Here we are, a week after the Jussie Smollett hoax case was dismissed for seemingly unethical reasons, and another accusation against someone wearing a Make America Great Again hat has cropped up, this time in known “MAGA country” San Francisco.
Police in San Francisco are searching for a man who slashed another man on the hand with a sword outside a roller-skating rink, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The attacker, according to people at the scene, was wearing the red hat when he and the victim got into a “verbal dispute.” The victim apparently tried to grab the hat when the attacker reached for a sword he had in the back of his jacket and slashed the other man’s hand, leaving him bleeding profusely.
The alleged attacker then fled, conveniently leaving his precious MAGA hat photo distance from where the victim’s blood was found on the sidewalk. That photo, naturally, is making the rounds on social media. The founder of the skating rink, David Miles, posted pictures of the bloody sidewalk and hat on his Facebook page.
“I came outside. The guy was cut, he was bleeding like you wouldn’t believe,” Miles told the Chronicle. “He was just gushing blood, so we got the first aid kit from inside and tried to stop the bleeding.”
He also referred to the alleged attacker as the “MAGA slasher.”
The victim was taken to a local hospital and treated for his injuries, which were non-life threatening, according to the Chronicle.
A witness, Scott Sweeney, told the Chronicle he saw the man in the hat with the sword 30 minutes before the attack, and claimed the man started yelling homophobic slurs at him.
“In my mind I didn’t think it was a real sword until we came out later and police were on the scene and there was blood and the hat on ground,” Sweeney said.
The Chronicle wasn’t the only outlet to include the hat in its headline. Newsweek picked up the story, predictably including the hat in the headline, as did local news station KRON. KNTV, a local NBC affiliate, did not include the hat in its headline, focusing only on the stabbing by a sword-wielding man.
Now, perhaps a supporter of President Donald Trump really does live in or near San Francisco and took a sword to a roller rink looking to instigate a fight and then left his MAGA hat behind. It could happen. But we’ve seen before when the media yells far and wide that a Trump supporter was behind a vicious attack that further details prove that not to be the case. Smollett wasn’t the only political hate crime hoax designed to blame Trump supporters. After Trump was elected, a number of people came forward to claim they had been the victims of racial or homophobic attacks by people wearing MAGA hats. The claims that received media attention turned out to be hoaxes.
There have been a few actual attacks from Trump supporters. A BBC cameraman was shoved by a supporter at one of Trump’s rallies in February, for example.