VDARE.com: 01/13/11 - DRAFT: Jared Loughner And Jared Taylor: When Sloppy Police Work Meets Irresponsible Media.

Jared Loughner and Jared Taylor

When sloppy police work meets irresponsible media.

byBy Jared Taylor

[VDARE.com note: This is Jared's original, with the marked changes made by Allison Silver [Email her]. The actual piece can be found here.]

Last Saturday, like most Americans people, I went to bed shocked at the news that someone had tried to kill a congresswoman and had murdered six6 other people.

The next morning, at about 9:00 a.m., I got a call from CNN, asking what my publication, American Renaissance (AR), had to do with the carnage. I nearly fell out of my chair. CNN said that Fox News was quoting a Department of Homeland Security Department memo saying it had a "strong suspicion" that AR — described as "anti-government" and "anti-Semitic"— was linked to the killer, now identified as Jared Lee Loughner.

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity., Bbut I draw the line at being thought to havecited as an influenced on a mass murderer.

I immediately went through AR's records, and found no trace of anyone named Loughner as a subscriber, donor, or even commenter on our web page. DESCRIBE YOUR MAGAZINE HERE IN ONE SENTENCE.

I needed to tell Fox this, but I had no contacts there. I went to their website and sent a "stop-the-presses" message to every address of every official and correspondent I could find. I called the telephone number on the page, but it seemed to be a help line for people getting bad reception. I left a frantic message anyway.

I then called up Homeland Security., bBut all I got was some moronic clerk, who told me no one was there., and that I shouldbetter call back Monday morning.

I startedthen fielded phone calls. The New York Times, theThe Washington Post, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, various bloggers, and an Australian radio station (!) wanted me to tell them all about this crazed killer. I told them I had never heard of him.

Finally, after several other Fox correspondents had repeated this incorrect storyalready spread the word about the AR-mass murderer connection, James Rosen of Fox finally called. He wasn't even replying to my desperate e-mail messages. Bless his heart, he was just thinking like a reporter -- and decided to called the notorious American Renaissance to get a responsehimself.

So, after Bret Baier, Jennifer Griffin, and Greta Van Susteren had reportedcalmly told the world that AR was under "strong suspicion," Rosen went on the air aton at 11:00 a.m. and quoted me describing as calling the DHS memo as "complete nonsense."

InOver the next few days, both Fox and DHS started backeding away from the memo. It was now , which ceased to be a DHS memo but a local law enforcement document put together with DHS information from DHS.

But the damage washad been done. The Internet was howling. There was aA chorus of lefty blogs claimeding this provedwas proof of the "climate of political vitriol." we have heard so much about. The Jewish Telegraph Agency fretted that if "anti-Semites" were pulling the strings, it meant Rep. GabrielleCongresswoman GiffordsGifford's (D-Ariz.) was shot because she was Jewish.

Expert hate-sniffers were trotted out. They finally, who explained that although American Renaissance is guilty of various varieties of wickedness, anti-Semitism isn't one of them. So, and thisa connection to the murderers was awfully unlikely.

But like so many errors that make much racier news than the hum-drum facts would --, this one went around the world. The London Daily Mail ran a big headline, about the "Fanatical Magazine American Renaissance."

And sSo the hate e-mail began to pour in. Most of it we deleted unread, and a shocking amount of what we did read was unprintable. Some of the milder lines: were "Kudos on teaching Jared Loughner how to hate," and "You must be popping your Champaign corks that a Democrat was killed."

Early on Monday morning we got a voice-mail bomb threat: "Evacuate the office. Evacuate the office." My wife kept expecting a SWAT team to show up at ourthe front door. I had a hard time explaining any of this to my 8-year-old daughter.

By Tuesday, sanity was returning. A POLITICO Politico.com ran a great story that went a long way towards clearing the air. The "memo," which originated in the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC), rather than DHSnot Homeland Security, was just an internal e-mail from a low-level guy to his superior. It was full of errors, hastily written soonright after the shootings, and not intended for outside dissemination. Fox has yet to revealis mum on how it got hold of it.

David Denlinger, the head of ACTIC. calledtelephoned me on Tuesday to say he is trying to find out what happened. He wouldn'twon't say who wrote the e-mail., aAnd he still doesn't know how anyone could have connected Jared Loughner to Jared Taylor.

—bBut I have a theory. When reporters asked me whywhat could possibly have led anyone would haveto associated the killer with me, I would joked that it must have been because the crack sleuths at DHS must have noticed that we have the first same name.

And tThat may not be completely crazy after all. The ACTIC e-mail says Loughner was linked to us "through videos posted on his myspace and YouTube accounts." Before Loughner became famous, you could reportedly find his goofy clips on YouTube. Maybe right after the shooting, the ACTIC guy who wrote thisthe e-mail typed in Jared Loughner's name and got—along with Loughner's ravings—some computer-generated suggestions of other clips to watch --, including some of mine.

Jared isn't that common a name; it's just the sort of coincidence computer algorithms look for. In the mad scramble after the shooting, maybe that was all ACTIC needed to start baying for blood. Though hHow it then turned us into anti-Semitic, anti-government loonies is still a deep mystery. Maybe ACTICs Denlinger will tell me some day.

In the meantime, the hate mail is tailing off and my wife figures the SWAT team must have read the Politico article -- and has decided not to come.

Jared Taylor is editor of American Renaissance