The Mob That Cried Wolf: Shiloh Hendrix and the Rage Economy

Scrolling junkies will surely, by now, be familiar with the fiery digital inferno of hot-takes burning their way across social media this week. Once the involved woman started a GiveSendGo, corporate media dropped the story like a soiled covid mask. But local and second-tier media are having a field day. People Magazine ran its outrage! article on Sunday headlined, “Woman Who Appeared to Hurl a Racist Slur at a Child in a Viral Video Has Raised Over $600,000 in Donations for Herself.”

Four days ago, before media made Shiloh Hendrix a successful fundraising martyr, NBC ran the breaking story under the tiresome and predictable headline, “Police investigate after white mother used racist slur at Minnesota park.” The details are nearly irrelevant at this point, but I’ll cover the basics for our Portland readers.

Late last week, a few unpleasant people got into a playground argument in Rochester, Minnesota. Single-mom Shiloh Hendrix apparently found some kid she didn’t know rummaging through her child’s diaper bag. The kid, who was black, has been reported to be anywhere from four to nine. Anyway, Shiloh scolded the child and impertinently dropped the N-word, enraging a nearby man who was not the child’s father.

The man whipped out his phone and followed Shiloh around, videoing her and demanding she admit she’d uttered the forbidden word. She gave him a predictably obscene response, and the clip ends with the man saying forbodingly, “okay, we’ll see what the Internet thinks about you.”

NBC reported the man and the child were Somali immigrants, part of a large group “relocated” into Rochester during President Autopen’s scribbly reign of terror.

What followed was not news, not to anyone paying attention for the last twenty years, anyway. A vast, furious online doxxing campaign started, leading to all the usual outcomes— attempts to get Shiloh fired, publication of every sketchy detail of her troubled life, death threats, and demands that the local police immediately arrest her for ‘hate speech’ — mob outrage that the Rochester police promptly undertook to satisfy, with all the enthusiasm woke police always keep in store for “investigating” unprosecutable verbal violations.

In response to the clamor for her death and destruction, Shiloh started a fund-raising page. She asked for donations to get herself and her child out of Dodge, moving somewhere safer than New Somalia. News spread like wildfire, and small donations soared past $600,000 in four days. That’s when corporate media conveniently forgot about the story, and everyone else became mesmerized.

GiveSendGo has been swamped with fake Shiloh accounts. Don’t bother trying to find the right one, it’s too late. The search feature also seems to have been gimmicked to make it impossible to find. Shame on GiveSendGo.

Shiloh’s incendiary story sits squarely at the intersection of immigration politics, “white supremacy,” race relations, cancel culture, and white guilt. But the racial components are not nearly as unambiguous as critics would like.

First of all, Shiloh Hendrix is a poor candidate for being a white supremacist. Among other inconvenient facts from her past, doxxers and foreign media reported she’d previously dated a black man, apparently even adding him to her profile picture in 2011. So there’s that.

Second, it strains credulity that America suffers from endemic racism if it becomes national news whenever a random single mom in a Rochester playground drops the “N” word. If it happens all the time, how could it be news? The excitement over the story proves the reverse is true. It’s rare.

That said, there is unquestionably a racial component to the public’s response. Shiloh’s successful fundraiser followed closely behind the also-successful fundraiser for Karmelo Anthony, a black middle-schooler who stabbed a white student to death after stealing his tent. Anthony then raised half a million for his “defense.” Citing free speech, GiveSendGo defiantly refused to shut down the comments to Anthony’s fundraiser even though they were filling up with slogans like “Death to White People!”

When I tell you the Anthony comments were off the chain, believe it. Here’s one example of many:

 
Jacob Wells, GiveSendGo’s CEO, steadfastly defended people’s right to say nasty things about white folks, citing principles of free speech (not hate speech, not this time). But a month later, after Shiloh’s fundraiser hit $500,000, GiveSendGo finally closed the comments on both campaigns. This morally questionable move proved the link between the two cases. GiveSendGo clearly knows the two campaigns are related, since it has the data to confirm that.

 
Before the comments were abruptly closed off, Shiloh’s campaign collected many equally objectionable remarks, except going the other way. Everybody was mad.

The deplorable sum of events at this point in the story is a whole lot of people behaving badly. But there’s more to the story, as evidenced by all the social media attention to the two fundraisers — though sadly, more outrage was expressed over a single playground insult than over the plain-blooded murder of an innocent teenager.

Let us not overreact. I often wonder whether these local-cases-escalated-to-national-attention are psyops. George Floyd’s over-publicized case conveniently kicked off the 2020 Summer of Protest, even though unfortunate custodial deaths like Floyd’s happen several times a month.

In 2020, something, or someone, ensured the nation would focus on that particular case — and the result was cities burned.

It is uncontroversial that this kind of operation is part of the classic deep-state regime-change playbook, and the tactic of using race to create political change has a long pedigree. Practically since day one —when the first Soviet spy arrived here in 1916— communists repeatedly and often expressed a desire to gin up a race war to help overthrow America’s capitalist government. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union and its proxies openly funded and trained members of the Black Panther Party and other radical race groups.

Later, KGB archives (e.g., the Mitrokhin Archive) confirmed that the Soviets saw racial unrest in the U.S. as fertile ground for subversion.

Drug-addled George Floyd was an inconsequential person and an anti-hero. His status came only from his victimhood. I have never believed that the George Floyd protests were truly grassroots or organic. I believe the Summer of Protest was a soft-power operation to help elect Joe Biden. Potty-mouthed Shiloh Hendrix is equally inconsequential and is no kind of heroine. (Nor is she any kind of devil.) Her public status derives fully and only from her victimhood. And she is a victim, this time of anti-white racism and double standards. And she has now become a cancel culture martyr.

With the Trump Agenda moving full speed ahead, it seems an opportune time for some adversary to foment domestic social unrest. I’m not making any claim; but I am saying we must be extra suspicious of these kinds of “organic” social movements, especially when they aggressively invade race relations and pop up right when it would be most convenient for the deep state.

Question everything.

Whatever else she may or may not be, Shiloh Hendrix is a terrible choice as the figurehead for fighting reverse racism. Her bad decision in the moment to curse out a stranger’s child on a playground might be understandable and forgivable, maybe even easily forgivable, but it is definitely not laudable. It is only polarizing.

So let us not fall into the outrage trap unwittingly. If we must go there, let it be done carefully and with calculation.

Finally, Matt Walsh found a silver lining in this story. Matt is the Daily Wire columnist responsible for the excellent anti-DEI documentary, What is a Woman? Matt hopes that Shiloh raises another $600K, because he persuasively argued the Shiloh Hendrix story represents the death of cancel culture:

CLIP: Matt Walsh supports Shiloh in the ‘controversy’ (23:00).

Matt doesn’t defend Shiloh’s choices, but he understands how her moment of anger could have happened. He also recognizes that she does need the money, given the vitriol and powerful forces assembled against her. But he was most of all fascinated by the sudden failure of white-shaming over the forbidden “N” word, and he thinks that at least some of the donations to Shiloh’s fundraiser were motivated by public outrage at the effort to destroy Shiloh’s life just for a random overheated comment that other people don’t like.

Unlike me, Matt did find something unintentionally heroic in the story: “Shiloh Hendrix is cancel culture’s final boss,” Matt explained.

In other words, Matt has recognized the principle behind the C&C Army’s Multiplier strategy. Since 2021, you and I have been multiplying attacked conservatives. We’ve always said our main goal was to send a message to the lunatic mob that, if you try to cancel our folks, we’ll just promote them even more enthusiastically. We have done that, supplying significant donations at critical inflection points for people like: covid docs — like Peter McCullough — Moms groups, free speech advocates, anti-DEI activists like Chris Rufo, and politicians like Wyoming’s terrific Harriet Hageman.

I concur with Matt’s take on how the response to Shiloh’s case is a crushing blow to cancel culture. But I remain wary —as we must— over the details. Opposing cancel culture is one thing. Using Shiloh’s story to crack open the floodgates of pent-up complaints between people of different skin colors is something we should studiously avoid if we don’t want a change of regime.

“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Ephesians 4:26.

Read more