Since Trump Was Elected, Hate Crime Hoaxes Have Skyrocketed

You may not have know actor Jussie Smollett a few months ago, but you probably do now.  He’s the guy who pretended to be the victim of a racist and anti-gay attack in downtown Chicago.  The supposed attacked was done by supporters of Donald Trump, he told police.  The fake attack even included a noose.

By now you know the rest of the story.  Turns out, Smollett staged this attack to get the attention of his show’s producers, as he was unhappy with his $65,000 per episode paycheck.

Ridiculous.

But these fake hate crimes are not new.  In fact, The Daily Caller took the time to comprehensively document all of them.  For example:

1.  A Muslim woman at the University of Michigan received national attention from national outlets like The Washington Post in November 2016 after she claimed a drunk 20-something man threatened to light her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab. The university condemned the “hateful attack,” which turned out to be a hoax.
2. Taylor Volk, an openly bisexual senior at North Park University claimed to be the target of hateful notes and emails following Trump’s election in November 2016. Volk told NBC News that “I just want them to stop.” But the “them” referenced by Volk turned out to be herself, as the whole thing was fabricated.
3. Philadelphia woman Ashley Boyer claimed in November 2016 that she was harassed at a gas station by white, Trump-supporting males, one of whom pulled a weapon on her. Boyer claimed that the men “proceeded to talk about the election and how they’re glad they won’t have to deal with n—–s much longer.” Boyer deleted her post after it went viral and claimed the men had been caught and were facing criminal charges. Local police debunked her account.

And that’s just three of them.  Peter Hasson put the list in chronological order, but it goes on and on and on.  (Read the whole list here.).

Niall Ferguson, when pointing out a real hate crime that happened against his friend, wrote, “People who fake hate crimes are beneath contempt, not least because they impede us from facing the complex realities of hatred itself.”

In USA Today, Wilfred Reilly wrote that we’re not really experiencing a spate of hate crimes.  Instead, we’re experiencing hate crime hoaxes.

Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher…

There is very little brutally violent racism in the modern USA. There are less than 7,000 real hate crimes reported in a typical year. Inter-racial crime is quite rare; 84% of white murder victims and 93% of Black murder victims are killed by criminals of their own race, and the person most likely to kill you is your ex-wife or husband. When violent inter-racial crimes do occur, whites are at least as likely to be the targets as are minorities. Simply put, Klansmen armed with nooses are not lurking on Chicago street corners.

They’re not making race relations better, that’s for sure.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Hat Tip: The Daily Caller