to the converted and, more importantly, not focusing on actually running New York City.

Running the city takes the full attention of City Hall. New York City has a larger population than some states. The New York City Police Department is larger than some nations’ standing armies. There is a large public transit system that is at the mercy of the State of New York government, an enormous educational system and a multitude of public services and complexities that need constant management and planning.

When a mayor becomes enamored with causes beyond the very real world applications of running New York, they quickly lose their bearings and earn the city’s scorn. This is what has happened with Mayor de Blasio. While he was swept into office with high hopes and a lot of progressive promises, his attempts to be an activist mayor have left the city in need of a no-nonsense manager again.

Our more recent past mayors fell into this same trap. Rudolph Giuliani squandered his political capital on trying to position himself to run for higher office. Michael Bloomberg went off the rails trying to police our diets.  

Mayor de Blasio seems to have done himself in on several fronts, but most importantly is that he appears willing to undo the work that Rudolph Giuliani did in cleaning up crime in New York. He voiced support with those protesting the police and let protesters shut down parts of the city. His treatment of the police has been so shoddy that cops turned their back on him en masse when officers were killed in Brooklyn by a #BlackLivesMatter-inspired madman.

This perception doesn’t entirely match reality. The crime statistics don’t say that New York is sliding into the crime-ridden morass of three or four decades ago. But de Blasio had already painted himself into a corner. He aligned himself early with activists who see racial bias in everything the police do; he doesn’t have the luxury of speaking truth to the activists who helped elect him. Not content to simply stop traffic in protesting the police, the #BlackLivesMatter movement started targeting diners in restaurants that they deemed “white spaces” in BlackBrunchNYC protests.

As a parent of girls whom I expect to enter the New York City public schools, de Blasio’s efforts to degrade the standards on gifted programs and elite high schools terrify me. The best defense for my girls’ future will happen in 2017 when we get a chance to make Bill de Blasio a one-term mayor. 

A Long Angry Summer is Coming

Local Law 11 is the ordnance in New York City that requires all air conditioners be installed with proper reinforcement on multi-dwelling buildings. It’s good that this law exists because too many people are doing what I did and installing their air conditioners with a jerry rigged effort involving a 2x4, cardboard and tape. People without drills still need to keep cool too.

So in our apartment we recently had a new air conditioned installed in the manner that meets this requirement. Our old air conditioner was broken anyway. The problem is that the company we bought this service from installed the wrong air conditioner (#FirstWorldProblems). They’re coming back to replace it, and just in time. The official summer season starts this coming Memorial Day weekend and it’s going to be a long, angry summer.

Despite the harsh, snow-heavy winter, we had a record-breaking warm March and we’ve already seen temperatures approach the 90s before May hit double-digits.

The subways are getting more crowded and service is deteriorating even as fares increase. People cram on to subway cars even when there’s really no room. Being pressed up against strangers is a lousy way to start your day, turning up the heat on this commuter bullshit sandwich is only going to make things worse tenfold. I’m surprised I have not seen more violence on the 7 train as people try to make room where there is none. Maybe the increased temperature will finally bring things to a boil.

New York, like the rest of America, is a melting pot that is always on the verge of boiling over into something ugly. Summer adds more tension to the played-out and media-fueled racial dramas that have come to consume our news feeds with controversies both real and manufactured.

But despite all of this, despite the humidity that turns my skin to an oily slick before I’m even done getting dressed for work, despite the fog of heat that shrouds you and clings to you through every day, despite the intense blowback heat reflected off of our streets and buildings and topped off with car exhaust, New York does not lose its magic over the summer.

Surviving summer in New York is like going into a hot tub filled with bum piss and meat sweat, but you haven’t lived in New York until you’ve been through a few summers here. There will be times you will retreat to the sanctum of a heavily air conditioned movie theater but be relieved to feel the awful yet real and true weather on your skin when you come out.

Living through summer in New York means being happy that on some weekends the city is less crowded, that many of the effete snobs who crowd our weekends are off in the Hamptons.

Summer in New York means not having to deal with people who would use summer as a verb. Summer in New York also means free Shakespeare in the parks, good people watching, ice cream trucks, air conditioning and iced coffee.

Living through a New York summer means you’ve endured a crucible that makes you a stronger person and a more seasoned urbanite.

New York City is a cauldron of fetid misery between June and August. Don’t miss it.

The Central Park Five Are Probably Guilty and Will Soon Be Rich

This past week, New York City’s Comptroller approved a settlement reportedly totaling $41 million to members of the “Central Park Five.”

The five men were convicted in 1990 of the brutal rape and bludgeoning of a woman jogging in Central Park in April of 1989. No one who was living in New York at the time could ever forget it. The jogger was so badly beaten that a friend had to identify her by a ring she was wearing on her finger. There was no telling how many people took part in the assault. The five who were convicted were part of a mob that numbered in the dozens.

Four of the five had confessed, and videos of their confessions were shows on the news. They renounced their confessions, claiming they were coerced, and went to trial.

Because several of the accused were juveniles, there was no way they would serve enough time in jail. They were somehow acquitted of attempted murder. They were convicted of several crimes committed that night, including the rape and assaults on other people in the park, and were sent to prison.

Years later, a serial rapist named Matias Reyes claimed that he had attacked the jogger that night and had acted alone. DNA evidence showed him to be guilty. The Manhattan District Attorney asked that the convictions of the Central Park Five be vacated as a result.

Here’s the first big problem with the confession of the alleged lone rapist Reyes: his tale of being the only attacker goes against the medical evidence that indicates the Central Park Jogger was attacked by multiple people. Part of this evidence includes bruising on both legs of the victim indicating she was held down by more than one person and cuts from a blade (Reyes said he only hit her with a rock and tree branch).

After the verdicts were vacated, the New York City Police Department published a detailed examination of the case, the Armstrong Report, which details evidence beyond the confessions that indicate that the defendants were involved in the assault. This includes statements some of the defendants made to police outside of the interrogation, things they said to family members, and details of the crime some of them provided that were not known to police at the time (for example, the NYPD did not know what property had been taken from the victim but two of the five separately described her Walkman being stolen).

The five sued the City and were helped along by filmmaker Ken Burns, who declared them “exonerated” despite the significant evidence of their guilt and made the documentary “The Central Park Five.”

The Burns documentary is an interesting examination of the case, but it is very one-sided and contains glaring omissions.  

Fans of the Burns film are buying into a narrative that lets them feel righteous indignation at a supposed injustice, but the evidence in the case does not gel with the idea the Central Park Five are victims of injustice at all.

The documentary presents its case without any of the skepticism required. It assumes that self-proclaimed lone rapist Matias Reyes is some kind of born-again angel for confessing to a crime (after the statute of limitations had expired, by the way), even though his story is full of holes.

Part of the reason that there is a belief in the innocence of the Central Park Five is what is known as the “CSI effect.” People believe that there is always going to be a mountain of DNA evidence with every case, though there often isn’t. Keep in mind also that the use of DNA collection and examination was in its early stages in 1989. Yes, DNA evidence proves Matias Reyes raped the Central Park Jogger; the evidence shows he was not alone in doing so.

But the public wants to buy into the popular story. Earnest and well-meaning New Yorkers are smitten with Ken Burns’ films and want to believe that the violent men about to become millionaires deserve it and are getting some measure of justice. They are very wrong.

The Other Side of the “Demographic Dilemma”

The going conventional wisdom regarding voter turnout in the latest presidential election is that the changing racial demographics of the U.S. mean that certain policies are now completely off limits and that the Republican Party faces certain doom unless it mends its evil ways.

There’s no doubt the Republican Party needs to do some work. With hooting ignoramuses that made insane quips about rape, abortion and evolution, I’d hate to see the candidates they turned away.

But the demographic argument is the one that is the most one-sided and simplistic and fails to look at the entire picture of racial politics.

Blacks, Hispanics and Asians are growing in number and since they all are voting predominantly Democratic now, the Republicans need to adopt policies that will appeal to these groups on nakedly racial lines if they want to cobble together electoral victory, so the theory goes.

It quickly became a tired mantra: The Republican Party needs to expel all those mean old racist white men who don’t believe in open borders or affirmative action or else the GOP is going to lose every national election.

What this account leaves out is the opposite side of this equation: If non-white ethnic groups are on the increase and are voting in large blocks, then whites are expected to vote as a block as well. The same forces of racial demography that apply to nonwhites apply to whites. 

Mitt Romney got a higher percentage of the white vote than John McCain, so whites are already voting more along racial lines. Why should they not? It’s somehow the cool thing to do in our “post-racial” America. A ham-handed candidate, Mitt Romney got a sizeable majority of the nation’s largest ethnic voting block without taking any really substantial stand on controversial issues like immigration. That should scare the bejesus out of liberal Democrats thinking in the long-term.

The left has successfully demonized any criticism of illegal immigration or affirmative action as inherently “racist.” Never mind that illegal immigration disproportionately harms blacks and Hispanics, as even respected liberal economists have pointed out. And affirmative action and other racial preference policies have the effect of excluding Asians and Jews at higher rates than whites. Asian and Jewish voters still vote predominantly Democratic, for now.

The dream among Democrats today is that this new multiethnic America will see blacks and Hispanics unite with the enlightened whites to defeat the evil cabal of Caucasian Scrooges and usher in the progressive American utopia that was meant to be.

But as machinery meant to realize this dream of a harmonious multiracial society keeps humming along, more and more whites and Asians will come to the realization that it’s them on the losing side of the multicultural math. Again, it’s not going to be due to anything but a shift in numbers. The greater number of nonwhites in the population, the greater number of whites pushed aside by government policies meant to do just that. More whites will start voting Republican (or whatever party replaces the GOP as the new “white” party). And now that the genie of racial demarcation is out of bottle, white voters are going to begin to vote more in a block than before.

Another giant misperception of the “demographic dilemma” perspective is that the nonwhite coalition forged by the Obama campaign is going to hold in the long-term. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians don’t all give each other giant hugs and sing “Kumbaya” in the celebration of not being white. They are as different and distrustful of one another as any other ethnic coalition that’s stapled together. Asians gain the least out of this bargain, being disproportionately injured by affirmative action. And blacks and Hispanics will need better reasons to remain in the same voting block other than not voting for a white candidate.

The Republican argument that blacks and Hispanics are forever lashed to the Democratic Party by entitlement programs, even if 100% true, is an argument with a short shelf life. The U.S. government is broker than broke, and it’s only a matter of time before the ax comes down, even on the sacred cows of Social Security and Medicare.

Just as our systems of cash-and-carry corporate government and rampant speculative financial cronyism fell apart under their own weight, so too will the multiple constructs meant to create a more racially balanced society. There’s no way to create a multiethnic mosaic in every institution without going to more ridiculous and obvious lengths. Even the most reckless gambler will eventually walk away from a stacked deck.

What this has meant so far has put whites on the losing side of several issues. Unchecked illegal immigration puts pressure on the public services of various municipalities all over the country. The U.S. government brings lawsuits against states that try to regulate this on their own. And President Obama’s second term promises more of the same disparate impact-based civil rights pursuits that has produced a de-facto racial spoils system.

The racial stratification of the American electorate cuts deep, but it cuts both ways.  

Groupthink and Unfashionable Facts

The current atmosphere surrounding the shooting of a Florida teenager by a neighborhood watch volunteer is one of frightening groupthink and near hysterical self-serving bloodlust.

If you haven’t seen it plastered all over the news, on Feb. 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed self defense and the police did not charge him with any crime. News of this incident has sparked a nationwide outcry among black racial activists and their political allies. The Department of Justice has begun investigating the case and the chief of police of the town of Sanford, Florida has temporarily stepped down.

The narrative that popular sentiment promotes is that this is a case of racial profiling turning murderous. That a white (though later identified as a mixed-race Hispanic) man thought a black teenager was a criminal simply because he was black and murdered him after provoking an altercation.

Even assuming the worst of the case, that the shooter harbors racial prejudice and was acting completely irresponsibly when he followed Trayvon Martin, there is still not enough evidence to charge him with murder. Furthermore, there is yet to be convincing evidence that the authorities erred in the decision not to charge him with a crime in the first place.

“Hey, we’ve had a lot of break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy…” So begins George Zimmerman’s 911 call to police. Even if you believe that the call contains a muttered racial slur on the part of Zimmerman, the call is not a racist rant but a call from a concern citizen who sees activity he finds suspicious and then grows frustrated when the suspicious person moves to avoid detection.

Zimmerman describes Martin’s behavior before he’s fully aware of Martin’s race. During the call, he tells the 911 operator that the suspect is possibly under the influence of drugs and is holding something in his waistband. He reports that the subject is now staring at him and then confirms that the suspect is black.

It is true that Trayvon Martin did not have a gun and that Zimmerman followed him and was suspicious of him. It’s also true that Zimmerman, and not Martin, has a criminal record including a charge of assaulting an officer and at least one complaint of domestic violence.

But one critical aspect of the case is often overlooked and is essential to determining whether the shooter acted lawfully. That is: it has been reported that Zimmerman was on the ground screaming for help and being punched by Martin when the shooting occurred. So far nothing has shaken that assertion. It’s backed up by witnesses and appears to be corroborated by later 911 tapes of people who called after hearing the two men fighting outside.

That’s a tough pill to swallow for the keyboard commandos publishing Zimmerman’s home address and calling for his blood. But if Zimmerman was being beaten by Martin and was screaming for help, as witnesses appear to confirm, then there’s no case against Zimmerman at all, no matter what kind of jerk he might be.

Zimmerman was indeed advised not to pursue Martin by the police and it appears he ignored this advice since the two met up later. Zimmerman complains on his 911 call about Martin possibly getting away. It is after this remark that the alleged racial slur occurs. For some reason, this has been seized upon as reason to declare the shooting unlawful, but the point, while it certainly is a damaging display of poor character is true, wouldn’t change facts if he was indeed on the defensive when he shot Martin. At least one report indicates that after exchanging words, Zimmerman was heading back to his vehicle and was struck from behind.

But as is often the case, the mainstream media falls in line relatively quickly and sticks to a predictable narrative. In doing so, many facts get tossed quickly out the window. In the Sanford, Florida shooting, the media is in the mode of portraying Martin as nothing but an innocent victim and Zimmerman as a villainous, racist ogre. But the shooting has to be judged by the evidence of the shooting itself. The calls for Zimmerman’s arrest fly in the face of the basic facts of the case.

And sadly, so far, the Trayvon Martin case is just that: racial hysteria that is inflated into front-page news by an echo-chamber media too scared to look at facts and tell the hard truth.