Hospital Officials Sound 'Hate Crime' Alarm Over 'Noose,' But Surveillance Footage Tells a Different Story
Will liberals never learn?
The discovery of what appeared to be a noose in a tree outside a San Francisco Bay Area Kaiser Permanente medical office last month stirred up no end of angst as Kaiser officials issued a handwringing statement about the “disgust” and “anguish” the facility’s staff had experienced.
Now, it’s probably more like “humiliation” and “embarrassment.”
As just about anyone who’s followed the news of suspected nooses lately might have guessed, the “noose” that turned up outside the office in Gilroy, California, was not the “painful and triggering symbol of the history of violence against African Americans in the United States,” Kaiser officials described.
In fact, it was a harmless piece of rope, left in the tree by a tree-trimmer who’d used it to climb the tree to cut branches and leaves that were too high to reach from the ground. Granted, there is a portion of the rope in the shape of a “noose,” but the rest doesn’t look like a rope meant for hanging. In fact, it looks a good deal like there’s climbing being done.
Noose found at Kaiser Permanente in Gilroy, hospital sayshttps://t.co/3NohTEh9U2
— LaMonica Peters (@LaMonicaPeters) March 8, 2023
It’s an utterly innocuous explanation for an incident that was blown out of all proportion by executives in the Pavlovian atmosphere of the United States in the 21st century, where the boogeyman of “white supremacy” is hiding behind every bush and tree that needs trimming in the country.
Check out KRON-TV’s initial, ominous coverage of the discovery:
“Kaiser officials say this startling, not only startling, excuse me, but they also find it really offensive. They say that it’s painful and triggering, and they ultimately say they are going to do everything they can to find out who did it and why,” KRON reporter Michael Thomas said on the scene on March 8 (at a ludicrously early 5:34 a.m. local time, according to the timestamp on the video).
“Hospital officials say it is being seen as a hate crime, and it’s not only an open investigation with police, but it’s also been initiated through a third party for their own investigation.”
Then the report flashed to a news release from Kaiser:
“This alarming discovery caused shock, disgust, pain, and anguish for our staff [and] physicians in Gilroy and throughout Northern California. A hangman’s noose is a painful [and] triggering symbol of the history of violence against African Americans in the United States. Its sight stirs outrage due to bigotry [and] continues to be a threatening symbol of hatred meant to inflict pain.
“Investigations are still underway, but we are not waiting for the conclusion of these reviews to acknowledge the trauma this incident has caused.”
So, a single rope outside a medical office has become a source of “shock, disgust, pain, and anguish” not only in no-doubt peace-loving Gilroy, California, but throughout all over northern California as well.
And Kaiser officials had no time to wait for the “noose” to be investigated before they acknowledged “the trauma this incident caused.”
Well, maybe they should have waited just a bit, since it apparently didn’t take long at all for investigators to look at surveillance video and realize what had happened.
On March 10, two whole days after the first report, KRON informed its no-doubt terrified viewers that the rope was “not intended to be a symbol of hate or racial animus, according to police.”
Authorities investigating the discovery of a rope resembling a noose at a Kaiser facility in Gilroy said it was not intended to be a symbol of liberalsjuhate, but was climbing equipment, police said. https://t.co/IJcjQ0SX69
— KTVU (@KTVU) March 10, 2023
“Instead, surveillance video shows the rope was used by an individual to propel himself up the tree to cut down normally out-of-reach branches and leaves,” a police statement said, according to KTVU-TV in Oakland reported.
“The rope was inadvertently left on the tree after being used as a climbing mechanism.”
So, no one at Kaiser Permanente even considered the possibility that there was anything but a hate crime involved?
A report last week in SFGate, a Bay Area online news site, noted that, according to the U.S. Census, the Gilroy’s population of about 58,000 is overwhelmingly of white and Hispanic, with a black population of only 1.8 percent.
That really doesn’t leave many targets for a “painful and triggering symbol of the history of violence against African Americans in the United States.”
What it does present, though, is a golden opportunity for white-shoe executives to virtue-signal near and far about how they will not countenance racial bigotry — abetted by establishment media outlets that love nothing better than to present an image of the United States as a racist nation.
The Western Journal has reached out to Kaiser Permanente for comment but had not received a response before publication.
Clearly, the company had no interest in finding out the actual facts of the matter an investigation would reveal before it leaped to its own conclusions — even if the conclusion that an anti-black hate crime had taken place in a town with less than 2 percent black population seemed a bit of a stretch.
Many KRON viewers had more sense than the station — and were not surprised at how the story ended:
The demand for racism and white supremacy far exceeds the supply….
— ksdkjfd (@ksdkjfd1) March 10, 2023
Overly sensitive…sensationalizing something mundane ??♀️
— howdykumy (@howdykumy) March 11, 2023
Imagine that.
— M (@Papa2One) March 11, 2023
But at Kaiser Permanente, apparently, no one was paying attention to the recent “hate crimes” that have turned out to be anything but crimes.
There was actor Jussie Smollett and his infamous hoax about getting attacked by supporters of then-President Donald Trump on a freezing morning in January 2019 in Chicago.
Despite being convicted in 2021 of lying to the police. And despite the obvious holes in his story — like if there are Trump supporters in Chicago, it’s a good chance they’re not dumb enough to be out on the street on freezing January mornings — Smollett is standing by his story enough to be demanding a new trial.
[firefly_poll]
And there was NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, a previously well-liked black driver in an overwhelmingly white sport who embarrassed himself, his fans and his profession when he claimed that a “noose” had been placed in his garage at the Talladega Superspeedway in June 2020.
It turned out to be a garage door-pull that had been there since at least 2019.
It’s gotten to the point, frankly, where just about any headline-grabbing claim of a racist event that victimizes blacks at the hands of members of other races (as opposed the atrociously real victimization of black Americans by black criminals) has to be viewed with a suspicion that leans more toward outright disbelief than simply skepticism.
But that word clearly hasn’t reached the ears of Kaiser Permanente, an Oakland-based healthcare company that just so happens to have a history of donating 10 times more money to Democrats than Republicans, according to the campaign funding website Open Secrets.
And it didn’t stop the local station covering Gilroy to give full apparent credence to a story that should have been questionable from the get-go.
But if liberals acknowledged how rare actual “noose”-type, anti-black racial attacks are, by police or anyone else, they’d have to acknowledge that their fundamental worldview is fundamentally flawed.
And they can’t do that.
Liberals can’t learn because they don’t want to.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
