http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/05/02/hate-crime-hoaxes-growing-epidemic/
Victimhood is profitable. On the internet, it can get you thousands of dollars in crowdfunding donations. In the media, it can win you national prominence and a cooing audience of credulous sycophants. On campus, it can get you attention and plaudits from fellow grievance-mongers.
Convince enough people you’re a victim, and everyone from presidential candidates to celebrities will come rushing to support you.
So it’s little wonder that charlatans and opportunists regularly seek to take advantage of our species’ natural instinct for empathy. False flags, in which people deliberately stage attacks on themselves to win the support of society, are as old as history itself.
That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way. They’re really as old as history itself. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once recalled how Peisistratos, a man who would become the dictator of Athens, staged a fake attack on himself to gain the support of the city:
That’s assuming you get away with it, of course. The typical victim hoax is so clumsily implemented that it is only believable to those that are well trained to embrace their victimhood status and, as is also necessary, suspend their critical faculties.
That’s why they don’t work so well on conservatives, who are more sceptical of such claims. Think of Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz blaming Roger Stone and the Trump campaign for the “sex scandal” story, when it was widely known that Little Marco’s people were the ones shopping the story.
Victimhood isn’t just used to push agendas and win power. It can also be used to make money. Professional victims like feminist pest Anita Sarkeesian have received thousands of dollars in donations after complaints about unkind words on the internet.
Little wonder that there’s been such an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes in the past few years, particularly among regressive activists on university campuses. We’ve seen students scrawl swastikas on the doors of their own dorm rooms, send themselves anonymous rape threats, and falsely accuse fraternities of queer-bashing.
So severe is the problem, lawyer and author Mike Cernovich has taken it upon himself to compile a guide on how to recognise common patterns in these hoaxes.
An epidemic of lies
This got Breitbart thinking. How many hate crime hoaxes have occurred in, say, the past decade? Progressives seem to get busted every other month, but surely that’s just our own biased impression.
When we started our search, we were expecting to find twenty, perhaps forty examples from the past decade of high-profile hate crimes that turned out to be frauds.
If only. We found over a hundred, spread across race, gender, sexuality and religion.
Perhaps thanks to the effect of social media and citizen-led sleuthing, reports of hate-crime hoaxes undergo a massive surge in the years after 2011. 2015 seems to have been a high point — our search found over 20 incidents in that year alone.
Then again, we’re only a quarter of the way through 2016. There have already been four major hate crime hoaxes this year.
And consider this: those are just the ones that were reported. How many other hate crime hoaxers are still out there, undiscovered and unpunished? It’s impossible to say, but given human empathy’s tendency to override scepticism, we suspect the number is high — and probably rising. Because the left is running out of real haters.
As British journalist Douglas Murray likes to say, the Left has a supply-and-demand problem with bigotry. There simply isn’t enough of it to go around, so reporters have to go “rape shopping” like Sabrina Erdely did for Rolling Stone, or they have to enlarge the definitions of “racism” and “homophobia” to include minuscule perceived infractions, called “microaggressions.”
If you live in an Anglosphere nation, you are living in one of the most tolerant, peaceful societies in recorded history. Attitudes towards women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of other races have never been more progressive. Among Millennials, attitudes to abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues are vastly more liberal than their parents. If history is any guide, the next generation is likely to be even more socially liberal.
With the Left reduced to chasing imaginary microaggressions and pizza-shop owners who’d rather not cater lesbian weddings, it’s little wonder that they have to turn to hoaxes to convince the public that bigotry is still alive and well.
It will do them no good. Despite the scaremongering, bigotry in western nations is in terminal decline. Soon, only the hoaxes will remain.
We can’t be far off from social justice education at top universities including courses on effective victim hoaxing. This may seem incredibly brazen to those of us with a modicum of integrity, but it isn’t a big step from where we are today. After all, we already have courses that do little more than teach students that straight white males are the devil and which peddle outright conspiracy theories such as the “patriarchy” and “systematic oppression.”
On the bright side, candidates for the PhD in SJW Hoax Studies may be hired by the CIA for false flag operations abroad, marking the first time a graduate of a left-wing course has been hired anywhere outside of academia, diversity offices and McDonalds.
Interestingly, false flag hoaxes in the West almost exclusively use white males at the hoax’s target. Why not use Militant Islam which is a much more believable aggressor?
I guess one explanation is that it’s hard to fake chopping your head off, or having you and your loved ones blown to bits, when you can, as a Tennessee lesbian couple famously did, burn your own house down after scrawling QUEERS on the front wall to collect the insurance money.
The media, and society as a whole, needs to become less gullible. Activists ought to give the police at least a week to determine the culprit before leaping to Twitter to coin the next hip protest hashtag. Journalists should let the police investigate before writing long, sympathetic stories about what the “hate crimes” say about our allegedly bigoted society.
Because, in reality, there’s only one thing that these hoaxes say about our society: that we’re all mugs. Especially white people, who typically serve as the villains in these hoaxes and beat themselves up every time one of these nasty progressive liars dreams up a poop swastika.
HATE CRIME HOAXES: A TIMELINE
2007
Student at George Washington University targets herself with swastika graffiti
Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University falsely reports racist hate mail to the FBI
2008
Liberal blogs spread false rumour that a Sarah Palin supporter called Barack Obama the N-word.
2009
Student at Hofstra University falsely accuses five male students of gang-rape
Rachel Dolezal reports numerous hate crimes at her property, but fails to follow up with evidence
Left-wing activists in Denver vandalize Democrat Party HQ, blame right-wing opponents of Obama
Liberal blogs spread false rumour that a town hall protester yelled a death threat at a Democratic congressman
2010
Lesbian couple in Tennessee stage fake arson attack on themselves
White woman in Portland attacks herself with acid, blames it on black woman
2011
African-American law student at the University of Virginia makes up police misconduct incident
Man in Iowa makes up incident of gay hate crime
Lesbian couple in Colorado spray-paint “kill the gay” on their own garage door
UNC chapel hill student accidentally burns himself, claims his injuries were the result of a homophobic attack
2012
Gay man in Montana injures himself attempting a backflip, claims injuries were the result of a homophobic attack
African-American woman in Louisiana claims the KKK “set her on fire” for wearing an Obama t-shirt. Police later found her own fingerprints on the lighter
African-American woman at Grand Valley State University writes racist death threat on a whiteboard outside her own dorm room
Lesbian in Nebraska charged with making false claims to the police after faking homophobic assault on herself
Gay bar owner in Chicago admits to torching his own establishment, writing gay slurs on the walls
Lesbian sophomore at Central Connecticut State University writes homophobic death threats to herself
Republican activist in Wisconsin falsely claims he was assaulted in his home by a man shouting homophobic slurs
Students at Montclair State University charged with faking racist graffiti
Student at Michigan State University claims he was punched and had his mouth stapled shut by Neo-Nazis
2013
Lesbian waitress claims a customer scrawled a homophobic note on his receipt, refusing to tip her because she was gay
Left-wing activists at Oberlin College scrawl racist graffiti around campus
Feminist activist at the University of Wyoming sends rape threats to herself on Facebook
Racist and transphobic graffiti at Vassar College revealed to be the work of the same transgender student who was appointed to run the student-led investigation into the incidents
Jersey City high school student government candidate sends racist texts to himself
Student at the University of Chicago fakes hack on his own Facebook page, fills it with racist abuse, uses incident to push diversity agenda on campus
African-American Baptist minister admits to painting racial slurs on the side of his house and setting his porch on fire
Mother of high schooler in Massachussetts falsely accuses high school football team of spraying racist graffiti on her family’s house
Gay man in Tennessee charged claims he was attacked and had a homophobic slur written on his forehead, later charged with making a false report
Transgender Student at Hercules High School in San Francisco fakes bathroom assault
2014
Muslim man in California murders his wife, tries to blame it on “Islamophobic hate crime”
Radio station in New York fabricates story of a mom stopping her child from attending a classmate’s birthday party because their parents were gay
Bosnian immigrant in St. Louis falsely claims three black teenagers wanted to kill her due to ethnicity
Gay Apple Store customer in Portland falsely claims employee wrote homophobic slur on receipt
African-American waitress in Tennessee claims customer wrote racial slurs to her on the back of a receipt, handwriting experts later say this is false
Muslim in Michigan burns Qu’rans outside Islamic Cultural Center
Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Ederly publishes “A Rape On Campus,” a female University of Virginia student’s account of an alleged gang rape at the hands of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. The story proves to be a hoax, leading to a national controversy
2015
Gay pizzeria owner in Utah admits he made up allegations that he was the victim of a homophobic attack in his restaurant
Lesbian professor at Central Michigan University admits she punched her own face and claimed bruises to be the result of a hate crime
Black activist at Kean University faces jail sentence and fine for tweeting anonymous racial abuse to fellow students
Gay student at the University of North Dakota claims fraternity physically attacked him for homophobic reasons, later admits he started the fight himself
Black student at Saginaw State Valley University leaves fake racist threats on Yik Yak
Mexican-American man in Palo Alto attacked by rival gang, blames it on white racists
African-American activist, an alumni of Kean University tweets anonymous racist threats to students, charged with creating false public alarm
“White Only” and “Black Only” signs at the University of Buffalo turn out to be a campus activist’s “art project””
African-American man in Colorado Springs leaves racist messages outside African-American church
Baltimore woman receives $43,000 in donations after claiming she received homophobic hate mail, later revealed as hoax
Gay man in Utah carves “Die Fag” into his own arm, claims to be victim of hate crime
Muslim student at UT Arlington fabricates story of being threatened with a gun by white men in a pickup truck decorated with “large Texan flags”
Student activists at the University of Missouri spread false rumor of KKK sightings on campus
Yale Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat falsely accused of multiple racist incidents
Gay man falsely accuses a University of North Dakota frat of throwing him out of a party because he is gay
Vanderbilt students claim bag of excrement left outside student cultural center was racially motivated, later revealed to be dog waste
Students at University of Delaware claim “nooses” were hung from trees on campus, later revealed to be remnants of paper lanterns
Mosque in Houston set on fire — by a Muslim
Jewish student at George Washington University admits to posting a swastika on Jewish fraternity’s bulletin board
White woman in Texas invents story of being attacked by three African Americans in front of her 3-year old daughter
Gay activist in Ohio claims he has been abducted, late revealed to be a hoax
2016
Black activist in Seattle defaces African-American cultural center with racist graffiti
African-American students at the University of Albany falsely claim to be victims of racial abuse by fellow passenger on a bus
Pastor in Austin, Texas claims a local Whole Foods store wrote “FAG” on a cake he ordered for a gay congregation member, but surveillance footage shows he tampered with the cake himself
Muslim woman in New York City admits to faking knife hate crime attack
Victimhood is profitable. On the internet, it can get you thousands of dollars in crowdfunding donations. In the media, it can win you national prominence and a cooing audience of credulous sycophants. On campus, it can get you attention and plaudits from fellow grievance-mongers.
Convince enough people you’re a victim, and everyone from presidential candidates to celebrities will come rushing to support you.
So it’s little wonder that charlatans and opportunists regularly seek to take advantage of our species’ natural instinct for empathy. False flags, in which people deliberately stage attacks on themselves to win the support of society, are as old as history itself.
That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way. They’re really as old as history itself. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once recalled how Peisistratos, a man who would become the dictator of Athens, staged a fake attack on himself to gain the support of the city:
Faking assassination attempts are risky these days, and the benefits are questionable. A failed murder attempt might make the local news, but unless you’re already a celebrity or a politician, there isn’t much to be gained. Claim to be a victim of a hate crime, though, and half of today’s uber-progressive, touchy-feely society will run to your doorstep to offer its support.
That’s assuming you get away with it, of course. The typical victim hoax is so clumsily implemented that it is only believable to those that are well trained to embrace their victimhood status and, as is also necessary, suspend their critical faculties.
That’s why they don’t work so well on conservatives, who are more sceptical of such claims. Think of Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz blaming Roger Stone and the Trump campaign for the “sex scandal” story, when it was widely known that Little Marco’s people were the ones shopping the story.
Victimhood isn’t just used to push agendas and win power. It can also be used to make money. Professional victims like feminist pest Anita Sarkeesian have received thousands of dollars in donations after complaints about unkind words on the internet.
Little wonder that there’s been such an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes in the past few years, particularly among regressive activists on university campuses. We’ve seen students scrawl swastikas on the doors of their own dorm rooms, send themselves anonymous rape threats, and falsely accuse fraternities of queer-bashing.
So severe is the problem, lawyer and author Mike Cernovich has taken it upon himself to compile a guide on how to recognise common patterns in these hoaxes.
An epidemic of lies
This got Breitbart thinking. How many hate crime hoaxes have occurred in, say, the past decade? Progressives seem to get busted every other month, but surely that’s just our own biased impression.
When we started our search, we were expecting to find twenty, perhaps forty examples from the past decade of high-profile hate crimes that turned out to be frauds.
If only. We found over a hundred, spread across race, gender, sexuality and religion.
Perhaps thanks to the effect of social media and citizen-led sleuthing, reports of hate-crime hoaxes undergo a massive surge in the years after 2011. 2015 seems to have been a high point — our search found over 20 incidents in that year alone.
Then again, we’re only a quarter of the way through 2016. There have already been four major hate crime hoaxes this year.
And consider this: those are just the ones that were reported. How many other hate crime hoaxers are still out there, undiscovered and unpunished? It’s impossible to say, but given human empathy’s tendency to override scepticism, we suspect the number is high — and probably rising. Because the left is running out of real haters.
As British journalist Douglas Murray likes to say, the Left has a supply-and-demand problem with bigotry. There simply isn’t enough of it to go around, so reporters have to go “rape shopping” like Sabrina Erdely did for Rolling Stone, or they have to enlarge the definitions of “racism” and “homophobia” to include minuscule perceived infractions, called “microaggressions.”
If you live in an Anglosphere nation, you are living in one of the most tolerant, peaceful societies in recorded history. Attitudes towards women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of other races have never been more progressive. Among Millennials, attitudes to abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues are vastly more liberal than their parents. If history is any guide, the next generation is likely to be even more socially liberal.
With the Left reduced to chasing imaginary microaggressions and pizza-shop owners who’d rather not cater lesbian weddings, it’s little wonder that they have to turn to hoaxes to convince the public that bigotry is still alive and well.
It will do them no good. Despite the scaremongering, bigotry in western nations is in terminal decline. Soon, only the hoaxes will remain.
We can’t be far off from social justice education at top universities including courses on effective victim hoaxing. This may seem incredibly brazen to those of us with a modicum of integrity, but it isn’t a big step from where we are today. After all, we already have courses that do little more than teach students that straight white males are the devil and which peddle outright conspiracy theories such as the “patriarchy” and “systematic oppression.”
On the bright side, candidates for the PhD in SJW Hoax Studies may be hired by the CIA for false flag operations abroad, marking the first time a graduate of a left-wing course has been hired anywhere outside of academia, diversity offices and McDonalds.
Interestingly, false flag hoaxes in the West almost exclusively use white males at the hoax’s target. Why not use Militant Islam which is a much more believable aggressor?
I guess one explanation is that it’s hard to fake chopping your head off, or having you and your loved ones blown to bits, when you can, as a Tennessee lesbian couple famously did, burn your own house down after scrawling QUEERS on the front wall to collect the insurance money.
The media, and society as a whole, needs to become less gullible. Activists ought to give the police at least a week to determine the culprit before leaping to Twitter to coin the next hip protest hashtag. Journalists should let the police investigate before writing long, sympathetic stories about what the “hate crimes” say about our allegedly bigoted society.
Because, in reality, there’s only one thing that these hoaxes say about our society: that we’re all mugs. Especially white people, who typically serve as the villains in these hoaxes and beat themselves up every time one of these nasty progressive liars dreams up a poop swastika.
HATE CRIME HOAXES: A TIMELINE
2007
Student at George Washington University targets herself with swastika graffiti
Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University falsely reports racist hate mail to the FBI
2008
Liberal blogs spread false rumour that a Sarah Palin supporter called Barack Obama the N-word.
2009
Student at Hofstra University falsely accuses five male students of gang-rape
Rachel Dolezal reports numerous hate crimes at her property, but fails to follow up with evidence
Left-wing activists in Denver vandalize Democrat Party HQ, blame right-wing opponents of Obama
Liberal blogs spread false rumour that a town hall protester yelled a death threat at a Democratic congressman
2010
Lesbian couple in Tennessee stage fake arson attack on themselves
White woman in Portland attacks herself with acid, blames it on black woman
2011
African-American law student at the University of Virginia makes up police misconduct incident
Man in Iowa makes up incident of gay hate crime
Lesbian couple in Colorado spray-paint “kill the gay” on their own garage door
UNC chapel hill student accidentally burns himself, claims his injuries were the result of a homophobic attack
2012
Gay man in Montana injures himself attempting a backflip, claims injuries were the result of a homophobic attack
African-American woman in Louisiana claims the KKK “set her on fire” for wearing an Obama t-shirt. Police later found her own fingerprints on the lighter
African-American woman at Grand Valley State University writes racist death threat on a whiteboard outside her own dorm room
Lesbian in Nebraska charged with making false claims to the police after faking homophobic assault on herself
Gay bar owner in Chicago admits to torching his own establishment, writing gay slurs on the walls
Lesbian sophomore at Central Connecticut State University writes homophobic death threats to herself
Republican activist in Wisconsin falsely claims he was assaulted in his home by a man shouting homophobic slurs
Students at Montclair State University charged with faking racist graffiti
Student at Michigan State University claims he was punched and had his mouth stapled shut by Neo-Nazis
2013
Lesbian waitress claims a customer scrawled a homophobic note on his receipt, refusing to tip her because she was gay
Left-wing activists at Oberlin College scrawl racist graffiti around campus
Feminist activist at the University of Wyoming sends rape threats to herself on Facebook
Racist and transphobic graffiti at Vassar College revealed to be the work of the same transgender student who was appointed to run the student-led investigation into the incidents
Jersey City high school student government candidate sends racist texts to himself
Student at the University of Chicago fakes hack on his own Facebook page, fills it with racist abuse, uses incident to push diversity agenda on campus
African-American Baptist minister admits to painting racial slurs on the side of his house and setting his porch on fire
Mother of high schooler in Massachussetts falsely accuses high school football team of spraying racist graffiti on her family’s house
Gay man in Tennessee charged claims he was attacked and had a homophobic slur written on his forehead, later charged with making a false report
Transgender Student at Hercules High School in San Francisco fakes bathroom assault
2014
Muslim man in California murders his wife, tries to blame it on “Islamophobic hate crime”
Radio station in New York fabricates story of a mom stopping her child from attending a classmate’s birthday party because their parents were gay
Bosnian immigrant in St. Louis falsely claims three black teenagers wanted to kill her due to ethnicity
Gay Apple Store customer in Portland falsely claims employee wrote homophobic slur on receipt
African-American waitress in Tennessee claims customer wrote racial slurs to her on the back of a receipt, handwriting experts later say this is false
Muslim in Michigan burns Qu’rans outside Islamic Cultural Center
Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Ederly publishes “A Rape On Campus,” a female University of Virginia student’s account of an alleged gang rape at the hands of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. The story proves to be a hoax, leading to a national controversy
2015
Gay pizzeria owner in Utah admits he made up allegations that he was the victim of a homophobic attack in his restaurant
Lesbian professor at Central Michigan University admits she punched her own face and claimed bruises to be the result of a hate crime
Black activist at Kean University faces jail sentence and fine for tweeting anonymous racial abuse to fellow students
Gay student at the University of North Dakota claims fraternity physically attacked him for homophobic reasons, later admits he started the fight himself
Black student at Saginaw State Valley University leaves fake racist threats on Yik Yak
Mexican-American man in Palo Alto attacked by rival gang, blames it on white racists
African-American activist, an alumni of Kean University tweets anonymous racist threats to students, charged with creating false public alarm
“White Only” and “Black Only” signs at the University of Buffalo turn out to be a campus activist’s “art project””
African-American man in Colorado Springs leaves racist messages outside African-American church
Baltimore woman receives $43,000 in donations after claiming she received homophobic hate mail, later revealed as hoax
Gay man in Utah carves “Die Fag” into his own arm, claims to be victim of hate crime
Muslim student at UT Arlington fabricates story of being threatened with a gun by white men in a pickup truck decorated with “large Texan flags”
Student activists at the University of Missouri spread false rumor of KKK sightings on campus
Yale Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat falsely accused of multiple racist incidents
Gay man falsely accuses a University of North Dakota frat of throwing him out of a party because he is gay
Vanderbilt students claim bag of excrement left outside student cultural center was racially motivated, later revealed to be dog waste
Students at University of Delaware claim “nooses” were hung from trees on campus, later revealed to be remnants of paper lanterns
Mosque in Houston set on fire — by a Muslim
Jewish student at George Washington University admits to posting a swastika on Jewish fraternity’s bulletin board
White woman in Texas invents story of being attacked by three African Americans in front of her 3-year old daughter
Gay activist in Ohio claims he has been abducted, late revealed to be a hoax
2016
Black activist in Seattle defaces African-American cultural center with racist graffiti
African-American students at the University of Albany falsely claim to be victims of racial abuse by fellow passenger on a bus
Pastor in Austin, Texas claims a local Whole Foods store wrote “FAG” on a cake he ordered for a gay congregation member, but surveillance footage shows he tampered with the cake himself
Muslim woman in New York City admits to faking knife hate crime attack
