January 11, 2015 07:00 PM UTC

Latest Right Wing Fantasy: NAACP Bombing a "Hoax"

• 5 Comments
• by: kwtree

UPDATE 11/3/15

Thaddeus Murphy has been sentenced to five years for the bombing of the NAACP building in Colorado Springs. His weak attempt to avoid a hate crimes charge: “I was mad at my accountant for not returning my calls”.  However, there hasn’t been an accounting office at the bombed building for five years. Per Rick Sallinger’s reporting on KKTV news:

But the NAACP believed then and now the device was intended for them, not a tax firm that was long gone at the time of the explosion.

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Charles C. Johnson wants attention. He wants digital pageviews on his website**’ so that he can keep promoting himself as some kind of conservative wonderboy crusader for the truth. He isn’t trusted among credible journalists along the political spectrum. He tends to regard morals, ethics and truth to be insignificant obstacles when pursuing a breaking news story. And if the truth isn’t flashy enough, Johnson will fix it up until it is sexy enough to bring readers to his site.

 Johnson’s latest attempt to fire up the right wing blogosphere is his claim that the Tuesday, January 6, 2015 attempted firebombing of the NAACP headquarters in Colorado Springs was a hoax. His story has been shared throughout the right wing blogosphere – Twitchy, Drudge, Newsmax, and dozens more are gleefully proclaiming that the NAACP faked the bombing.

Johnson, a blogger based in Fresno, California, (pictured on Redstate, above), used the Google Earth program to find an existing dark splotch on the NAACP HQ which existed before the attempted bombing. See Google Earth screen cap, right.

However, video from  the Democracy Now story clearly shows two marks, one angling upward, one downward. The Blogger littlegreenfootballs has a nice summation of the Google Earth “evidence”. Mark Reiss’ photo from the Gazette, reprinted in Jesse Paul’s Denver Post story, also clearly shows both marks next to each other. (below)

As the Gazette reported, FBI special Agent Ravenelle, who is in charge of the investigation, dismisses the older charred mark.

“Here’s the thing, whether there was a charred mark there before, whether there’s a new charred mark there that’s a little bit larger, the bottom line is, somebody placed a bomb outside the facility, with the intent of doing something nefarious,” he said.

Johnson not credible even to right wing media

Johnson  offered to pay $250 for  photos of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s wife inside a nursing home, where she was being treated for dementia. Johnson has failed spectacularly  to take down politicians (see: Menendez, Kirkpatrick, Cory Booker,) and recently,  his “doxxing” (exposing name and address) of the woman accusing the UVA football team of gang rape, has landed him in legal trouble.

 Redstate commentator Jeff B had this to say, about 23 minutes in to the Red State Weekly Briefing 12/21/2014 “Charles, … I’m going to put this as bluntly as possible. You’re a hack-handed reporter. Your methods are sloppy and your biggest scoops seem to blow up in your face like an exploding cigar from Acme Industries.” Ouch. That was from a conservative commentator.

Charles Johnson is known for negative statements about blacks who have been victims of police violence: he calls them all “thugs”. He is clearly partisan and a sensation-seeker, and even his own Republican and Tea Party compatriots know it. From Fresno, using Google Earth, this arrogant huckster presumes to know better than the FBI, the ATF, local El Paso and Fountain police forces, and all of the citizen witnesses (and potential victims) on the scene.

Why does it matter?

Because the attempted firebombing of the Colorado NAACP headquarters is, probably, an act of domestic terrorism. The FBI has not yet categorized it as such, but how many other explanations are there for a white guy to try to burn down the headquarters of the local National Association for Colored People? Perhaps he brought over a can of gasoline case someone needed some, and tried to light it up as an act of kindness?

I remember vividly from my own childhood when someone, mad at some stance my father took on the editorial page of the Post, threw a Molotov cocktail on our porch. The bottle didn’t break, and it didn’t get inside the house. No one was hurt, very little property damaged. Yet, someone felt strongly enough that Dad needed to stop writing about housing and school integration that they felt it was OK to endanger my skinny eight year old self, my family, and even my ancient Siamese cat.

It didn’t work, of course; Dad continued writing about topics which were controversial at the time. The NAACP, which has decades of experience with these scare tactics, will not be cowed, either. ““We will not be deterred,” Henry Allen, the local NAACP chapter President said. . “I can assure you that early morning Thursday morning, we’ll be back in that office.”

It’s fear that these people want to spread; intimidation and losing the will to political action. They call these things “domestic terrorism”, because that shit is scary.

Someone attempted to bomb the NAACP headquarters in Colorado Springs. Someone did not care who could get hurt in such an attempt. Someone thought that black lives did not matter.

The right wing’s attempt to portray this act of terrorism as a “hoax” is a blatantly racist attempt to minimize the Spring’s history, and to portray the NAACP as hucksters.

The rest of the news-reading world needs to condemn this “hoax” story as the biased claptrap it is, and to move on in finding the perpetrator of the bombing.

**No link provided to Johnson’s site – on purpose.