What is worse: murder or alleged racism? The New York Times knows. A headline in the paper’s April 11 print edition read: “Trump Posts Attack Video and Denigrates Haitians.” The online version of the article was only slightly more detailed: “Trump Shares Video of Graphic Attack and Rails Against Haitians.”
What was this “attack video” or, even more puzzlingly, this “graphic attack?”
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On April 3, a surveillance camera at a gas station convenience store in Fort Myers, Florida, filmed a burly man methodically bashing in the windows and hood of a parked car with a hammer. The audio captures the blows’ explosive force. When the vandal starts in on the driver’s side windows, a woman exits the convenience store and calls out to him. He strides over to her, winds up as if for a pitch, and lands a massive strike on her head. She falls to the ground. As she lies on her back, spread-eagled, the assailant lands six more blows on her skull. Initially, her arms twitch upwards with each strike, but then she moves no more. The murderer steps over her body and walks away.
The killer, Rolbert Joachin, is a Haitian illegal alien who entered the country in 2022. Rather than deporting him, the Biden administration granted him Temporary Protected Status. TPS allows illegals from countries allegedly experiencing crises to remain in the U.S. until the domestic crisis ends. Haitians have historically been the largest recipients of TPS grants, but they have recently been displaced from Number One status by Venezuelans. About 350,000 Haitians are in the country still on TPS.
Joachin’s TPS grant ran out in 2024, but he stayed anyway (of course). The record does not suggest that the Biden authorities tried to find him. Joachin was reportedly homeless and known in downtown Fort Myers as a nuisance. According to the police, he was under investigation for another crime at the time of the killing. Law enforcement is reporting that Joachin had planned to murder the victim, Nilufa Easmin. Easmin, an employee of the convenience store, was a 51-year-old Bangladeshi in the U.S. legally. Joachin reportedly demolished Easmin’s car in order to lure her outside.
On April 9, the Department of Homeland Security posted the store video with the caption: “WARNING GRAPHIC: These are the consequences of importing the third world. Do not look away.” Four hours later, Trump posted his own message about the killing on Truth Social:
This animal was allowed to stay here because the Biden Administration granted him, and all Haitians, “Temporary Protective Status,” a massively abused and fraudulent program which my Administration is working to terminate. . . To my fellow Republicans, and frankly all Common Senses Americans, NEVER FORGET that Joe Biden and the Democrat Party turned the United States of America into a dumping ground, allowing Tens of MILLIONS of Criminals, Lunatics, and the Mentally Insane from all over the World to pour into our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked through our wide Open Borders. As I’ve said all along, if you import the Third World, you become the Third World.
Trump acknowledged the brutality of the video, which he embedded in his post. “I don’t recommend you watch this tape, because it is so terrible,” he wrote. He justified its release on the ground of political accountability: “[I] felt I had an obligation to put it up so that people can see what Democrats are protecting, and wanting to come into our Country, even now, after all we’ve been through. Again, viewer discretion advised — Not for children!”
To the New York Times, the story and the scandal here is Trump’s Truth Social post, not the psychotic bludgeoning. Trump “has made disparaging comments about Haitian immigrants for years,” the paper informed its readers. The Times quickly introduces an immigrant rights activist to offer moral clarity. “Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the immigrant rights nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance, said that the president’s comments were in line with his administration’s history of targeting Haitian people and spreading false narratives. ‘They don’t see the humanity of immigrants,’ she said.”
The real victims in this episode, according to the Times and its sources, are Haitian migrants and other Third World border breakers. “'What President Trump is doing is weaponizing and continuing to attack and traumatize and terrorize communities of color, specifically Haitian immigrants,’” Jozef tells the paper.
It isn’t until nine paragraphs into the article that the Times gets around to saying what Joachin actually did: “The video shows a man using a hammer to smash a car parked outside a store. A woman later emerges from the store and approaches the man. He walks toward her, hits her in the head with the hammer and keeps striking her after she falls to the ground.” This sanitized account leaves out the shocking physical force of the attack and the killer’s sangfroid in carrying it out.
The Times quotes no victims’ rights groups or families of innocents mauled and maimed by immigrants and their progeny. Instead, it trots out the usual boilerplate about the allegedly lower crime rates of immigrants. That claim rests on incomplete and unreliable data. But even if crime rates are lower among first-generation immigrants (at least compared with a national average that includes black Americans), one such act of depravity is too much, if the attacker should not have been in the country in the first place.
Though the Times ignores victims’ representatives, it did reach out to the White House for comment about the subject of its story: Trump’s shocking sin against diversity politesse. In response to questions about Trump’s exploitation of the video to “push his anti-immigration agenda,” a presidential spokeswoman responded: “President Trump will always share the truth with the American people, even when the media tries to hide it.”
Other news outlets also ignored the crime until Trump’s Truth Social entry. That indifference shows how justified Trump was in making the post. But the other outlets at least acknowledged in their headlines that a murder had occurred. CNN wrote: “Trump posts graphic video of deadly hammer attack in Florida, putting renewed focus on immigration debate.”
The BBC announced: “Trump posts graphic video of slaying to argue for stricter immigration policies.”
A TV station in Texas wrote: “Trump shares video of a brutal Florida killing allegedly by Haitian immigrant.”
The Daily Beast, however, matched the Times’s fastidious indirection: “Trump Posts Sick Video in Live Social Media Breakdown.” It is the video that is “sick,” not the killing, according to the Daily Beast, in the typical left-wing swerve from personal responsibility. And it is Trump, not law and order, that is having a “breakdown.”
Trump was right to post the video and right to publicize the murder. His determination to speak out about individual crimes is a notable departure from usual presidential practice. The media keep Americans in the dark about urban and immigrant crime. Reading a sanitized description of the murder is no substitute for seeing its heinousness.
The condition of America’s public spaces is a scandal. In New York City’s latest vagrant attack, a lunatic who calls himself “Lucifer” slashed three senior citizens with a machete in Grand Central Station on Saturday. Nowhere else in the modern Western world are people routinely and sometimes lethally assaulted by vagrants; nowhere else have streets been allowed to disintegrate into such squalor, filth, and threat. Those conditions are the result of policy choices, not of uncontrollable economic or social forces.
Yet to the liberal commentariat (often disguised as “news reporters”), crime and disorder are not the main problem afflicting the U.S.—racism is. Racism has become the cardinal sin for elite Western policy and opinion makers. (The BBC is still publicly flagellating itself a month later for allowing a racial epithet, emitted involuntarily by a Tourette’s Syndrome sufferer, to air during a movie awards ceremony. “We want to address the harm that this has caused” and the inexpressible “trauma and pain” that such offensive language carries, the broadcaster announced in one of its many apologies.) Governments across the West see their main duty as wiping out bigotry among their citizens, not only against “people of color,” but against females, sexual minorities (real or imagined), and as many other alleged victim groups as advocates can be found to put in a claim for. Western governments, especially in Europe, police racial thought crimes. Alternatively, Western governments pressure social media proxies to do the policing for them (as during the Biden administration). Murder is taken for granted, but speaking ill of an official victim group disqualifies one from polite society, sometimes from employment, and, ideally, from public office.
AI is just as vigilant. Asked to provide examples of violent crimes committed by illegal Haitians, Chat GPT balked. “Individual Haitian immigrants, like people in any large population, have been arrested or convicted for many different offenses, including violent crimes, property crimes, fraud, drug offenses, and immigration offenses,” the large language model reluctantly acknowledged. But “isolated anecdotes are a poor way to judge an entire national-origin group.”
There is, in fact, behavior worse than racism, however odious the latter attitude may be. Murder is one such evil. But all violence against others, crimes against property and the social order, unjustified wars, extortion, treason, torture, terrorism—all these human sins would have been recognized up until the last half century as greater violations of the social compact than racist attitudes. Moreover, Western elites ignore lethal ethnic hatreds in the Third World and antiwhite racism in the First. Fighting whites’ alleged racism lets elites morally preen while ignoring the damage that their policies have wrought. That is the very definition of decadence.