This is a typically triumphalist “Day of The Dead” story. Note that reporter Daniel Hernandez talks about American cities that are “Mexicanizing.” When we report that, it’s “hate.”

“Day of the Dead is increasingly becoming a United States holiday, with people of all backgrounds in Mexicanizing U.S. cities adopting the parties and customs of Mesoamerica’s cousin to Halloween. Just check out the scene at Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles. In Mexico, the regalia associated with November 1 and 2 — candied skulls, brilliant orange marigolds,pan de muerto — are seen practically on every block right now. Although, in true binational post-NAFTA fashion, Day of the Dead in Mexico is also lately having to compete with jack-o-laterns and witches on broomsticks.”[Day of the Dead: Your New American Holiday, October 31, 2009, Daniel Hernandez]

But leaving aside the ethnic triumphalism, most people don’t seem realize that the Day of the Dead is just All Saints Day and All Souls Day in a slightly different garb. Halloween , the Eve Of All Hallows, is part of the same festival. Nothing wrong with that, although Americans can’t be blamed for finding the Mexican festival, with its candy skulls and Aztec associations slightly more bizarre than the American trick or treating, the Great Pumpkin and Treehouse of Horror.

An immigration attorney named Kelly Einstein Darwin Giles and two others were arrested on suspicion of selling dozens of fake H-1B visas for $6,000 to $50,000. According to the LA Times and Law.com they laundered the profits by buying vacant burial plots. The two co-conspirators are Joseph Wai-man Wu and his wife May Yin-man Wu.

Surprisingly the website for the Law Offices of Kelly Giles hasn’t died yet. Besides fraud, they specialize in immigration to the U.S. and Canada. Email them.

Jason Richwine considers the evidence.

From my September 26, 2001 essay on John Huston’s movie The Man Who Would Be King, which was based on the Kipling short story.

Yet, if a war in Afghanistan does prove winnable, which it should, ought the U.S. to undertake a long-term benevolent occupation to attempt to turn that desolate land into a peaceful “normal country?” Huston’s movie offers a skeptical perspective.

Initially, the two pirates’ plan succeeds wildly. The pagans believe Daniel is a god, the son of Alexander. The high priests place the great Greek’s crown upon his head and offer him a treasure room full of rubies and gold. All Daniel and Peachey need to do to become the two richest men on Earth is to fill their packs, wait four months for the snows in the Hindu Kush to melt, and then walk out.

While awaiting Spring, Daniel amuses himself by playing at being king. To the applause of his new subjects, he enforces peace, dispenses justice at traditional durbars, sets up granaries to insure against famine, and builds bridges to tie the country together.

When the passes finally open, Peachey learns to his horror that Daniel now feels too responsible for his people to grab the loot and run. The grandiose nation-building urge that in the 1990’s helped inspire American interventions in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia has infected him. “A nation I shall make of it, with an anthem and a flag,” King Daniel thunders. …

Catastrophe ensues.

This afternoon, a Knox County (Tennessee) jury sentenced Lemaricus Davidson, now 28, to death for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23, on January 7, 2007.

“The jury of five women and seven men deliberated about four hours before returning its decision to a packed courtroom….

‘The punishment is death,’ the jury foreman said.

The victims’ families gasped at the verdict, but Davidson showed no reaction….

‘The murder was especially heinous, atrocious and cruel,’ the foreman said, reading from the verdict form for Newsom….

The jurors this morning heard closing arguments in the penalty phase of this 11-day trial before getting a final round of legal instructions from Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner.

Prosecutor Takisha Fitzgerald told jurors Davidson killed Christian [and Newsom] … to save his own neck.

“The only thing Chris had left was the knowledge of who his attacker was,” Fitzgerald said. “(Davidson) took everything else. The only thing (Channon) had left was the knowledge of who her attacker was.”

Defense attorney Doug Trant asked jurors to spare Davidson’s life, noting the abuse he suffered and the foster parents who still love him….

The jury, chosen from Knox County at Davidson’s insistence, considered death by lethal injection, life without parole or life, a mandatory 51-year sentence.”

[Torture-slaying sentence: Death for Davidson by Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel, October 30, 2009.]

The jury resisted attempts by Judge Baumgartner to induce it to impose a less severe sentence.

Look for more on the trial later in an exclusive VDARE.COM report.

Lawrence Auster has been writing about the gang-rape in California that I mentioned below. It appears that while the alleged perpetrators of this crime were largely Hispanic, but include one black and one white, the victim may have been white.

I say “may have been,” that’s a deduction, because it’s not the kind of thing that the media wants us to know, and they have even deleted a comment  surmising this from news website.

It’s true that the press rightly avoids naming rape victims, who have had a hard enough time already without having their name on TV. But compare this case with the Duke Rape Hoax, where a reporter for the Washington Post started a story in its Arts and Living section , even after it was becoming known that it was a hoax, with the words “She was black, they were white, and race and sex were in the air.” See how long it takes them to write a similar story this time.

On Wednesday morning, the jurors in the second Knoxville Horror murder trial convicted “alleged ringleader” Lemaricus Davidson, aka “Slim,” of 35 out of 38 state felony charges, including of murdering Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, 23, of kidnapping both victims, robbery, repeatedly vaginally and anally raping Christian, and of facilitation in the gang-rape of Newsom. It could not be proven that Davidson had actually raped Newsom, a crime which was apparently committed with an object.

The penalty phase, in which Davidson is eligible for the death penalty, begins today.

Davidson’s attorneys had sought—with the help of incredible, “never-before-heard” testimony by a friend of Davidson’s, Ethel Lynn Freeman, which contradicted testimony she had given in the two previous trials—to portray the victims as druggies who had voluntarily gone to the house on Chipman Street, where Channon Christian’s tortured corpse would later be found, seeking drugs, and that Christian had voluntarily had vaginal sex with Davidson. The jury did not buy the incredible story.

Reader “D,” who has functioned as my unofficial research assistant on this case wrote,

“Before the guilty verdict today, Gary Christian, Channon’s father held a press conference. A video is on the right side of the page. He blasted the legal system for allowing his daughter to be slandered on no evidence. He said, ‘I don’t care who you are…anybody insinuate that my daughter was down there buying drugs, was doing drugs, all that crap, look for a lawsuit.’

Also, ‘And that Channon Christian may have had consensual sex with that animal, over my dead body. The next person that says out of their mouth that my daughter had consensual sex with him, ain’t got but one person in this world to deal with and that’s me, over my dead body.’

I’m sure you are aware of the guilty verdict today in the second Knoxville Horror trial. Davidson went down on all the main counts. Most important, BOTH murders, unlike the Cobbins trial.

At least in the guilt phase, the attempt to say that Channon Christian and Chris Newsom went to East Knoxville to buy drugs was afailure. The defense also kept inferring that Channon had ‘consensual sex’ with Davidson. They never left that theme.

Tomorrow they have the penalty phase. There is another set (if not the same ones) of weeping relatives from Memphis ready to cry for Davidson tomorrow. Will the judge affirm a death sentence if the jury hands it down? How fast will the appeal come?”

For better or worse, one cannot sue for slander on behalf of the dead.

DNA testing showed that Channon Christian’s underwear contained sperm from two men that did not match any of the men charged in this atrocity, or her boyfriend, Chris Newsom. (None of the sperm found in her vagina and anus matched Newsom, either.) Ergo, in addition to the many as yet uncharged admitted accessories in this atrocity, there are likely at least two additional rapists and possible murderers.

In April 2008, Eric Boyd was convicted in a federal trial as an accessory after the fact to the carjacking, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Boyd is presently appealing his conviction.

In August, Davidson’s half-brother, Letalvis Cobbins, aka “Rome,” was convicted on 33 out of 38 state felony charges, including the aggravated rape and murder of Channon Christian, and sentenced to life without parole.

Co-defendant George Thomas’ trial is scheduled to begin on December 1, while co-defendant Vanessa Coleman continues her fight to get the charges against her dropped.

During one recent 24-hour stretch, three separate readers, led by “D” (who for all intents and purposes, functions as my research assistant on this case—thanks also to Jun and “SH”), sent along a link to a Daily Mail article that discusses the Knoxville Horror, for the first time, on the other side of the pond.

The good news: Brits are hearing about the case, and the headline makes clear what is at stake: “Is political correctness to blame for lack of coverage of horrific black-on-white killings in America’s deep [sic] south?” The bad news: The Daily Mail writer, David Gardner, has largely cut and paste without attribution from a May 18, 2007 article by AP propaganda officer Duncan Mansfield.

Back in the spring of 2007, the Internet was afire with rumors that the gang rapist-torturer-killers had sexually mutilated Christian and Newsom, cutting off one or both of her breasts, and lopping off his penis, while both victims were still alive; and with attacks on the national MSM, for the latter’s refusal to cover the case. In the course of researching my first report on the case, in early 2007, I was able to trace the sexual mutilation rumors back to white supremacist/neo-Nazi/FBI agent provocateur Hal Turner. Meanwhile, the AP tasked Duncan Mansfield with discrediting the MSM’s critics as “white supremacists.” As a sop to “balance,” Mansfield also cited “mainstream conservatives” and country singer Charlie Daniels.

One might question the significance of such an article, almost three years after the initial crime. [Peter Brimelow: No, it’s significant that the Daily Mail is focusing on MSM censorship. It’s not an allegation you usually see in major newspapers.]

Granted, that a British paper would report at all on the case, rather than ignore it or let it be forgotten, as most of the American MSM have done, is a positive. The best paragraph in the Daily Mail article that isn’t a cut-and-paste, I believe, is this one:

“Ironically, the case has now generated more publicity surrounding the furore over whether or not political correctness was behind the US media’s decision to largely ignore the story than it did for the murders themselves.”

[Is political correctness to blame for lack of coverage over horrific black-on-white killings in America's Deep South? by David Gardner, Daily Mail, October 16, 2009.]

The above-quoted paragraph and the title notwithstanding, much of the article is devoted to quoting authorities’ insistence from Mansfield’s 2007 article, that the atrocity was not racially motivated. And yet, most British readers take such knee-jerk proclamations with a grain of salt. Racial socialism is, if anything, even more deeply institutionalized in British life—what’s left of it—than in America, and racist assaults on Englishmen by black and Pakistani immigrants and their children are a daily occurrence, as are the denial of the obvious by the media and the courts, and the latter’s powder puff justice in such cases. As many of the Daily Mail reader comments show, Englishmen simply read through the pc coding of such articles to the underlying, racist reality.

“It is exactly the same over here. Scenario 1) white youths beat up Asian, race crime and all over the press. Scenario 2) Asian youths beat up white youth, by-line in local rag with mention from local police saying no evidence of any race crime.”

- john,, manchester, 15/10/2009

“There is no point expressing how I feel when I read this, any person who is able to show a shred of human emotion will feel the exact same feeling reading the details.
The one comment I really hate is when the County Sheriff said ‘they were two kids in the wrong place at the wrong time’. No, no they were not. They were two people on a date, minding their own business, it was no wrong time. It is a patronising excuse for such a tragic waste of life. People with that mentality to inflict such evil are not fit to walk amongst the rest of us….
Evil is not race specific-but I am annoyed it took the issue of race for this to surface.”

- David, Glasgow, 15/10/2009 17:35

“This is no different to what the BBC does. Frequently they do not give a description of suspects or carry a photograph (when other media sources do) when the crime involves non-white suspects.

It is apparently an official policy to ensure ‘diversity and social cohesion’. Read all about it on the Biased-BBC blog.

Perhaps hushing up crimes that dont show multiculturalism in a good light will make them go away”

- Alan, Reading, 16/10/2009 7:14

The following comment applies to the Republican/neoconservative attitude in general:

“Believe it or not, this case is one of the more mundane involving black on white violence. And of course it’s not reported because of political correctness and a fear of what white populations would do if they knew the truth. I could write so much more here but the DM [Daily Mail], despite highlighting the evils of political correctness, wouldn’t print it for reasons of political correctness. The DM is the arch-expert in leading it’s readers to water but never letting them drink..”

- Derek S, Dundee, 16/10/2009 4:23

We at VDARE.com have long had good reason to think little of The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto (a.k.a. Tarantoad), the fanatically open-borders neoconservative who polices the paper’s blog.

Possibly we will have to reconsider. On Monday he posted
In Defense of Carol Swain The Wall Street Journal October 26, 2009
which takes the astonishing step (for the MSM) of attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to us).

This arises out of the $PLC’s attempt to harm black Vanderbilt Professor Swain for her endorsement of Craig Bodeker’s A Conversation About Race (VDARE.com discussion here).

“Carol Swain is an apologist for white supremacists,” Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center tells the Tennessean. Carol Swain is also a friend of this column. To our mind the charge seemed awfully far-fetched, so we decided to get to the bottom of it.

Because we think highly of Swain, we decided to watch the film and draw our own conclusion. Our reaction was mixed: We found the interviews fascinating but Bodeker’s narration disagreeable. We do, however, see Swain’s point about the film’s value in illuminating the subject of race in America.

Taranto’s piece is an astonishing 1,977 words long. This is because, while determined to defend Swain, he is not willing to take the position that A Conversation About Race deserves to be considered on its merit, regardless of what its Producer may have said elsewhere or had for breakfast. Anathematization by Association is a treasured part of the Neocon arsenal, as well as the $PLC’s.

So Taranto writes a long series of quibbles, finally reaching a polemically viable conclusion:

Bodeker …makes of himself an example of the phenomenon described in the publicity material for Carol Swain’s “The New White Nationalism”:
…Swain goes so far as to say that if liberals and African American leaders don’t start to address the legitimate concerns raised by the white nationalists on race matters, they risk being partly to blame for racial unrest in America.
This is a serious argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously, even by those, like the SPLC, that disagree.

Taranto correctly concludes

dismissing Swain as “an apologist for white supremacists” is the tactic of one who is trying to shut down, not encourage, debate.

What is going on here? Neoconservatives have previously been happy to benefit from the demonization process.

Is it just that Taranto has some kind of (an ideological) crush on Swain? Or could it be that the $PLC’s increasing targeting of mainstream political and Christian groups for fundraising scares is being perceived as too provocative?

In any case, what a triumph for Carol Swain. She elicits an extremely rare MSM condemnation of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and she causes the appearance of an extensive and not wholly hostile discussion of A Conversation About Race into a major outlet.

And what an embarrassing contrast to the ineffectuality of FAIR