Can Somebody Tell Us If LeBron James Faked a Hate Crime?

CLAY: Buck and I have been talking about this a bit off air. He’s not familiar at all, but in the wake of the Jussie Smollett fake hate crime being exposed, a lot of people out there… I tweeted about this, because it reminded me of what happened with LeBron James four years ago. So, Buck, you don’t recall or didn’t know anything about LeBron James claiming that he was the victim of a hate crime?

BUCK: Never even heard a word about this one. Never. Never. You know me and sports, Clay. I’m not always on the cutting edge.

CLAY: This was such a big story that it was leading Good Morning America, the Today show.

BUCK: Really? When was this?

CLAY: This was 2017, right before the NBA Finals.

BUCK: Can I just say the entire Rush team in here with me in New York right now, the folks that are here, none of them remember this one, either. So somehow this —

CLAY: Oh, wow.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: This is an example… I use the phrase “memory holed” sometimes because when stories don’t end up fulfilling the narrative, they just vanish. There’s no follow-up. There’s no story. So here was the story. LeBron James at his house in Brentwood, California… We’ve got a lot of great listeners in L.A.; Brentwood is a very high-end neighborhood in the Los Angeles area. LeBron James, at the time, had bought a mansion there for $21 million.

I believe he still has his mansion in Brentwood. He was not present at the time, but allegedly there was a racial slur scrawled on his gate, a racial slur scrawled on the gate of LeBron James home. So, his security staff there called police. Buck, when police arrived, there was… Let me read from my article that I wrote. So, the LA police arrived. “Los Angeles police were called to LeBron James’ house at 6:44 a.m. on this morning. LeBron and his family weren’t at the house.

“When police arrived at 6:44 a.m., the gate had already been repainted so there was no racial slur visible. They were allegedly provided a photo of the racial slur on the gate.” That was the only evidence of it. There is a massive camera, surveillance camera — as you can well imagine, on a $20 million mansion. The camera was not working that time. So, there was no footage that was able to be given. The police said, “Hey, can we get the footage from your massive surveillance camera here right beside the gate?”

BUCK: Did the two guards fall asleep, too, Clay?

CLAY: Alleged photo never released. Never has been out as evidence at all. The LAPD investigated and determined that there was no evidence that a crime had ever occurred, but that didn’t come out. Immediately, LeBron talks about it. He compared himself, Buck, to Emmett Till. He compared himself to Emmett Till, and said that it was important that America confront the racism that he was a victim and the LAPD…

Now, think about this: The graffiti was immediately painted over on the gate at 6:44 a.m. At its most elemental level, if you really were a victim of a hate crime, wouldn’t you preserve the evidence? This was where I started like the alarm bells started going off. Wait a minute. LeBron James claims that his gate in this wildly, wildly expensive neighborhood of L.A….?

By the way, there are video cameras everywhere in this neighborhood, right? Every mansion has its own video camera, nobody ever came forward with any evidence of this racial slur being put on LeBron’s gate. But if you really wanted somebody caught, wouldn’t you leave the racial slur up on the gate and allow the police to conduct an investigation?

BUCK: Clay, if Jussie Smollett —

CLAY: Plus, the camera is not working?

BUCK: If Jussie Smollett was willing to put the noose back on for the purpose of evidence, you would think you wouldn’t want to, in a different context, erase the graffiti itself before anyone has seen it, right? Jussie at least knew that with his hoax.

CLAY: It’s the most basic thing to preserve evidence. You don’t have to be very smart. If somebody breaks something or writes something and it’s the only evidence that it occurred…? So, what’s fascinating about this is the LAPD investigated; they found no evidence that a crime had occurred. Media… I mean, this is everywhere. This is on the Today show! If you doubt me, you can go Google, people out there listening, to look at the amount of coverage this got.

LeBron James, biggest victim ever, everybody was talking about this, and then the LAPD investigates. No evidence that the crime ever occurred. And the story just vanished. So in the wake of Jussie Smollett, how in the world did the media allow LeBron James to come out and say, “Hey, I was the victim of a racist hate crime in Brentwood, California”? There’s zero evidence that it actually occurred. Everybody covered it, much like the Jussie Smollett case, as if it were evidence, the accusation itself, 100% true.

And then when the LAPD investigates it and determines that no crime took place and the story disappears, people just pretend that LeBron never alleged he was the victim of a hate crime. So look. Maybe somebody on LeBron James’ staff made it up. LeBron wasn’t in the house at the time. But the fact that this just went away, nobody was charged with making a false police complaint, nobody was… I mean, think about it.

If it really had happened, if you were living in that house, you want to know what was happening to your family, what risk they might be under? Just disappeared. Nobody even asked LeBron about it anymore. And after the sports media and the larger media ecosystem painted LeBron James as a victim for a racial slur on his $21 million gated mansion which never actually occurred.

Just pretend it didn’t happen. This is what happens so often with these stories. Buck, I talk about this sometimes with you. You’re a long-time conservative. You grew up in New York City and you were like, “Hey, I know my political beliefs.” When you were 12 years old, you’re reading George Will columns and nodding along or whatever it was.

BUCK: Give a high five to my portrait of Buckley on the wall. You know it.

CLAY: You knew all this. I have come to this, ironically, through the media, through seeing myself so much dishonesty. That’s how I got red pilled, was just seeing all the narrative dishonesty on a day-to-day basis and basically at OutKick — we got another article up about the Penn swimmer — just asking honest questions and trying to be reasonable and rational in a totally unreasonable and irrational world. There are a lot of people, I think, like me who listen to this program now that have come to have the same beliefs as me just by seeing all the dishonesty.

BUCK: The left, to borrow from Solzhenitsyn, lives by lies, and that was what you experienced. They live by lies. The lie is actually moral to them if it serves their overall purpose. Pretending to believe Jussie Smollett or being so brainwashed by lies that you actually believe Jussie Smollett is virtuous if you’re a leftist. If you’re LeBron James — or, rather, if you’re LeBron James supporter — it doesn’t matter if LeBron James faked this or not.

All that actually matters is that he’s raising awareness about all the racism that exists in this country, which is so omnipresent that people are constantly — in the highest profile cases — faking hate crime after hate crime. Remember who went through the terror of fake nooses in this country?

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: They kept going through it, and what was amazing is there were even public officials — I believe this was maybe the mayor of Oakland, if I remember correctly — saying that we still needed to treat this like a major racial issue even when it was found that some nooses in a public park were not nooses, in fact, but some guy who was black had set them up to do exercises with on a tree. Didn’t matter that it was fake, Clay! The narrative was all that matters. So, when you experience that enough, you say, “These people are crazy.”

CLAY: Remember the NASCAR incident? The pull rope that was supposedly a noose?

BUCK: Dozens of FBI agents were investigating this.

CLAY: Fifteen FBI agents, I think, investigated that.

BUCK: And it had been there for months and months and months.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It was so offensive and meant to terrify so many people that nobody noticed it until there was a noose panic across the country which reminded me of the anti-Asian violence panic, which went away very quickly. And I think we all remember it went away very quickly. Because they couldn’t find enough MAGA hat white Trump guys who were attacking Asians. It was other groups, other individuals who were attacking.

CLAY: Mostly minorities attacking other minorities, and the story went away. It did.

BUCK: So very quickly.

CLAY: It just vanished.