Hate pays: Making $770K from a racist rant

It's a tale to "make you sick to your stomach," said Parker Molloy in The New Republic. Shiloh Hendrix, a white mother from Rochester, Minn., went viral last week after she allegedly called a 5-year-old Black boy the N-word at a city playground. Confronted by smartphone-wielding bystander Sharmake Omar, she "doubled down," lobbing the same slur at Omar and saying she'd caught the 5-year-old boy "digging" through her son's diaper bag. Hendrix said she was justified in using the N-word "if that's what he's going to act like." After Omar posted the video on social media, Hendrix launched an online fundraiser, saying her family was being harassed. She raised more than $770,000, much of it coming from donors who signed off with racist usernames such as "Nate Higgers” and "Unite the Whites." Hendrix has benefited from the same ugly "patronage system for bigotry" that previously aided right-wing causes célèbres like Kyle Rittenhouse. "The playbook is simple: Do or say something awful, get rightfully called out for it, claim victimhood, and watch the money roll in."

There's a deeper story here, said River Page in The Free Press, and "it starts with the zealotry of the Left, not the Right." The past decade has been awash in tales of people canceled after being "wrongly labeled as racist by an overzealous progressive mob." That doesn't apply to Hendrix, who is guilty as charged. But the righteous fervor of the "woke era" has triggered a "backlash so intense that the Right now celebrates racism." We see the same "tribalism" on the Left, said Abigail Anthony in National Review. When a Black teenager in Texas, Karmelo Anthony, fatally stabbed a white teen last month, his fundraiser received over $500,000 in donations, alongside messages such as "death to the white man." Some Hendrix donors want to "counter-signal," while others want to protest Omar's setting of "an internet army" on Hendrix, which was "more aggressive than screaming a slur."

Come off it, said Anthony L. Fisher in MSNBC.com. Hendrix's backers aren't warriors against cancel culture. They're racists soaked in "white grievance" who feel liberated by the re-election of bigot in chief Donald Trump to engage in overt racism that was "previously socially verboten." I'm no fan of cancel culture, said Kirsten Fleming in the New York Post. But neither am I down with making "heroes" out of murderers and racists spewing "gratuitous hate." It's a dangerous trend that only encourages people's worst impulses. "We all know how slippery this slope is."