Media Breathlessly Covered a ‘Hate Crime’ by White Middle Schoolers Against a Black Classmate: It Was a Giant Hoax
Plus, NFL stars fundraise for Islamic charity tied to Minnesota fraud scandal
When the mother of a black Texas middle schooler claimed in 2021 that a group of white students made her son drink urine, media outlets from NBC to CNN and ABC covered the story. “Texas authorities investigating allegations of racism and bullying of a 13-year-old by his classmates during sleepover,” a CNN headline blared. Nearly five years later, we’re learning it was a giant hoax. None of the outlets that covered the case have written follow-up stories despite the lurid (and defamatory) nature of the allegations, which included not just the urine but also that the boy was shot with a BB gun and called racial slurs.
Last month, a Texas district court judge in Collin County, in suburban Dallas, ordered the “victim’s” mother, Summer Smith, and her attorney, Kim Cole, to pay $3.2 million in damages to the white student they accused of bullying. A racially diverse jury ruled that they cooked up the allegations to raise their profiles and rake in nearly $120,000 in GoFundMe donations at the height of the BLM hysteria.
Mainstream media coverage was a key part of the plan. Smith and her son, along with Cole, discussed the hoax on Good Morning America, where co-anchor Linsey Davis promoted the GoFundMe to the ABC program’s millions of viewers, promising that funds raised would pay for “therapy and private schooling.” In fact, account statements show Smith spent the overwhelming majority of the funds on luxuries including “a designer dog, dining and travel, beauty products, liquor, vapes, cell phones, car payments, and rent,” our Andrew Kerr reports. Good Morning America has not followed up. Smith said she plans to appeal.
Kerr talked to the student who was falsely accused of organizing the attack, Asher Vann, who is now a college freshman.
“I was getting death threats from thousands of people on social media. People leaked my address and my name. During one of the protests, they walked all the way to my house and threw bricks through my house,” he said. “It was scary. These were adults, and I was in middle school at the time. Full-grown adults were rushing my house and causing harm to it. What if I was home and they saw me?”
NFL stars like Azeez Al-Shaair of the Houston Texans are raising money for the Human Development Fund, an upstart Islamic charity that claims to provide “hot meals to orphans in Gaza.” But a Free Beacon investigation found that the group’s leaders have close ties to Feeding Our Future, the now-defunct organization at the center of the country’s largest COVID fraud, perpetrated by a mostly Somali cast of characters in Minneapolis.
The fund’s founder and CEO, Abdirahman Kariye, is an imam at a predominantly Somali mosque near Minneapolis that served as a Feeding Our Future food distribution site. Its director of fundraising events, Khalid Omar, is a director at the mosque. In June 2021, at the height of the fraud, the pair celebrated Feeding Our Future founder and fraud mastermind Aimee Bock at an award ceremony for her “outstanding leadership to the Minnesota communities.” Omar emceed the event and hailed Bock as a “furious fighter” for Feeding Our Future. Kariye accused Minnesota’s education department of unfairly scrutinizing Feeding Our Future. The event ended with a group of Somali women dancing around Bock and serenading her with chants of “Sweet Aimee.”
Bock is now awaiting sentencing after being convicted in March of multiple counts of fraud.
“HDF’s previously unreported links to Feeding Our Future fraudsters raise red flags, particularly as HDF emerges as one of the most prolific U.S. charities operating in Gaza,” writes the Free Beacon‘s Chuck Ross.
“Founded by Kariye in 2023, HDF raised $33 million in its first full year of operations, according to tax filings. It’s now poised to receive a significant financial boost through the NFL’s ‘My Cause My Cleats’ charity program. Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair, an NFL Man of the Year nominee, is raising money for HDF, as are Baltimore Ravens safety Sanoussi Kane and Buffalo Bills wide receiver Josh Palmer. HDF also has high-profile backing from the likes of Sami Hamdi, a popular Muslim influencer who said he felt ‘euphoria’ after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, and Shaun King, who has referred to Hamas as ‘heroes.’ Kariye hosted two fundraisers with Hamdi and King in December 2024 at a cost of $15 a ticket.”
READ MORE: NFL Stars Fundraise for Islamic Charity Tied to Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future Fraud Scandal
Democrat Manny Rutinel is running for Congress in Colorado’s swingy Eighth Congressional District, which is home to a major meatpacking company and some 4,000 farms and ranches. But Rutinel is an anti-meat activist who has called for “animal liberation.”
Of course, Rutinel attended Yale Law School, our Ethan Barton reports — as a Law, Ethics & Animals Program fellow. During his time in the program, he called animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive [sic] industry” and proposed a plan to push farmers away from the meat industry. More recently, he founded and led Climate Refarm, an organization that helped schools and hospitals transition to plant-based meals and pushed for tax increases on meat, dairy, and eggs. That should go over really well in the district.
Rutinel is running against Republican incumbent Gabe Evans—a beef producer who owns a small cattle herd. A spokesman for Rutinel told the Free Beacon that Rutinel will “always fight to support family farmers and ranchers.”
Elsewhere:
U.S. airstrikes against Iran aren’t imminent because, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the Pentagon is moving in additional air defenses to better protect Israel, Arab allies and American forces in the event of a retaliation by Iran.”
The latest federal campaign fundraising figures are in, and they show the DNC is entering this year’s midterm elections “at a staggering financial disadvantage, trailing the Republican National Committee by nearly $100 million,” according to the New York Times. The DNC reported $14 million in the bank and $17.5 million in debt at the end of 2025. The RNC reported $95.1 million in the bank and no debt.
Democrats likely need to win Michigan to take back the Senate—and party strategists are worried that their nasty primary between Haley Stevens, Mallory McMorrow, and Abdul El-Sayed “will exacerbate ideological tensions and leave the nominee in a weakened position heading into a contest against former Rep. Mike Rogers,” Politico reports.
Newly inaugurated New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, who campaigned on “transparency and accountability,” took six-figure checks from business leaders through a dark money nonprofit that does not disclose its donors. Had Sherrill raised the money through an official inaugural committee, she would have been subject to contribution limits and would have been required to disclose them.
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"The DNC reported $14 million in the bank and $17.5 million in debt at the end of 2025. The RNC reported $95.1 million in the bank and no debt."
If only Congress was run on RNC fiscals....
Wild how the follow-up never got a fraction of the original coverage. The incentive structure here is broken when there's basicaly no cost to amplifying unverified claims but also no reward for corrections. I worked in newsrooms early in my career and saw how these narratives took hold becasue they fit the moment perfectly, but nobody wanted to revisit once the story fell apart.