Media Blamed Chicago Cross-Burning on Trump and the Right - Then the Real Culprit Stepped Forward
No historian could write the Democratic Party’s 200-year-old story without devoting multiple chapters to its sordid history of fomenting racism.
That story continues unabated to the present day.
On Tuesday, after nearly a week of hand wringing over a cross-burning incident in Chicago’s Grant Park, WMAQ-TV in Chicago reported that city police have arrested 21-year-old Merlin Lu, who earlier admitted to the outlet that he set fire to the cross as a protest against President Donald Trump’s administration.
Lu burned the cross, he said, to protest “MAGA Christian nationalist supporters” and the Trump administration “ruling class.”
Of course he did. Had an actual white supremacist burned the cross, it would have been Trump’s fault, but now, in this case, it’s Trump’s fault anyway; that’s how these things work.
Turns out, the “KKK burning cross” found in Chicago was made by a socialist gay Asian: pic.twitter.com/l1ClC4QSd3
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 16, 2026
On the afternoon of June 9, the burning cross caused a ruckus in the city, according to the Associated Press.
The AP then dutifully did what the establishment media does: blame it on Trump and/or his supporters.
In this case, the AP found people willing to say what the outlet wanted published.
“I do think we’re living in a time when we have a president that stokes this kind of thing and invites this type of stuff,” Miranda Samuels said. “People feel emboldened and are invited to see how far they can go.”
Chicagoan Frank Chapman, executive director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (groan), found a way to connect the cross burning to the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021.
“The same kind of people got the same white supremacist mentality as a cross-burning,” Chapman said. “So, they figured like they got a license now … with people pardoned and more or less shaking hands with the devil.”
Meanwhile, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois got in on the act.
“The fact that it even occurred at all speaks to what happens when the seeds of racism and fascism grow unchecked in our country,” Pritzker said Thursday at the late Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s annual conference, per the Chicago Sun-Times. “The threats are real. And in times like these, it’s easy to fall prey to despair, to think that the fight for justice is just too costly to engage in, that the mountain is too high to climb and the path is too narrow to navigate.”
Democrats have spent years falsely and dangerously accusing Trump and his supporters of Nazism or fascism.
They could not have done so, however, without help from the media.
For instance, perhaps the most egregious, media-driven racism hoax stemmed from Trump’s comments about the 2017 Charlottesville protests. For the better part of a decade, Democrats and their media allies insisted that Trump had praised neo-Nazis and white nationalists. In fact, it took the “fact-checking” outlet Snopes seven years to admit that the president did no such thing.
Likewise, in 2019, black actor Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime, also in Chicago. Democrats, including then-Sen. Kamala Harris of California, also exploited that incident for political gain until the truth emerged.
Then, in June 2020, amid the Black Lives Matter madness that engulfed America that summer, the media also hyped the alleged discovery of a noose inside black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s assigned garage at Talladega Superspeedway. That, too, the FBI quickly deemed a false alarm.
Six years later, the extreme-leftist Southern Poverty Law Center stands accused of committing fraud by funding hate groups. In other words, if Democrats cannot find the racism on which they thrive, they will manufacture it.
That has been the party’s modus operandi since its inception in the 1820s: keep hate alive.
In those days, Democrats fostered prejudice by supporting slavery and openly touting white supremacy. Democrats formed the Confederacy in 1860-61 in protest against President Abraham Lincoln’s election victory.
Then, after the Civil War, Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan, which made the burning cross a symbol of hatred across the South.
In fact, nearly every person who ever burned a cross in anger was almost certainly a non-Republican. That remains true to this day, and it remains true in this instance.
Still, each time a hoax like this occurs, the media repeats the same shopworn lies.
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