The Free Press
Last Wednesday, a video went viral of a white woman defending her actions after calling a 5-year-old black boy the N-word because, allegedly, the kid had tried to steal from her son’s diaper bag.
The guy filming the video confronts her, asking if she’d used the racial slur.
She responds, “It’s none of your fucking business.”
“It is my business,” the man replies.
The woman then makes an ululation sound, apparently to mock what she perceives to be the cameraman’s Muslim heritage.
He says: “Why don’t you have the balls to say it right now again?”
“Fuck you,” she replies, before chanting the N-word multiple times.
The video spread lightning-fast from TikTok to Instagram to X. Almost immediately, the woman in question was identified by online sleuths as Shiloh Hendrix of Rochester, Minnesota. Commenters disgusted by her racism called on the internet to “make her famous.”
The internet obliged. And it might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to Hendrix. Because even as she became a target of the left’s outrage, the far-right turned her into a folk hero—and by the end of the week, they might even make her a millionaire.
Online, the far-right’s reaction started with posts like this: “She’s fresh out of fucks to give, like the rest of us. This is the new normal.” One user made a giant infographic that’s just the N-word under the message: “I stand with Shiloh Hendrix.” Others were even more creative, using AI to create an image of Hendrix as an armor-wearing medieval knight, flipping off the viewer as a black child weeps behind her. There’s even a Shiloh meme coin, presumably for cryptoheads who also love racially charged public outbursts.
Hendrix, surely sensing an opportunity, started a fundraising campaign on GiveSendGo, a GoFundMe-like platform that self-identifies as the “#1 Free Christian Crowdfunding Site.” (It even allows users to click a button marked “Pray” to indicate their support for a campaign.) “My name is Shiloh and I have been put into a very dire situation,” wrote Hendrix on her donation page. “I recently had a kid steal from my 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was.” She then adds that she’s been doxxed—her address, phone number, and Social Security card have all been released—and she needs money to relocate. Initially, Hendrix sought to raise $20,000.
This is an obvious grift, but the online far-right doesn’t seem to mind. Donations poured in, with comments like “Here’s 10 dollars for your courage and 10 dollars for each of your white kids” and “thanks for standing up to these violent criminals who are babied by our government and our brain dead society.” Hendrix met the $20,000 goal almost immediately.
In the small hours of Friday night, one X user, @AngloSaxonGirl, expressed concern that Hendrix might be a “scammer,” so she asked Hendrix to send her a picture of herself holding up a piece of paper with “@anglosaxongirl” written on one side and the N-word on the other. Hendrix promptly did so, and AngloSaxonGirl posted the picture to reassure anyone who was thinking of donating that “This White Woman is definitely legit”—adding the comment: “WHITE FUCKING POWER 🤍🥰.”
Meanwhile, Shiloh raised her fundraising goal to $100,000. Then to $150,000. Then to $250,000. Then she surpassed that goal. Now, Hendrix is seeking $1 million—you know, for moving expenses. Currently, she’s raised over $670,000.
All the while, her fundraiser went viral on X. One post promoting a link to the page received over 24 million views—more than the entire population of Florida.
To further glorify Hendrix, her supporters have fired racist abuse at the child she insulted, and claimed the man who says he filmed the video, Sharmake Beyle Omar, is a sex offender. (“Under 24 hours after standing her ground against retarded Somali children and pedophiles, Shiloh Hendrix has raised over $300,000 on GiveSendGo,” wrote one X user.) In truth, Beyle Omar and another man were arrested and charged with raping and sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl in January 2022. But both pleaded not guilty and the case against them was dismissed by the Olmsted (Minnesota) County Attorney’s Office in March of this year, “in the interest of justice.” So Beyle Omar isn’t a sex offender. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Hendrix’s backers from calling for his deportation.
How did America become a place where someone who screams racial slurs at a child in a public park is valorized and financially rewarded for it?
In some sense this story is a decade in the making, and it starts with the zealotry of the left, not the right. The past decade is filled with tales of people who were wrongfully canceled in the fervor of what people like to call the “woke era.” The Free Press has told a lot of these stories. We ran a piece about a child in Evanston, Illinois, who tied three nooses and was accused of being a racist when actually he was just mentally ill. We ran an investigation into the “Central Park Karen,” a white woman who was viciously canceled for calling the police on a black bird-watcher who was yelling at her in New York’s Central Park. Most Americans, upon hearing the details of these cases, would agree that these are stories about ordinary people wrongly labeled as racist by an overzealous progressive mob.
Shiloh Hendrix’s story is not in this category. She did exactly what she’s accused of, and it’s all on camera. And unlike many of the people wrongly accused of racism, transphobia, or other bigotries in the last several years—who still don’t feel safe in their hometowns and can’t get their jobs back—Shiloh seems to have paid no price for something she very proudly did. I’m not saying a person’s worst moment should destroy their life, but they shouldn’t get rich from it either.
But as I wrote earlier this year, the excesses of the left—canceling all those innocent Americans—has triggered an equal and opposite reaction on the right, which has become more and more extreme in railing against cancel culture. The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that Hendrix’s unabashed, unambiguous, racist behavior qualifies her as a hero.
Basically: The left cried wolf, and now the wolf is here on your phone, calling a little boy in Minnesota the N-word on camera—and there’s a new, identity politics–obsessed far-right waiting in the wings to reward her for it.
Shiloh’s supporters belong to what some have called the “woke right,” a version of the far-right that has embraced identity politics in the same way the “woke left” has done in the last decade or so. In this case, the woke right is adopting the playbook of Black Lives Matter, except they’re using it to defend white people. This is clear in the comments from donors on Shiloh’s donation page—comments that appear to have now been disabled.
“Black fatigue is real,” reads one.
“White guilt is DEAD,” reads another.
Another states: “White Lives Matter.”
A top donor on the page, it should be noted, is someone who goes by Germar Rudolf Respecter—which is the name of a German chemist and notorious Holocaust denier. (The woke right feels victimized not only by black people, but also by Jews.)
The silence of the more mainstream conservative mediasphere—which is chronically online, and absolutely aware of the Shiloh Hendrix saga—is striking. At risk of repeating myself, my message to that crowd, and my friends among them, is this: Enriching a woman who called a child the N-word in public is bad for America, and if you’re afraid to say that for fear of being called a libtard, the people who will destroy your movement have already won.
The public didn’t like the black nationalism of BLM, but they won’t like the white nationalism of the woke right either. And as someone who came up on the left, I can promise you this: If your movement can’t be bothered to wash its hands of the freaks within its ranks, the public will wash its hands of you. And they will do so sooner than you think.
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