Valentine McClatchy
The Kansas City Star has a long, dishonorable tradition of race baiting…
Following the lead of its founder – the bush league Citizen Kane known as William Rockhill Nelson – for three generations the Star delighted in patronizing the black residents of Kansas City.
However, when the Star was acquired by McClatchy, I had no idea this represented the confluence of two of the most racist news organizations in the history of American journalism.
Valentine McClatchy was the son of the founder of the eponymous newspaper chain. Using his wealth and influence as a publishing heir, McClatchy launched a crusade to keep Asians out of the United States. After 40 years as publisher of the Sacramento Bee he sold his interest to his brother and devoted the last 15 years of his life to an omnibus committee (California Joint Immigration Committee) dedicated to excluding all non-European immigrants from the country, encompassing Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and Mexicans.
Under his influence the flagship McClatchy paper, The Sacramento Bee, ran upwards of 90 racially demeaning anti-Japanese editorial cartoons between 1906 and 1945. Even though Valentine McClatchy died in 1938, there is no doubt that his views were instrumental in the decision by the Roosevelt administration (aided and abetted by moderate Republican governor Earl Warren of California) to round up and intern Japanese American citizens during World War II. (The year before he died, McClatchy lobbied to strip Japanese-Americans born in the U.S. who were sent to Japan to study or visit family for an extended time of their citizenship if they had stayed in Japan for more than a year. No more Mr. Nice Guy.)
Here we are 85 years later and the KC Star/McClatchy legacy of racial demagoguery soldiers on under the able stewardship of present-day Star journalists.
The Star issued a lengthy mea culpa in 2020 for its anti-black racism of the past. (No apology for its racist McClatchy heritage though.) It now seems to be trying to overcorrect by focusing on stirring up black rage and white guilt by inventing allegations of white racism against its political opponents.
The latest example is the unfortunate event in Clay County three weeks back.
A retired airplane mechanic, 84 year old Andrew Lester, lived in a typical suburban home in Clay County north of the river.
A 16-year-old black man, Ralph Yarl went to the wrong house (he wanted to go to a house on 115th Terrace North East but went by mistake to the house on 115th Street North East where Mr. Lester lived).
After Mr. Yarl knocked–he was coming to pick up his younger brothers–Mr. Lester shot through the door with a pistol. He wounded Yarl in the head and then shot him in the arm.
The only real factual issue in dispute is whether Yarl started to open the storm door when he thought he heard someone coming to let him in. If this is true it is a totally understandable action on Yarl’s part and does not excuse Lester’s acts. However, it may help to explain the shooter’s panicked reaction. By the way, this occurred at 10:00 p.m.
The only fortunate aspect of this terrible event is that young Yarl was released from the hospital within a day or two and is expected to make a full recovery.
Immediately the black grievance industry, both locally and nationwide, went into overdrive and made it seem like this was a new Emmett Till case. (The young black man lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman. Ironically, his accuser, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, died last week April 25th, 2023.)
The Star immediately swung into action, along with all the other racial grievance hucksters.
Ralph Yarl
Considering that the unfortunate event happened three weeks ago, there has been a flood of coverage by the Star, hostile to the accused, totaling tens of thousands of words, seventeen articles in all.
The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to a fair trial, including the ability to have your case heard by an impartial jury of your peers.
How is this possible with the flood of relentlessly negative pre-trial publicity?
The Star and the Greek chorus of liberal activists it serves as a megaphone for have made Lester’s conviction a near certainty. Not content with pressuring the police and prosecutors to treat a frightened and confused old man as a vicious racist criminal, the Star’s writers want to escalate the racial tensions by forcing Lester to be charged with a hate crime.
What is different from past journalistic jihads by the Star is their newfound love of getting close family members to betray their relatives.
In this case, the Star quoted the defendant’s grandson, attributing racist motives for Lesters’ acts. The Star did this one better by blaming FOX News for stoking the violence. The only thing better from the Star’s perspective would have been if Lester had a Josh Hawley sign in his front yard.
As my last post asked, what sort of person would go public with unsubstantiated charges against a father, a grandfather, a sibling, or a child to place them in serious criminal jeopardy? All because of a political disagreement? Why would any responsible journalist encourage this behavior, just to score political points by destroying individual lives or families?
By giving him a platform, the Star is only too willing to enable Klint Ludwig, the defendant’s 28-year-old grandson, to destroy his grandfather’s life and reputation because he disagrees with his grandfather’s politics.
The tactical advantage is obvious–use everything you can to smear conservatives.
It’s like the liberal media who turned President Kennedy‘s assassination 60 years ago by Communist sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald into a product of the right-wing hateful atmosphere of Dallas. They even blamed it on a retired general, Edwin Walker, even though he himself had been wounded in an assassination attempt by the same gunman several months before Oswald shot Kennedy.
Talk about blaming the victim.
What’s going on also has a broader strategic purpose.
The disdain and contempt that the Star and/or McClatchy previously reserved for Asians, blacks, and Hispanics is now shifted to the white working class.
Look at the way they wrote about the local people swept up in January 6th.
None of them had any financial means, they all had to drive to D.C., none could afford to fly. All worked blue collar jobs like sheet metal worker, beautician, and railroad brakeman. One was a decorated 20-year Marine veteran from Olathe, another was a former policeman from Blue Springs.
These are the kind of people who did the hard manual labor that literally built this country and fought this country’s wars. According to the Star, they are bigots, fools, white nationalists, racists, terrorists, as well as lunatic conspiracy buffs. And, oh yes, they are dangerous criminals who need to be crushed as an example to others.
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
Consider another case from six months ago and how it was treated by the Star.
Anthony Santi
On October 6th, 2022, an off-duty KCMO fireman, Anthony Santi, was at a gas station in Independence when a 23-year-old man, Jaívon Taylor, started abusing a female cashier. When Santi tried to intervene, Taylor went back out to his car and got a gun. A struggle ensued when Santi tried to wrest the gun from Taylor. As they struggled, a woman companion of Taylor’s took the gun and shot and killed Santi.
This is all on video.
The Jackson County Prosecutor’s office refused to press charges against the shooter. It argued that the woman who shot Santi was acting in self-defense. They relied on the Missouri Stand Your Ground law, a decision which was applauded by the Star; “Here is why the Stand Your Ground law protected the woman who shot KC firefighter from charges.”
First of all, the real reason neither Taylor or his companion were charged was because they were black and the man who was killed was white.
It was a purely political calculation given Democratic party fawning and groveling to its most loyal constituents, guilty whites and angry blacks.
After all, when blacks kill blacks, no big deal. When whites kill whites, no big deal (at least as long as the killers are trans activists or Islamic extremists, i.e. members of demographics which support the Democratic party).
When blacks kill whites, no big deal. (See Santi case above). But when whites shoot blacks (even if no one is killed), VERY BIG DEAL.
What makes this situation even more outrageous is the fact that the Star, like the good progressive mouthpiece it is, has been bitterly opposed to Stand Your Ground Laws, saying it promotes vigilante style justice. The Star even blamed the Yarl shooting on the existence of a Stand Your Ground Law, arguing that laws like Missouri’s encourage gun violence.
Any objective analysis says that the law has no application here.
The whole purpose of the law is to allow anyone who is attacked to defend themselves. It is not to allow someone tied to the attacker to kill the person fighting back against the attacker. By the logic employed by the Star and the Jackson County D.A., I could go with my buddie when he tries to rob a liquor store. If the liquor store clerk fights back, I can kill him because, after all, I fear for my buddy’s safety. The rule that you can’t claim the right of self-defense in any confrontation that you initiated doesn’t apply. I didn’t pull the gun on the liquor store clerk, it was my buddy! I was acting in his defense because I was afraid he might be shot by the liquor store clerk and killed or injured.
This is an absurd interpretation, employed to the usual end of angering blacks and guilting whites. (Note also the background analysis by the Star of the Yarl/Lester case intended to cast the suburbs north of the river as Klan country.)
Lest you miss the point, the D.A. and the Star purposely tried to evoke the All Purpose George Floyd analogy by adding the detail from an unnamed witness to Tony Santis’ killing. An unnamed witness now claims that Taylor was being choked and couldn’t breathe during his struggle with Santi.
Remember, this is the same D.A. and newspaper that launched a multi-year crusade to free a local man convicted of a triple murder 45 years ago. Was this based on new evidence? Or has the political climate so changed that they could get a conviction overturned, a result which stirs anger and fear in the black community and guilt and shame in the white, both of which are more important than mere justice for individuals like a 41-year-old fireman from Independence? Demonstrating systemic racism matters, white lives don’t.
The Star and its corporate overlord, McClatchy, are still playing racial politics as they have for the last 140 years. This time, however, the group treated with contempt and derision, is not blacks, Asians, or Hispanics, but simply working-class white people like Andrew Lester and Anthony Santi.
Santi and Lester are outlaws in the true, original sense of the word, i.e. not people who broke the law but members of a despised minority from whom the law’s protection is withheld. When the legal system and the media are corrupted like this, our days as a constitutional republic are numbered.
Wow a white boy whining about society changing, from one he loves where whites could kill people of color without consequence, to one where white folks have to abide by the same laws as those they used to kill. Just white snowflake whining, as society realized that white supremacy is a cancer that must be stopped. Yep white boy privilege is dying. Now the real whining will commence.
Thanks for that, Kansas Karl…
Mind if I ask you a question?
Have you considered therapy?
Talk about a one trick pony! Have you ever responded to anything I’ve written without playing the race card? The people I expressed sympathy for and whom the Star despises may be white but they are anything but privileged. The Star always has a racial group which it ridicules. Working class whites are just the newest flavor of the day. Witness the cold indifference shown to the poor residents of East Palestine,Ohio. Stalin liquidated a whole class of people,the kulaks. Welcome to the American Gulag.
That’s telling him!
WTF is this idiot “kansas karl” even talking about? What planet does he live on?
I only ask because I wasn’t aware whites could run around and kill blacks with impunity. That’s news to me. JFC. What a moron.
Now Guy…go easy on KK – at least he’s not KKK…
He can be a little ornery and I think his screw might have been a tad loose before he unleashed that comment.
But let’s give him a bit of the Rodney King treatment
“Why would any responsible journalist encourage this behavior?” None would, the trouble is that the Star hasn’t had any of those for at least 20 years, if not more. The author also alleges that the Star employs “logic” in its analyses, and unless it is the Red Queen’s logic from Alice in Wonderland, the Star is guilty of nothing of the sort. Finally, the Star has always taken the side of Kansas City’s limousine liberals against the working class, white or otherwise.