Matthew Shepard

Many of the most consequential Victims during my lifetime have been some flavor of fraud, at least in terms of narrative.

Rodney King’s beating at the hands of L.A. police led to the L.A. riots of 1992, and yet the cops who clobbered him were acquitted for a good reason. King had been hopped up on PCP and had led police on a dangerous high-speed chase through residential neighborhoods before fighting off attempts to arrest him with near-superhuman strength.

Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 kicked off another round of riots. “Hands up, don’t shoot” became a rallying slogan for the emergent Black Lives Matter movement, despite the fact that there is no evidence that Brown said this. The Obama Justice Department launched a federal investigation into the incident, and quietly came to the conclusion months later that Brown had indeed fought the officer after shoplifting a nearby corner store. Brown had reached for the officer’s sidearm, and had been killed with just cause.

And then the granddaddy of them all, George Floyd, who’s death via fentanyl-added cardiac arrest in 2020 lit the spark of the largest wave of urban violence and general lawlessness that America had seen in half a century — not to mention the leftist cultural revolution it provided cover for, which wrestled final and total control over American institutions such as media and academia. This time, the mob got the ludicrous murder convictions it sought. The spotlight was far too bright, the information organs and narrative matrix too tightly controlled by vicious revolutionaries. They had video, you see. But of course video can be projected upon in the same as any other object, and so millions saw a man being suffocated by a man’s knee when every shred of honest evidence revealed that he had died of a drug-induced heart attack while under restraint.

But I’ve found myself more interested in another case recently. A story that perhaps laid the blueprint for how the narrative machine would harvest “hate crimes” as ammunition for cultural warfare in the modern media landscape. This case did involve a true victim of a crime, but therein lies the importance of the telling.

The killing of Mathew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998 was a true watershed event. It took place in the pre-social media days of the early internet, and so is situated as one the final “analog” media crimes, scooped up by interested parties who had fine-tuned their manipulation of that preexisting information environment. It still stands as the paramount example of “anti-gay” violence in America, and sprung legislation that helped shape the weaponized “hate crime” thicket that plagues modern law.

The narrative that was created about Shepard’s death goes like this. On October 6, Matthew was having a drink at a Laramie bar called Fireside. He was a very slight young man, five-foot-three-inches tall, and was considered beautiful and effeminate by those in his circle. And so he stood out as gay to a pair of men named Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, who entered the bar and began antagonizing him. A run of drinking mixed with aggressive homophobia, and the men beat up Matthew and threw him in their truck. They drove him out to a fence line in the hills, where they repeatedly pistol-whipped him, stripped him naked, tried him to a post, and lit him on fire. All because Matthew was gay, and may or may not have made a pass at them at Fireside. A police officer found Matthew the next day, barely alive. He died five days later.

That narrative was solidified quickly despite some misgivings by the police as they began their investigation. This was mainly thanks to a man named Walt Boulden, a local college instructor, friend of Matthew, and gay activist. Immediately after leaving the hospital where Matthew had been brought, Boulden contacted a slew of journalists including those at the Associated Press, where he beat the drums about the vicious “hate crime” committed in the bucolic foothills of rural Wyoming. The story was lapped up by the media, and it circled the globe in days as local authorities tried to figure out what had actually happened, and as activists groups descended on Laramie. It was so perfect already — wicked white rednecks in flyover country, the pastoral American hinterland as a den of irrational hate, the grisly and cinematic nature of the crime itself. Who needed to know more?

Two days after Shepard’s death, there was a massive candlelight vigil on the steps of the U.S. Capital, which was attended by the likes Ellen Degeneres and Senator Ted Kennedy. Barbara Streisand called the Laramie police to demand immediate action. The day of the young man’s death, President Clinton proclaimed, “In our shock and grief one thing must remain clear: hate and prejudice are not American values.” More than a thousand people attended the funeral. Elton John sent flowers. In 2009 President Obama capped things off when he signed the Matthew Shepard Act, the first major federal law that made attacks motivated by certain victim identities a “hate crime.” (To date, no antiwhite crime has been prosecuted under this law.)

But the narrative surrounding Shepard’s death — which was used to cajole the culture and ram through dangerous anti-constitutional legal precedents — was a lie. Henderson and McKinney were indeed convicted of murder, but the circumstances of the crime and Shepard’s relationship to his assailants only came to light after the grand narrative had been deployed, and so these details were ignored or suppressed in favor of the mythos. The anti-gay hate crime was in reality tantamount to a drug killing, one of many violent episodes in the meth epidemic that was overtaking swaths of rural America in the 1990s.

Shepard and McKinney knew each other before the attack. They had in fact been sexually involved, and had bought and sold drugs from each other several times. The two of them had rough home lives, and had been pimped out to men in exchange for drugs since they were teenagers. Despite the fact that police established that Shepard knew his killers, this was not explored in court. Neither was Shepard’s drug addiction or his dealings with the local meth trade. And with the immense media attention and political pressure, it’s easy to see why. It’s also easy to see why people ignored the opinion of police that the murder resulted from an attempt to steal a shipment of meth to which the killers knew Shepard had access - a shipment worth around $10,000.

The details disproving the “homophobic assault” story were patched together in the years after the killing, as the media attention faded and activists efforts like the Laramie Project and the Matthew Shepard Foundation solidified the myth. The most intrepid in this was an investigative journalist named Stephen Jimenez, who spent thirteen years interviewing more a hundred people connected to the Shepard case. He didn’t intend for his truth-seeking to be so counter to the official narrative. Jimenez is gay himself, and he begun his investigation soon after the murder as research for a screenplay about this most notorious of antigay crimes. But he let the facts lead where they may.

Not that it mattered to the movement built on the back of the myth. Ask just about anyone with a passing familiarity with Matthew Shepard today, and they’ll tell you he was murdered for being gay. The foundation still takes in money under the banner of this story, and books and plays and TV shows are still pumped out using Shepard’s angelic symbol as a means shaming and intimidating ideological opponents. Even those familiar with the more fact-based counter-narrative tend to just attack or dismiss it without regard to its accuracy. The Advocate, the nation’s leading gay rights magazine, published a piece titled “Why I’m Not Reading the ‘Trutherism’ About Matt Shepard.” Said the Guardian, “Matthew Shepard’s horrific death at the hands of redneck homophobes shocked America and changed its laws. Now a different truth is emerging, but does it matter?”

Of course it matters. These lies have consequences. The structures built on them are inherently contra to reality, and such structures either crumble when pushed or lash out in totalitarian fury as they surround themselves with barbed wire barricades of additional deceit. The modern world is full of these mass-sanctioned lies. They combine to build a great panopticon, a false reality from which burbles the acid thrown over civilization. When you don't know what is real, you likely don't know what really matters — and if by chance you do, you don't know how to preserve it.

We now have tens of millions of people who believe that there is an ongoing mass slaughter of innocent black men at the hands of police, and that interracial violence is mostly whites attacking nonwhites (the facts overwhelming prove the opposite). As I detailed in my piece The Noble Lie, wildly dishonest activist campaigns about the nature of the AIDS epidemic created a deluge of waste and fear and delusion that continues to shape American public health policy. Regime-mandated delusions about the nature of sex differences have made the mutilation and sterilization of children a legitimate topic of consideration amongst the “expert class.” The “smart ones.” The “good people.”

But what does it matter if the banner examples are pretty much all lies? Crack a few eggs to make an omelette, as they say. So many other examples, we are told. (The demographics in which many of them take place may be...problematic). And yet if there were so many similar examples, they would not need Matthew Shepard.

The young man surely did not deserve what happened to him that night in Wyoming. He should have been mourned, buried, his killers hung, and the rural American drug trade assailed with a publicly supported barrage of arrests and executions. But of course that would never happen. Wrong targets, so says the panopticon. Wrong victims. One might even risk friendly fire.