Hate Crime Hoax

How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War

Wilfred Reilly

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781621578932
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

If you believe the news, today's America is plagued by an epidemic of violent hate crimes. But is that really true? In Hoax, Professor Wilfred Reilly examines over one hundred widely publicized incidents of so-called hate crimes that never actually happened. With a critical eye and attention to detail, Reilly debunks these fabricated incidents—many of them alleged to have happened on college campuses—and explores why so many Americans are driven to fake hate crimes. We're not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, Reilly concludes—but we might be experiencing an unprecedented epidemic of hate crime hoaxes.

Chapter One

LANCING A BOIL

Why would anyone fake a hate crime? The basic answers would seem to be fame, profit, and the advancement of a political ideology.

It is no secret that there exists a large and well-entrenched grievance industry in the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which thrives on labeling organizations such as the Family Research Council and Jewish Political Action Committee “hate groups,” pulls in $51,800,000 per year and has a well-invested endowment of $432,000,000.¹ The similar Anti-Defamation League (ADL) listed itself as possessing $144,158,994 in assets and $81,187,088 in post-liability net assets during fiscal year 2018 alone.² While perhaps a bit more cash-poor, the great Black advocacy organizations are no slouches when it comes to rallying the troops: the official Facebook page for Black Lives Matter boasted 326,993 likes and 332,368 followers when I accessed it in November 2018.³

Civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Urban League, and indeed some of the very organizations mentioned above all did considerable good in the past, notably during the civil rights movement of the 1940s to 1960s. But it would be foolish to deny that today these organizations have a deep-rooted interest in presenting the sort of bigotry which they fight as a serious ongoing problem in the United States in order to continue receiving donations and funding. More broadly, it would not be wild speculation to say that one in every ten dollars spent in business interacts in some way with an affirmative action or minority set-aside program. These programs too have advocates, who welcome evidence of their own necessity in society. Especially in a liberal environment, such as a college campus, the false report of a hate crime brings both predictable notoriety and support from a preset group of allies and a chance to strike back at perceived oppressors.

Thus, when Yasmin Seweid falsely claimed that Donald Trump supporters had ripped off her hijab on a train, she received sympathetic national media coverage and a platform from which to speak out against racism and Islamophobia. After a Black graduate student hoaxed the University at Buffalo by placing “Blacks Only” signs above multiple water fountains around campus, the Black Student Union and major fraternities called a campus-wide meeting. In a few truly remarkable collegiate cases, such as a recent incident at Gustavus Adolphus College, representatives of organizations such as the Campus Diversity Council have themselves been caught placing racist or insensitive materials around campus in the hope that students would see them, recognize prejudice as a problem, and contact the Campus Diversity Council. Laird Wilcox describes hoaxes like these—all of which we will look at in more detail below—as the predictable results of a “market process.” Where there exists a reward or payoff for victimization—such as media coverage, popularity, or the chance to punish enemies—the temptation to create it where none actually exists will be very strong.⁴

The fact that there are sizable payoffs for reported victimization, real or false, is the result of a quirk of historical memory. Simply put, the American activist Left often seems to have forgotten that the civil rights movement ever occurred, or at least that it was a success. Although most forms of institutional racism have been illegal since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and anti-white affirmative action has arguably been the law of the land since the Philadelphia Plan in 1967, one of the most consistent themes of modern social justice activism is that the United States remains a “genocidally” racist nation. Allegedly the lives of Blacks, and to a slightly lesser extent other minorities, are nightmares of unstinting oppression.

This is no fringe opinion confined to the members of some witches’ coven at Berkeley. The official manifesto of the Movement for Black Lives claims that Black people are “criminalized and dehumanized” across “all areas of (modern American) society,” including—but not limited to—“justice and education systems, social service agencies . . . and the media and pop culture.”⁵ How the oppression is effected is not specified; it never is. But the ongoing genocidal oppression apparently terrorizing our society today is frequently alleged to start at the very top. President Donald Trump is called a racist and a white nationalist pretty much daily; a search for the phrase “Donald Trump white supremacist” turns up the headlines “How White Nationalists Learned to Love Donald Trump”;⁶ “Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog, and White Supremacists: A Primer”;⁷ “How Trump Took Hate Groups Mainstream”;⁸ and “Trump Promised White Supremacy. Now He’s Delivering It”;⁹ among many others.

The activist Left’s distrust for the United States goes well beyond even this kind of overheated political rhetoric. Although it is considered impolitic for whites or conservatives to mention this in mixed company, a substantial bloc of minority Americans sincerely believe that the U.S. government is attempting to exterminate them. According to a widely cited Washington Post article, roughly half of all African Americans believe that AIDS is man-made; 25 percent think that it was developed by the U.S. government “in a. . . laboratory”; and 15 percent believe that AIDS is a form of “genocide against Black people.”¹⁰

The idea that civil rights laws and policies of affirmative action are toothless shams is quite common among both people of color and white social justice warriors. According to a well-designed study reported in the 2012 book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., after nearly fifty years of affirmative action programs 67 percent of African Americans believe that if a Black student and a white student were to apply to the same university with the same grades and the same SAT scores, the white student would be given an admissions preference and will be more likely to get into the school. Only five percent said that the Black student would have the advantage.¹¹

And yet the latter is undoubtedly the more likely outcome under our current affirmative action regime. The representative University of Michigan affirmative action policy challenged in the famous Grutter v. Bollinger case awarded undergraduate applicants twenty full points for being Black or Hispanic, in contrast to twelve points for a perfect SAT score, four points for legacy status, and twenty points per one-unit increase in grade point average (GPA). Thus a Black applicant with a 3.0 GPA was as likely to get into Michigan as a white applicant with a perfect 4.0 average, and more likely to gain admission than a 3.0 white legacy student who also aced the SAT. Even after the Supreme Court’s final decision in Grutter modified Michigan’s affirmative action regime, very similar admissions preferences persist. In their 2009 book on race and higher education, No Longer Separate, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford point out that Black applicants to selective colleges generally receive “an admissions bonus equivalent to 310 . . . points” on the now three-section SAT.¹²

Racial preferences this large have unintended consequences. As Sander and Taylor demonstrate in Mismatch, the boost that affirmative action gives to many Black and Hispanic students during the college admissions process results in huge gaps in preparedness between minority and white students at virtually every level of the American university system. Black students who might do very well on the local state campus or at a historically Black college find themselves struggling in the Ivy League or at their state’s flagship university, where their GPAs and test scores are, on average, lower than those of their white classmates.¹³ The resulting gap in success between white students and non-Asian minority students cries out for an explanation, at least within that huge majority of universities where the “sausage making” realities of racialized admissions are not honestly discussed. And gross exaggeration of racism in 2018 America is often a convenient one.

False hate crime allegations have value because they provide support for the meta-narrative of majority group bigotry. To quote Wilcox, “There’s nothing like some (fake) racist graffiti to invigorate the militants. And, what the Hell, it’s for a good cause. Right?”¹⁴ Unfortunately, the hoaxers are playing with fire.

The mismatch problem is only one example of the general trend—which Thomas Sowell demonstrates using extensive research in his magisterial 2004 book, Affirmative Action around the World: An Empirical Study—for affirmative action to increase hostility between racial groups wherever it is implemented. Members of the races that are disfavored by the affirmative action policy (whites and especially Asians, in America) tend to resent the boost that is given to favored groups at their expense. And many members of favored races (Blacks and Latinos) naturally resent the fact that their accomplishments are called into question by that favoritism. One famous example of this latter trend is Clarence Thomas’s affixing of a 15-cent price tag to his Yale Law diploma to express his frustration with prospective employers who assumed he had gotten into and through the Ivy League law school only because he was Black.

Both kinds of resentment increase hostility between the races and, as Sowell found in his research on affirmative action programs in countries from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone, have even led to violence—up to and including race riots and civil war.¹⁵ Thankfully, real interracial violence is a much, much smaller problem in the United States than in many less fortunate countries—and also a smaller problem in America today than was the case during America’s past. More than three thousand Black Americans were lynched in the United States before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Today, threats involving hangmen’s nooses are likely to be hoaxes, as I will demonstrate in this book. But the perpetrators of those hoaxes are doing their best to exaggerate racial animosities—which may very well fuel real hate crimes in the future.

It is a tragic truth of human history that fake hate crimes have, on more than one occasion, been the precursor to real atrocities. The best-known example is probably the “blood libel” against the Jews. Throughout medieval Europe, Christians started rumors that Christian children were being killed and their blood used in Jewish religious rituals. These stories were, invariably, complete canards. But the false belief that the Jewish people were perpetrating violence against Christians became the inspiration and excuse for the Christians to commit real violence against the Jews—vicious pogroms in which whole Jewish communities were driven out of their homes, and many of them killed horribly.

So hate crime hoaxes are dangerous. Their perpetrators are playing with fire. While the current epidemic of hate-based violence in the United States is really an epidemic of hoaxes, and any “race war” going on today exists only in the minds of a few radicals, there are disturbing signs that the fakes are fostering real hostility between the races, which could lead to real violence in the future. Consider, for example, the fact that hate crime hoaxes are increasingly being perpetrated by white members of the alt-right, with the explicit goal of making Black people and leftist causes look bad.

Hate crime hoaxes take a variety of forms. College and university campuses were hotbeds of fake hate crime reporting throughout the duration of my study period (2013–17) and for some time before this research project began. Literally hundreds of major hate crime hoaxes have taken place on American university campuses during the past decade. Ninety-three of the 260 nationally reported hoaxes and sets of hoaxes to appear on the first eight pages of the Fake Hate Crimes website either took place on a college or senior high school campus or involved a student as the primary perpetrator—and FHC didn’t get them all!

Many examples are truly outrageous, almost unbelievable. In 2016, at Kean University, the now-suspended Twitter account @keanuagainstblk was used to tweet out multiple disturbing messages such as “I will kill all the Blacks (who) go to Kean University,” tauntingly tagging the campus police department in some of the tweets. This was taken as evidence that the university president, himself a minority activist named Dawood Farahi, had failed to “(do) enough to address racial tensions,” and massive demonstrations swept the campus.¹⁶ The state police and Department of Homeland Security were involved, and the total bill for restoring order and identifying the maker of the threats ran to $100,000. In the end, however, an IP-address trace by police showed that every one of the tweets came from the computer of one Kayla McKelvey, a leader of anti-administration protests with past grievances against Kean. McKelvey faced ninety days in jail and a fine of $82,000, and the long-suffering Kean University issued a statement noting that the institution continues to “wholeheartedly respect and support activism.”¹⁷

As absurd as the Kean situation was, it was not especially unique. In late 2012, a remarkable and disturbing string of “hate incidents” swept the pleasant tree-lined campus of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, about one hour’s drive due north of Chicago. First an object resembling a hangman’s noose, woven out of rubber bands, was found on campus by a group of students. The very next day, an honor student named Aubriana Banks was sent a second noose made of corded string in the mail. Later that night, students came across professionally made flyers posted around campus, reading “Niggers will DIE in two days,” with the names of thirteen Black students written on the bottom of each. Finally, after a great deal of shouting and some detective work, most of the apparently anti-Black incidents were traced back to Black student Khalilah Ford. It is worth noting that Ford was initially identified as a suspect because her name was the only one on the double-digit list of Black targets to be spelled correctly. Incredibly, Ford defended her racist flyers and death threats by claiming that the Parkside administration had not responded quickly enough to the first “noose” found on campus—for which she rather implausibly denied responsibility—and needed to be prodded away from such unacceptable “racism.”¹⁸

It would not be at all hard to fill a full-length book simply with campus incidents such as these. At the University at Buffalo in 2015, an anonymous vandal posted the classic “Whites Only” and “Blacks Only” signs associated with Southern segregation at the entrance to campus bathrooms and over several prominent water fountains on campus. The New York Times, Daily News, and other national mass media outlets reported breathlessly on the “surprise” and “outrage” of UB students. Then, during a formal campus-wide meeting hosted by the Black Student Union, a Black graduate student confessed that she had posted all of the offensive signs as part of an art thesis project called “Installations in Open Spaces.” She did this to create dialogue about campus racism—of which none had previously been in evidence.¹⁹

The Diversity Leadership Council at Minnesota’s well-regarded Gustavus Adolphus College went one remarkable step further than that, in 2017, by posting flyers across campus informing “all white Americans” that “America is a white nation” and that reporting illegal aliens to law enforcement is every white man’s duty. Students who attempted to report th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Lancing a Boil
• Chapter Two: A Conflict of Visions: The “Continuing Oppression” Narrative versus Reality
• Chapter Three: Big Fake on Campus: Fake Hate Crimes in American Academia
• Chapter Four: The Klan Springs Eternal! Hoax Hate Group Attacks and the Real Crimes They Cover Up
• Chapter Five: The Trump Hate Crimes: Donald Trump’s Election and the Resulting Wave of Hoaxes
• Chapter Six: Fake Religious, Anti-LGBT, and Gender Bias Incidents
• Chapter Seven: Throwing Fuel on the Fire: Media Complicity with Hate Crime Hoaxes
• Chapter Eight: White Hot: Caucasian Hate Hoaxers
• Chapter Nine: Solution Sets: How to Deal with the Epidemic of Hoax Hate Crimes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright