Limbaugh Cares About Hate Crimes Only When Whites Are Victims — Even If They’re Not Real Hate Crimes

By Amanda Terkel

Yesterday, hate radio host Rush Limbaugh took up a story about a fight between three Missouri schoolchildren — the two attackers were black and the victim was white. The event gained extra attention because it was captured on video. Limbaugh cast it as a hate crime — typical of what whites face in “Obama’s America” where “white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering”:

LIMBAUGH: It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white. Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives.

Listen here:

There’s no evidence that the fight was racially motivated. Although the local police captain initially speculated that it may have been, he later backtracked and said, “The incident appears now to be more about a couple of bullies on a bus dictating where people sit.” D’Vante Lott, a student who witnessed the attack and was suspended for laughing at the incident, said the two attackers were basically just trying to act tough.

Limbaugh never cares about racially motivated attacks perpetrated on people of color and has derided hate crimes legislation. He said that such a bill would “carve out protection for perverts” and worried that it didn’t provide enough protections for whites.

Federal authorities are now probing a possible hate crime that happened outside a Georgia Cracker Barrel restaurant. After Army reservist Tasha Hill, who is African-American, politely asked Troy Dale West, who is white, to be careful because he almost hit her daughter when opening the door, he began spewing racial epithets at her and punching and kicking her in front of her daughter. Will Limbaugh also condemn this incident today? (Unlikely, considering that in the past, he has praised slavery, said that James Earl Ray deserved the Medal of Honor, and claimed that “all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson.”)