Notes on: Reilly, W. (2019) Hate Crime Hoaxes and
Why They Happen. Commentary April 2019
https://www.commentary.org/articles/wilfred-reilly/hate-crime-hoaxes-why-they-happen/
[Very challenging/courageous stuff here.One or two
arguments extended too far]
A black gay actor, J Smollett, claimed that two
masked assailants yelled homophobic and racist
insults, declared that this is MAGA country, beat
and kicked him, put a noose round his neck and
poured liquid over him before he managed to fight
them off. This took place in Chicago during a
polar vortex [!]. The whole thing became a
celebrated cause among progressive politicians and
celebrities. Sceptics were attacked on social
media and in the press as deniers or perpetrators
of prejudicial hatred. A month later, Smollett was
charged with filing a false police report. 'The
whole thing was allegedly a hoax '.
'Our nation is not wracked with hate crimes… I
have done a great deal of research on hate crimes…
An enormous number of such incidents reported over
the past decades turn out to have been hoaxes'.
Early incidents that he investigated involved the
burning to the ground of a gay owned lounge in
Chicago, and reports of death threats by hate
group members at a university in Wisconsin. Other
apparent hate crime cases occurred shortly
afterwards. A particular student had criticised
the University of Chicago administration 'for
allowing "racist" Halloween costumes on campus'
and later alleged that a reactionary group, '
the"UChicago Electronic Army"' had hacked his
Facebook group and posted racist and violent
messages. In Detroit a female student claimed that
her door had been defaced with graffiti including
the phrases '"black bitch", "die N***r" and "F**k
black history month'. In 2015 a student was
expelled after 'allegedly threatening to "shoot
all black people… tomorrow'. Serious hate crimes
were reported at another college in Wisconsin and
in Minnesota.
However, 'most of the hate crime allegations
eventually turned out to be false'. The fire at
the gay lounge 'had been intentionally staged to
look like a hate crime'. 'Almost all the incidents
at Wisconsin turned out to be the work of a
disaffected student… who claimed that she had
wanted to test how seriously the university took
racism'. The student who said he wanted to shoot
black students had actually said he wanted to
shoot them '"a smile"' but had been 'intentionally
misquoted and reported'.
Reilly actually assembled 'a fairly large database
of hate crime allegations — 346 of them — which he
found by searching online and eventually confirmed
that 'fewer than 1/3 of these cases could even
possibly have been genuine hate crimes'. A genuine
hate crime: would 'never [be] exposed as a hoax
and never [be] discovered to have been committed
by a person or group different from the person or
group originally alleged to have committed it'. 'A
majority of these incidents, which were almost all
initially reported with a great deal of fanfare
and breastbeating, were later exposed as hoaxes',
although this got very little exposure in the
press. The headlines vanished and were replaced if
at all by 'low key rueful acknowledgements that a
hoax had taken place'.
He also spent three weeks in 2017 searching for
fake hate crimes and hate crime hoaxes. There is
already a website called 'fakehatecrimes.org'. He
found 409 confirmed cases of fake hate crimes, all
of which had received 'substantial regional,
national, or global media coverage'. He is not
taking a position on what exact percentage of them
are hoaxes. That would be impossible to calculate
— how many interracial fist fights were classified
as hate crimes, how many led to convictions, how
many were dismissed based on the belief that the
allegation was a false one.
However, a book published in 2017 — The Campus
Rape Frenzy [usual casual references]
suggest that estimates of the percentage of false
rape reports range from 2% to almost 50%,
depending on whether we are talking about official
determinations that the allegation was false and
hostile in motivation, or whether it could or
could not be successfully prosecuted. A reporter
from the Washington Examiner offered a
third estimate — 15.6% of rape allegations are
false or baseless and another 17.9% are not
substantial enough to be legally prosecuted [very
dubious ground here of course. Are these related
to hate crimes?].
It is clear that 'the actual number of hate crime
hoaxes is indisputably large'. He found 400, the
website found another 341, and a further
researcher found another 300, in the pre-Internet
era. Official FBI records document 5850 in 2015.
If fewer than one in every 10 [hoax?] hate crimes
is nationally reported 'and thus is a candidate
for these datasets, it seems indisputable that
hoaxes make up a very large chunk of the pool of
widely reported hate crimes, and quite possibly
the pool of all reported hate crimes' [not at all
sure I follow the reasoning here — you could quite
easily argue the opposite, that there is a dark
number of both unreported and real hate crimes.
Not only that, he is comparing his totals gained
over several years with FBI records in one year].
A special team at the University of
Wisconsin–Lacrosse investigating hate responses
conceded that 28 of 192 recently reported bias
incidents were hoaxes or had not occurred at all —
15% rate of false reporting, 'almost certainly
represents a gross underestimate' given that they
responded to matters such as '"discovery of a
Campus Crusade for Christ poster on campus" and "a
blog post about life as a white student" as
legitimate non-hoaxes'.
False hate crimes have a cost. They probably
increase hostility between blacks and whites. They
might even ferment more real hate crimes. Why
would anyone fake hate crime — 'fame, profit, and
the advancement of a political ideology'. There is
'a large and well entrenched grievance industry in
the United States'. The Southern Poverty Law
Centre, considers organisations such as the Family
Research Council and the Jewish Political Action
Committee as '"hate groups"': it has an income of
$51.8 million a year and an endowment of $432
million. Black advocacy organisations are also
large — Black Lives Matter had 332,368 followers
on Facebook in 2018. Civil rights groups did
considerable good during the civil rights
movements, but today they 'have a deep rooted
interest in presenting the sort of bigotry they
fight as a serious ongoing problem… in order to
continue receiving donations and funding'. 'It
would not be wild speculation' [weasel] to suggest
that one in every $10 spent in business 'interacts
in some way with an affirmative action or minority
set-aside program' and of course these also have
advocates. So the false report of a hate crime
rallies support.
There are 'sizeable payoffs for reported
victimisation, real or false', despite
institutional racism having been illegal since
1964 ['most forms'], and affirmative action the
'unofficial law of the land… Since 1967', a
consistent theme of 'modern social–justice
activism is that the United States remains a
"genocidally" racist nation'.
There are claims that black people are
'"criminalised and dehumanised"' across all areas
of society, justice and education systems, social
service agencies, the media and pop culture, that
civil rights laws and policies of affirmative
action are 'toothless shams'. As a result,
apparently 67% 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 preference, although preference for the
black one is 'undoubtedly the more likely outcome
under the current dispensation: a recent case
'awarded undergraduate applicants 20 full points
for being black or Hispanic, in contrast to 12
points for a perfect SAT score, four points for
legacy status, and 20 points per one unit increase
in GPA'. A black applicant with a GPA of 3.0 was
as likely to get into Michigan as a white
applicant with a perfect 4.0, and more likely than
a white legacy student with GPA of 3.0 and perfect
SAT'. This is 'a large racial preference.'
This policy has unintended consequences, for
example 'huge gaps in preparedness between
minority and white students at virtually every
level'. Black students 'find themselves struggling
in the Ivy League… where their GPA and test scores
are, on average, lower than those of their white
classmates' [sneaky revolving door stuff?]. There
is a 'resulting gap in success between white
students and non-Asian minority students'.
False hate crime allegations 'provide support for
the metanarrative of majority group bigotry.
However, this example of an unintended consequence
of affirmative action is one consequence of
several cases where 'affirmative action increases
hostility among racial groups where ever it is
implemented' [supported by Sowell 2004 Affirmative
Action Around the World: An Empirical Study].
Those not affirmed resent the boost. Many members
of the favoured races resent the fact that their
accomplishments are suspected, say by prospective
employers. Resentment and hostility is increased.
Fake hate crimes are have sometimes led to real
atrocities, as in the blood libel against the
Jews. [He goes as far as saying] 'the current
epidemic of hate-based violence in the United
States is mostly an epidemic of hoaxes, and any
"race war" going on today exists only in the minds
of a few radicals', but there are signs of real
hostility. Some hate crime hoaxes are increasingly
being perpetrated by white members of the
alt-right.
There are a variety of forms. College and
university campuses were hotbeds when he was doing
research and 'literally hundreds' of hoaxes took
place on campuses. Some examples were almost
unbelievable — one Twitter account carried
multiple disturbing messages threatening to kill
blacks, which led to accusations that the
President had not done enough, and led to massive
demonstrations with eventual bills of more than a
hundred thousand dollars. Eventually it was all
traced to one computer, whose owner had led
anti-administration protests in the past. In
another case a noose woven from rubber bands was
found on campus, flyers were posted around campus
threatening black people, but most of the
incidents were eventually traced back to 1 black
student — the only one whose name was spelt
correctly on the list of targets: she claims she
was doing it to prod the campus away from racism.
Flyers were found on another campus, which turned
out to be posted by the Bias Response Team itself
as part of a social experiment. Sometimes white
hate groups like the Klan are blamed for
incidents, such as when, in 2016, three black
women claimed to have been attacked by a mob of
white supremacists, but the video showed that they
had attacked a young white woman after an exchange
of insults, while an individual responsible for
torching a black church and writing '"Vote Trump!"
on it 'turned out to be a black parishioner with a
lengthy history of legal troubles'.
'Quite a few church burnings… Seem to have been
hoaxes'. [In another case in 2017] 'the church
organist who had reported the vandalism confessed
to being the culprit': apparently it was an
anti-Trump protest. In Florida, a black man was
finally identified as the individual for faking a
hate crime writing'KKK' and'Trump' over his
ex-girlfriend's car before trashing it; a black
Louisiana woman claimed that men in white hoods
had set her on fire but 'was discovered to have
actually set herself ablaze'
Trump's election seems to have inspired an
entirely new category — '"Trump hate crimes"', and
again 'the actual numerical majority of alleged
crimes… [reported in the media]… seem to be total
fakes' — a Muslim student in 2016 claims to have
been accosted by three drunken white men yelling
'Donald Trump' but finally broke down and admitted
to making the whole thing up to avoid confessing
to her parents that she'd been out late enjoying
drinking with a boyfriend. In another case, a
58-year-old black man vandalised cars and homes
with slogans such as '"Trump rules"', while a
bisexual student 'claimed she had been sent pieces
of hate mail referring to Trump, before she was
exposed as a hoaxer by a campuswide
investigation'. A woman at Bowling Green State
claims to have been attacked by three white men
wearing Trump T-shirts, but a police check showed
she was nowhere near the location, and an email
search showed she had made disparaging references
to poorer white Trump supporters. Another woman
received a jail sentence for falsely reporting a
hate crime after slashing herself across the face
and claiming that a white Conservative 'angered by
her anti-Brexit pin was responsible for the
injury'.
There are false allegations of anti-gay and
anti-Jewish crime, but these are substantially
less frequent. They do happen. The owner of a
well-known nightclub was arrested in 2013
after he burned down his own gay club and
wrote anti-gay slurs throughout the building and
blamed it on homophobes. Again real hate crimes
against LGBT Americans are common, mostly verbal
abuse. This is 'in contrast to collegial "hate
incidents"'. There are still hoaxes though. [More
examples follow — my favourite is the head of
Vassar College's Bias Incident Response Team who
tagged multiple student locations with anti-tranny
graffiti messages before reporting them to
herself].
Apparently fake hate crimes have been around since
1988, but there is now a new twist in that whites
are now reporting them too [a case in 2015 claimed
that black vandals destroyed his car and wrote
'black lives matter' on the vehicle], while a
Boston immigrant claim to have been attacked by
three black men but made the whole thing up, a
woman in Portland disfigured own face with
sulphuric acid and alleged that a black man had
done it — behaviour resulting from 'a combination
of unresolved racial issues and "extreme
narcissism"'].
His research indicates that 'anti-white hate
crimes reported by whites today are, like other
hate crimes, very likely to be hoaxes', and he
blames the rise of the white identity movement and
the growth of the alt-right. Some of these might
have been inspired by minority hate-crime hoaxes.
The problem must be addressed. Prosecutors must
enforce the law and we must challenge the
narrative with facts, including the actual rates
of real hate crime, interracial crime and police
violence, in order to remove the unjustified fears
of oppression. Until then, we should practice
'good old-fashioned scepticism', especially when
some 'astonishingly unlikely sounding event is
reported'. 'Solving the problem must begin with
acknowledging its existence'.
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