NASCAR hate crime falls apart, "noose" found in black drivers garage was a door pull.

A screen grab showing where the door pull was. 

After making international news a story about a noose placed in a black driver's garage at a NASCAR event has shown to be false. Fox News. NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace's team found the noose near his garage and the story went viral after they claimed it was a hate crime. However, an FBI investigation found that the noose had been their since at least 2019 and that it was a door pull to open and close the garage doors. The incident was not targeting Wallace as his garage stall was determined by his performance in races and were not known in advance. Wallace has been active in Black Lives Matter and is partially responsible for getting Confederate flags banned from NASCAR events. The FBI will not press charges in this case. 

My Comment:

As expected this case has fallen apart very quickly. Even last night I was reading that it was likely that the event was a hoax and I had already seen video of these door pulls. I have always said that it's good to wait 24 to 48 hours for a story that sounds stupid to fall apart and this is one of them.

Generally speaking I mistrust all cases of alleged racism using nooses. I have always felt that nooses are something that the left and black activists think racists would use but in actuality I don't think they do. Indeed, when I heard the Jussie Smollett story back in the day I immediately thought it was garbage because the supposed attack used a noose. A real racist would have just killed him and a real racist would have tried to kill Bubba Wallace. 

Was this a deliberate hoax or just a misunderstanding? I am thinking it's likely to be the 2nd. I guess it's possible that one of Wallace's crew saw the noose and thought "hey this would be good for his publicity" and made a scene. But that just seems about as unrealistic as a real racist somehow getting access to the garage and using a noose to send a message to Wallace. This was just an incredibly stupid misunderstanding. 

How much blame does Bubba Wallace get here? I don't think it's all his fault. He wasn't the one that found the door pull, it was his team, and his team went straight to NASCAR. It's not really his fault if NASCAR and his team didn't question what they found, that's kind of on him. 

But I think Wallace deserves the blame for creating the environment in NASCAR where a door pull can be mistook for a noose. After all, he's a Black Lives Matter activist and he's responsible for getting rid of confederate flags. Everyone in NASCAR must now be on their toes or Wallace is going to tattle on them for any perceived slight. Had NASCAR found this and dismissed it and Wallace made a stink about it, it would have been even worse PR for them then they have already. 

I do think this is a pretty good example of how hysterical people are getting about race in this country. It's too the point where we have long run out of real racism to fight and now we are focusing on things that were pretty obviously not racist in the first place. I won't deny that there are a few real racists out there, but we are to the point where the cure has been way worse than the disease. 

NASCAR has really alienated their fanbase. It's no secret that NASCAR fans tend to be lower-class whites, mostly from the South. They are already furious with NASCAR for banning Confederate flags and for Wallace openly supporting Black Lives Matter, and now they have essentially slandered the entire sport by saying they were capable of an act of racism like this. I'm guessing the fans won't be all that forgiving for this stunt.