Despite the story's horror, despite its drama, despite its "human interest" dimension, the national media didn't report the murder. The reason: the monsters who committed this horror were black, the victims white. The national media is infected with anti-white racism, and the infection is of epidemic proportions. And apparently the story didn't fit the politically correct national melodrama of black victimhood.

The same epidemic of politically correct, anti-white attitudes pervades local governments and law enforcement authorities. The official position over the killings in the editorial rooms of the Wichita Eagle and the local district attorney's office is that the Dec. 14 hate crime was not a hate crime at all. Why? Because the victims were robbed and the motive therefore was not racism, but robbery.

Matthew Shepard was robbed.

Neither the crime nor the silence surrounding it is an isolated incident. Last April, 8-year-old Kevin Shifflett's throat was slit in broad daylight in Alexandria, Va., a suburb of the nation's capital. No one reported it as a hate crime, and the crime itself was also enveloped in a news blackout -- with the exception of the Washington Times and Washington Post, which covered it as a local story. The reason? Kevin was white, his racist attacker black. But a 2-year-old hate crime, committed against a black man, did become a central feature of the Democrats' campaign against presidential candidate George W. Bush, who was found guilty of association with the incident because it took place in Texas.

Why should these facts surprise anyone, when everyone knows that it is politically correct to hate white people in America? Hatred of whites is a highly developed intellectual doctrine at our nation's most prestigious universities -- whole departments are devoted to it. Hatred of whites is taught in our nation's schools, where whites are portrayed as history's racists and oppressors, and it is inscribed in our nation's laws, which provide racial privileges for those whose skin color is anything other than white.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is waging a campaign to make sure that hate crimes are identified in the public mind with straight white males. The nation's leading so-called civil rights organization, the NAACP, ran a multimillion-dollar TV campaign during the presidential election insinuating that Bush hates black people and is in league with lynchers because he does not think extending the law to include special protections for gays (as opposed to heterosexuals) is a prudent idea. No Democrat has condemned the racial McCarthyism of the NAACP or of party extremists like Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.

Politics 2000: Unflinching daily political news, analysis and commentary.