For more than a decade, I knew every time I called Colin Flaherty, he’d answer with: “Big Man! Whatcha got for me today?”
There was never a phone call that failed to start out this way, with enthusiasm in his voice so infectious I still smile when thinking about how he’d draw out the “ig” portion of “big” in his distinctive Tidewater accent.
“Avuncular” would be the way to describe him: he remembered details of our last conversation and would then inquire about the latest happenings in my life as if he had been there as an intimate observer.
That’s why, when he called one day in the spring of 2020, the surprise of not being greeted with that oh-so-familiar salutation meant I immediately knew something was wrong.
For those who had watched Colin’s videos about black-on-white crime over the years, it had become obvious something was impacting his health. His face was thinning out and his Falstaffian frame seemed to be shrinking.
Though the Churchillian cigar still protruded from his lips as he spoke effortlessly about the latest example of black mob violence and the corporate media’s attempt to obfuscate what was happening, it was alarming to see the physical deterioration of this man who embodied courage and tenacity throughout his life.
We chatted about the Ahmaud Arbery hysteria, wondering if this would be the powder keg carefully placed by the corporate media every election year to blast out the Democrat turnout-boosting theme of perpetual black victimization (which Colin had correctly noted was the Biggest Lie Of Our Generation). Then he just blurted it out: “I’m not sure if I’m going to make it much longer, Big Man.”
I don’t recall much of what he said next. The shock of a good friend telling me about a disease he wouldn’t beat was too great.
There was a long pause when he finished. He asked: “Are you still there?”
Throughout the insanity of the subsequent Covid lockdowns (“two weeks to stop the spread”) and the overreaction to a virus that 99% of victims survive, I still reflect back on that day as the defining moment of the past two years.
In many ways, I’m still without words for how to answer Flaherty’s question.
When the George Floyd apotheosis happened a month later, and that particular powder keg of anti-white animosity exploded in an orgy of violence, looting, burning and lawlessness—enhanced by academia, Corporate America and of course the corporate media—I ventured into the heart of Richmond, VA.
Walking around that city, with the smoke of the night before from cars and burnt buildings still pungent in the air, I reached the great Robert E. Lee monument, completely desecrated with anti-white slogans and the acronym “ACAB.”
ACAB—"All Cops Are Bastards.”
The past was being erased in real time, because what Flaherty had called the Biggest Lie of our generation—that of black victimization—had set off a mighty conflagration of anti-white insurrection across America.
Standing at a monument to one of America’s greatest heroes, later torn down in celebration of the George Floyd Hoax, I was doing everything I could to fight back tears.
Then, in one of those serendipitous moments, my cell phone rang.
It was Colin.
He was calling to apologize for declining to go on American Renaissance podcasts with Jared Taylor until only a year or two prior.
He had had a corporate media career—but now, seeing what was unfolding across America, he felt he had been too cautious.
Here was a man who had written two seminal works of the last decade—White Girl Bleed A Lot and Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry—apologizing, at the end of his life, for lacking courage—when so many others had failed to speak up at all.
And here I stood at the base of a monument to a hero of my ancestors, whose every action in life was for his posterity, desecrated with a noose hung around its neck, thinking about the cost of silence in an age where obedience to the greatest lie of our generation is mandatory.
For the better of a decade, Colin and I had engaged in a battle on conservative websites to promote the truth about out-of-control black violence, and the denial, deceit and delusion the corporate media waged to suppress reality. He was the visible face, fearless in YouTube videos and writing repeated articles picked up by the Drudge Report and broadcast to tens of millions during the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Late Obama Era.
He told me that in 2014, Google even threatened to demonetize WND if all ads weren’t removed from Colin’s pieces, because they drove so much traffic. (Subsequently, Google has cut off WND anyway.)
That led Colin to self-publish his second book, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry.
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, I told Colin where I was and how he didn’t need to apologize for anything.
He knew I was a Southerner. And he was also aware of the professional costs I had assumed to support him.
“You could have stopped at any time,” he told me.
“Did you?” was my only response.
The Robert E. Lee statue, dedicated in 1890, is now gone. But the memory of the conversation that happened in its shadow that dark Sunday after Memorial Day 2020 will not be forgotten.
I said: “You can’t stop. You know how many people you have inspired. Including me.”
In that moment, it was okay to let the tears flow.
Colin and I used to share with each other the letters we’d get from families of those impacted by black violence—so grateful that someone remembered how they lived and died. I think it was those letters that ultimately led him to organize a “Victims Matter” rally in June of 2020. He and his devoted fans shut down a highway in Delaware within feet of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, to remember those lives lost to black violence. As Jack Kerwick wrote:
And on June 22, a Monday afternoon, as if to send a message to the left that they aren’t the only ones that can employ these kinds of tactics, he and about 30 carloads of people from various states succeeded in shutting down one side of an interstate highway in Wilmington, Delaware.
They shut down a segment of the highway that is located within feet of the exit for Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.
For approximately 45 minutes to an hour, passing motorists on the opposite side of the interstate were treated to Flaherty’s “Victims Matter” (VM) rally.
That’s right. Flaherty and his fellow demonstrators—all of whom were peaceful—defied the meaningless “Black Lives Matter” vs. “All Lives Matter” dichotomy by invoking the lives of the victims that have been lost to black criminals, and reminding people that, for as much as Big Media would like to forget about them, they matter.
The VM protesters carried signs with pictures and names of the victims, black and white:
David Dorn was a 77-year-old retired police captain and family man who was working part-time as a security officer guarding a pawn shop in St. Louis when, during the midst of the George Floyd riots, he was gunned down in cold blood by black looters (who ran a live, 13 minute Facebook stream of the incident). At least one person, thus far, has been arrested and charged with the shooting.
David Dorn: Say his name.
Paul and Lidia Marino, a couple in their mid 80s who were closing in on their 62nd wedding anniversary, visited their son’s gravesite at the Delaware Veterans’ Cemetery on an almost daily basis. Paul himself was a World War II veteran. In May, on a day that seemed unlike any other as they visited with their deceased son, a young black male walked up on them and put two bullets in their heads. The murderer was shortly after found dead himself.
Their son Ray commented: “My parents were in their 80s but they were very healthy and active. I thought they would die from natural causes someday—not be executed by a stranger in a cemetery.”
Paul and Lidia Marino: Say their names.
Wendy Martinez, a 35 year-old woman who, but six days after celebrating with her family and friend her wedding engagement, was stabbed to death by a black male while she proceeded to go for a run in a Washington D.C. park. In court, while her family members tearfully attested to just how beloved Wendy was to those who knew her, her killer—Anthony Crawford rocked in his chair and even smiled.
Wendy Martinez: Say her name.
There are still so many other victims to black violence, innocents, the vulnerable, whose lives were disposed of in the most barbaric of ways. Regrettably, given space constraints, we can here do little else than, well, say their names.
Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom: In their early 20s, they were carjacked, tortured, raped, and murdered.
Say their names.
Jourdan Bobbish and Jacob Kudla: Teenagers who were tortured and murdered.
Say their names.
Karina Vetrano: Attacked, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death while jogging.
Say her name.
Paul Monchnik: A 91-year-old World War II veteran who was beaten to death in his own home and then set on a fire.
Say his name.
Phil Trenary: Treasury of Chamber of Commerce in Memphis who was trying to rejuvenate the city’s economic life and who was murdered, shot, execution-style, in the back of his head as he walked home one night.
Say his name.
There are still others:
Scott Brooks; Sebastian Dvorak; Serge Fournier; Tessa Majors; Dorothy Dow; Lorne Ahrens; Brent Thompson; Michael Krol; Patrick Zamarripa.
Say their names.
The names that the VM protesters called out constitute but the tiniest fraction of the names of people, of all races, whose lives have been extinguished or otherwise made to suffer courtesy of black violent offenders (and, by implication, their enablers throughout our political and cultural institutions).
Edmund Burke memorably remarked that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. This being said, one thing is for certain:
Colin Flaherty, for spearheading a demonstration to affirm forgotten victims of violent criminals, is one hell of a good man who is doing his part to stop evil.
[Remembering the Victims of Black Violence - Black and White: Fearless journalist Colin Flaherty holds a peaceful "Victims Matter" rally, FrontPageMag.com, July 27, 2020]
And it goes on.
Colin and I shared an intense love of college football, historical movies (his favorites were HBO’s Rome, A&E’s Horatio Hornblower and the amazing British TV show Sharpe starring Sean Bean) and Westerns.
And during the lockdown in 2020, he told me to watch Yellowstone. It’s the story of a white family in Montana fighting to preserve the ranch of their ancestors in a changing world.
I didn’t get around to watching it until after Colin’s death. But there’s a line that reminds me of how he lived, and how we should all live every day.
In Season Three, one of the main characters helps kill a rapist who has preyed upon women on the Indian reservation. The Chief of the reservation tells her:
“People talk about makin' a difference, but they don't because they don't try. They don't risk. You risked -- everything. Today, you made a difference.”
My friend Colin Flaherty made a difference.
Our cities can be rebuilt. Statues to those who came before us can be recast.
Heroes who, in dark times, defended what was undefendable, can be celebrated.
But it’s only because those who lived bravely and without fear dedicated their lives to truth, in a time of universal deceit, that what once was can be again.
Colin Flaherty risked everything. And he made a difference.
Rest in peace, Big Man.
The author [Email him] is a son of the (reoccupied) South.
