“I wish that my son was killed by a 60-year-old white man.”
Imagine saying those words as a father of a dead child.
Covering up a racist murder simply because the victim is white.
“I wish I had died instead of my son” or pretty much any other combination of words would be more understandable, more speakable — anything but this bizarre fixation on the skin color of the man responsible for his son’s death.
And yet those were words uttered by Nathan Clark at a press conference on September 10.
‘Look what you’ve done to us’
A little context: Nathan’s 11-year-old son Aiden was killed and dozens more children were injured when a Haitian drove a minivan into a school bus in Springfield, Ohio, last August.
Now that Haitian immigration to Springfield is a national issue, with lurid tales of domestic pets being caught and butchered for food, Nathan Clark wanted to set the record straight about the circumstances and meaning of his son’s death. I suppose he did that — but perhaps not in the way he thought he would.
Here’s some of what Nathan Clark said:
I wish that my son Aiden Clark was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would ever say something so blunt. But if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone.
The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces.
But even that’s not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem as though our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate. That we should follow their hate.
And look what you’ve done to us: We have to get up here and beg them to stop. Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose. And speaking of morally bankrupt, politicians Bernie Moreno, Chip Roy, JD Vance, and Donald Trump — they have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain.
This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis, and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio.
Grief does terrible things to people. We all know this. I wouldn’t blame Nathan Clark if, just a year after his son’s tragic death, the wound is still gaping and raw. Who would?
But the nature of the statement and its targets — Donald Trump, JD Vance, MAGA, “misinformation,” and “hate” — suggest deliberate crafting and calculation, not the kind of lashing out you’d expect from a father driven mad by pain and loss.
It’s a totally politicized call for de-politicization.
America’s peacemaker
Maybe this is a glimpse into the abyss of the modern liberal soul, into the deep recesses where the ideal of absolute equality takes root. Equality at any price, even the life of your own child: Is that not commitment? What we sacrifice reveals the nature of what is truly most sacred to us. God showed Abraham that, and Cain learned his lesson the hard way.
Maybe. But I think there’s something more to the story than that when you consider just how many parents and family members of dead white people — and it’s always white people — say stuff like this now.
That extra something is fear — and political pressure. Nathan Clark may be a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but it’s likely he received a visit from the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service, which told him exactly what to say and how to say it.
According to its own website, the CRS “serves as ‘America’s peacemaker’ for communities facing conflict based on actual or perceived race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or disability.”
When a community faces such a conflict, the CRS springs into action, “providing facilitated dialogue, mediation, training, and consultation” to help communities “come together, develop solutions to the conflict, and enhance their capacity to independently prevent and resolve future conflict.” Throughout, the CRS aims to be “the neutral party.”
Burying Donald Giusti
But what does this bureaucratese mean in practice? It means that when a white person is the victim of a serious crime at the hands of a non-white person or persons, the CRS turns up and makes sure the victim and their loved ones don’t kick up a fuss and, most of all, don’t say anything inflammatory about the role of race in the crime.
That’s exactly what happened when Donald Giusti was smashed over the head with a rock and stomped to death by a mob of Somalis in a Lewiston, Maine, park six years ago. The CRS website includes Lewiston as an example of a successful intervention. According to the CRS, “conflict [had] been on the rise between the immigrant population and the white community” for “several weeks” before Donald Giusti was killed. The city’s police chief then called in the CRS “to help ease racial tensions and strengthen community relations.”
The mere existence of the CRS and the documented instances of its work tell us all we need to know about the profound anti-white bias of the American government today.
Public statements by the victim’s family were essential to the “peacemaking” process. Donald Giusti’s uncle was wheeled out for the press, and so was his sister. Both said more or less the same thing. “We want to see the violence stop,” the uncle said. “We want to see things come to an end, we want people to be able to come to the park and be happy. Walk through the park and not be afraid.” The sister expressed her hope that her brother’s death would not be for nothing and that it would “give this community a voice to say something needs to give.”
And what of the man held responsible for the killing? He was allowed to plead “no contest” to a reduced charge of criminal negligence and was sentenced to just nine months in prison.
So this is what “easing racial tensions and strengthening community relations” really means to the CRS and the Justice Department: covering up a racist murder simply because the victim is white.
I won’t say, “Imagine if the roles were reversed,” because I’m well past that point, and you probably are too. You know how different things would have been if it were a bunch of Italian-Americans beating a Somali man’s brains out in a park.
Never ‘a race thing’
Donald Giusti isn’t the only one. Look at the terrible case of Jonathan Lewis, the schoolboy kicked to death last year by at least eight black teens in an alley behind their school.
Lewis was killed over a pair of wireless headphones and a vape pen. But instead of calling for justice or expressing anger or any kind of recognizably human response, Jonathan Lewis Sr. issued a public statement denying that race was a factor in the killing. “This is a humanity thing beloved people of the United States. Not a race thing!” he wrote on a fundraising page for his son’s funeral.
Or look at the case of Andy Probst, the former police chief who was deliberately run down and killed by two non-white teenagers on a joyride in a stolen car. Again, the same dismal script, this time read by the victim’s daughter on behalf of the whole family:
We believe that Andy’s murder is a direct result of society’s decayed family values and the strong effects that social media has on our youth. We as a family in no way feel that Andy’s murder was based on race or profession, and was a random act of violence. We ask you to not politicize or use Andy’s murder to fuel political agendas or to create cultural wars.
I can’t say for sure whether the CRS was involved in the cases of Andy Probst, Jonathan Lewis, and Aiden Clark, but there is every reason to believe so. The similarities are undeniable.
To refuse the script
The mere existence of the CRS and the documented instances of its work tell us all we need to know about the profound anti-white bias of the American government today.
What kind of pressure does the CRS apply to people like Donald Giusti’s uncle and sister? Threats? Probably not direct threats. Threats don’t need to be explicit to be felt and understood. We know from the famous Milgram experiments that the mere presence of authority is enough to get people to act almost totally out of character, up to and including administering fatal electric shocks to complete strangers. A white lab coat is all it takes in the right setting.
I’d also like to know what it would take for a family to go against the CRS. To refuse to read the script and instead tell America: “They’re trying to make us say things we don’t believe. It does matter that our loved one was killed by in an apparent racist attack. It matters, and it’s happening all the time.” What an act of bravery and patriotism that would be. I won’t hold my breath.
Whether he was coached by the CRS or not, Nathan Clark didn’t speak out against the use of his son’s death for political gain. He did the opposite.
He spoke out in favor of a different political vision from that of Donald Trump and the millions of ordinary Americans who support him and simply want their country back: a world where people are interchangeable, where whole towns and cities and even nations can be replaced, where the life of a child — of many children — is a fair trade in pursuit of a new America so long as the children are white.
Nathan Clark spoke out in favor of an America that was once unspeakable but is fast becoming reality.
Opinion & analysis, Politics
