Monday marked the five-year anniversary of the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax. I say that with some hesitation, because I know that there’s not a single living person who ever wants to hear the name Jussie Smollett ever again. Every detail of that story has been covered, and every joke you can possibly make about it has already been made.
But if there’s a silver lining in that whole episode, it’s that everyone on the planet received a crash course in how easy it is to lie about “hate crimes.” You can come up with the most ridiculous story imaginable, and people will still buy it. That was the moment that hate crime hoaxes peaked. So if you’re a rational person, you might think that, post-Smollett, the number of reported “hate crimes” would go down at least a little bit. After all, the gig is up. No one’s ever going to be as naive as they were back in 2019 ever again.
But that assumption, as logical as it might seem, would be very wrong.
In just the past year, there’s been a rash of cases just like Smollett’s, complete with outlandish claims that don’t make any sense, which the media buys without any hesitation whatsoever. There’s so many examples that it’s hard to choose, but here’s one of the best ones.
Last summer there was the curious case of Scott Rowin, who told reporters in Southern California that he was set on fire on the sidewalk, solely because he’s gay.
Here’s how the gumshoes at the local ABC affiliate covered that story:
You’ll notice there’s no effort whatsoever to verify this guy’s story. To recap: We’re told there was a gay guy who was out for a “routine” walk in San Diego, on his way to a restaurant, when he heard two people yell homophobic slurs at him — because obviously, anyone could tell this guy was gay from a mile away. And of course, there are a bunch of “anti-LGBTQ” assassins roaming the streets of Southern California, on the hunt for anyone who looks gay, so this makes perfect sense. Naturally, in response, this gay guy yelled back at his assailants, and then to his horror he noticed he had been doused with some kind of liquid and set on fire.
Literally the only innovation over the Jussie Smollett hoax in that whole story is that bit at the end about getting set on fire. Everything else — from the bit about going to a restaurant, to the number of assailants, to the slurs — is pretty much identical. In fact, this claim is perhaps more similar to the story of a biracial woman named Althea Bernstein in Madison, Wisconsin. She claimed she was doused with lighter fluid and set on fire by a gang of white racists who accosted her while she was waiting at an intersection. Authorities opened a hate crime investigation into that alleged attack, and then quietly dropped it, saying only that they couldn’t prove the event ever occurred at all. Which is odd considering that it supposedly happened at an intersection in the middle of a city with dozens of cameras all around.
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But to give Scott Rowin some credit, we do know that he was indeed actually set on fire. There’s no denying that. So there is an ounce of believability to at least one aspect of this story — especially if you don’t remotely look into it in any of the other details, in any way whatsoever. And of course, the news of this alleged hate crime went viral in Left-wing circles.
Unfortunately for the narrative, though, the truth eventually did come out, precisely three days later. Watch as the same crack news crew that brought you the original story pulls what may be the single biggest about-face in the history of journalism:
Ah. Well, that’s a little different. So instead of two homophobic bigots trolling the streets of San Diego, looking to torch some random gay guy, now we learn that the gay guy was allegedly beating a pregnant woman, to the point that she was bleeding and had to go to the hospital. And while she was being attacked, she somehow set the gay guy on fire in self-defense.
Note that the news station isn’t ashamed about any of this. They don’t apologize to their viewers for airing a completely false story, with no vetting whatsoever. That’s because they don’t care. Their job — and the job of corporate media in general — is to stoke as much division as possible. If they get caught in a lie, they’ll just shrug and move on to the next one.
Fortunately for the news media, there have been plenty of other fake hate crimes for them to talk about.
There was the case of the 20-year-old Ohio man who claimed in November to be the victim of an anti-Palestinian hate crime. Here’s how the Council on American-Islamic Relations, (CAIR), described the episode. They said the man, “was walking home from eating lunch when a car slowed down and rolled down the window. The driver of the car allegedly started yelling at him using anti-Palestinian statements like ‘Kill all Palestinians,’ and ‘Long live Israel,’ as he swerved his car to intimidate the victim. The driver then allegedly turned around and hit the man while shouting ‘DIE!'” For good measure, CAIR posted a picture of this guy in a neck brace in the hospital, just to underscore how Islamophobic this country has become.
As you may have guessed, none of it was true.
Police later obtained video evidence that the man’s injuries resulted from a fight with his brother earlier in the day. Confronted with the fact that they were completely wrong about this supposed “hate crime,” CAIR did not admit their mistake. They didn’t offer any explanation for their decision to amplify a clearly fraudulent narrative. Instead, they said this:”Our understanding is that the brothers have secured their own legal counsel. We do not yet know anything more about the nature of the charges.” That was their actual statement. Not, “We’re horrified we misled the public about a brutal hate crime that didn’t happen.” Just, “He’s got a lawyer so we’re not talking about this anymore.”
Again, there’s never any remorse from these liars, probably because they can’t even tell how ridiculous they look. They are so far gone that they don’t see it. Remorse requires shame and self-awareness, and these people have neither. That could explain the recent stunt by California congresswoman Barbara Lee, who as I’ve mentioned before, launched into a bizarre story on CNN recently about a supposed racist incident that occurred at the Capitol. Watch:
Rep. Barbara Lee: “I was walking … to the Capitol and a white guy stopped me, and told me I could not get into the members’ elevator … He told me … it was for members only. I said, ‘Sir, I’m a member of Congress’ and showed him my pin. And he said, ‘Whose pin did you steal?’” pic.twitter.com/hop81xQHpU
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 19, 2024
Once again, right away, nothing about the story makes sense. And you can tell she’s lying because she leaves out the kind of details you would need to verify the story. She doesn’t tell you when this incident happened, which would allow Capitol Police to pull up the surveillance tapes in about ten seconds. And conveniently, she doesn’t offer any description of the “white guy.” Is he a police officer? A random vigilante patrolling the elevators to make sure no black congresswomen get inside? We have no idea, and she didn’t mention it, because this is all made up. Like all of these other recent hate hoaxes, it just makes no sense.
I could go on and on, listing dozens of fake hate crimes that have been reported over the past year, but the data tells the story. We are indeed witnessing an epidemic of fake hate crimes reports in the post-Smollett, post-BLM era. As many news organizations reported this week, the FBI has determined that from 2018 to 2022, hate crimes in the United States have increased by a staggering 60%. And if that sounds bad, rest assured, we’re told that it gets even worse. The problem is especially acute among students, the bureau tells us. In that same period — from 2018 to 2022, — according to the FBI, reported hate crimes in schools and colleges have nearly doubled. Elementary and secondary schools are the hot-spots, we’re told.
Supposedly, the most common hate crime in schools is anti-black, followed by anti-Jewish, followed by anti-gay. Anti-white hate crimes don’t make the top three, despite the fact that white kids are the victims in nearly every video of an assault at a school by one race against another that we’ve seen in the last 10 years.
For example, watch this footage of a recent beating at a school in Florida, which again comes to us from a local ABC affiliate. Notice what’s not mentioned in this report:
So there was a “brutal” beating of a teenager in a parking lot at a school. The victim suffered a skull fracture, and he had to be hospitalized. The motive, we’re told, is unknown. There’s just no way to explain why this might have happened.
What’s not mentioned in the report, conspicuously enough, is that the teens who beat the student were black, and their victim was white. And, just in case you think this was another innocent mistake by the local news crew, rest assured that the national media did precisely the same thing. Fox News reported on the incident as another example of “juvenile violence that’s rocking the nation.” But the cause of the brawl, we’re told, is “unknown.” So it’s clear that, when black people beat up white people at school, then the identities of the attackers isn’t something you’re supposed to talk about. The national news media doesn’t think it could possibly be related to motive, even though we all know what they’d do if the races were reversed.
Given all this, there are obviously a lot of reasons to doubt the FBI’s latest hate crimes data. No one wants to talk about anti-white hate crimes, even when they’re occurring on camera. So we should expect some underreporting in that area.
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But for just a moment, let’s take this FBI reporting at face value, and assume that indeed, there’s been a dramatic rise in the number of hate crimes in schools. If that’s the case, then it would seem to suggest that our schools are an even bigger disaster than we thought. Test scores and student productivity are going down while hate crimes are going up. Considering that schools have never focused more on preaching tolerance and diversity, this would mean that their efforts to bring about “racial justice” have been a catastrophic failure and are doing more harm than good.
You’d think that realization might prompt some self-reflection from the activists who have been lecturing us for years about the importance of DEI, and “racial reckoning.” It turns out, none of it’s working. Just like affirmative action, this grand social experiment hasn’t solved any of the problems that it was supposed to solve. That’s the implication of this F.B.I. report, if we assume it’s accurate.
But the truth is that the FBI report isn’t accurate, just like all the reports of hate crimes from 2016 weren’t accurate (back when we were told that Donald Trump was “emboldening” white supremacists or whatever). The moment you dive into the specifics on hate-crime stats, you realize what a fraud it is.
All of this data is based on “reported hate crimes.” In other words, if someone tells a teacher that they were called a mean name because of their skin color, then that could count as a reported hate crime. It doesn’t matter if there’s no conviction or even an arrest. All it takes is for someone in a police department somewhere to code an incident as potentially related to hatred. That’s it.
And by the way, the police are incentivized to do this by the Biden DOJ. The DOJ awards millions of dollars to local police departments that report hate crimes. So there’s a massive gap between “reported hate crimes” and hate crimes that actually result in a conviction.
What’s funny is that you never hear anyone talk about what exactly this difference is. None of the media reports this week even mention it. If you go on the FBI’s website, you won’t find the information either, at least not prominently. But I went looking for it on the website of the California Department of Justice. I thought this would be a good state to check, since it’s one of the most Left-wing states in the entire country, if not the most Left-wing. So we can assume that they’re going to vigorously prosecute as many alleged hate crimes as possible.
Here are the most recent numbers we have. In 2022, the state of California reported a whopping 2,589 hate crimes. Depending on your perspective, in a state of 40 million people, that might not seem like many. But let’s pretend it’s an alarmingly high figure for a second. Guess how many of those reported hate crimes resulted in hate crimes convictions, according to the California DOJ? Out of 2,589 supposed hate crimes, how many of them were actually proven in court? The answer is: A grand total of 53.
That’s roughly two percent of them. And again, this is in the jurisdiction where the prosecutors are presumably the most aggressive on charges like this, and where juries are extremely predisposed to convicting.
You can reproduce numbers like this in any state in the country. There’s a massive gulf between reports and charges and even greater one between reports and convictions. Obviously that’s because most of these reports are nonsense. What we actually have is a massive epidemic of false hate crime reports that are eating up who knows how much law enforcement time and resources.
Now, it’s tempting to dismiss all of these reports as hoaxes. It’s easy to say that all of these reports are from mentally imbalanced, cynical people looking for attention or sympathy or something like that. And undoubtedly that’s a big part of it. But it’s not the whole explanation.
A lot of the people claiming that they’re victims genuinely believe that they are. We’ve raised a generation to see hate crimes everywhere. Everyone from law enforcement to academia to the corporate press have participated in that indoctrination. The truth is that this epidemic of false reports is as much a product of hoaxes as it is of brainwashing.
That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised the numbers are going up. And it’s why we shouldn’t be remotely shocked to learn that ground-zero for these reports are schools and universities. Indoctrination is their job. Five years after Jussie Smollett, it’s safe to say that they’ve gotten very good at it.