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Hate Crimes?

First of all let’s suggest that’s a person creating a hoax hate crime so as to make another party look bad, is actually engaging in a hate crime themselves. Here’s three examples.

So you think these three are the only ones doing hate crimes?

Not hardly.

Jonah Goldberg [1], yesterday:

Smollett’s hoax isn’t that unusual. I’m already running long, so I’ll spare you the data, but hoaxes happen all the time — and so do actual hate crimes. They’ve happened under [2] Trump [3], and they were happening [4] for decades before Trump. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see Al Sharpton opine on the Smollett case given that his entire career stemmed from the Tawana Brawley hoax and his role in a real hate crime that killed seven people.

I’ve been following this stuff ever since I witnessed such hoaxes as a college student. I think the first book I ever reviewed [5] professionally was about student activism. The author, Paul Rogat Loeb, had a whole chapter about racism on college campuses. He focused on a hate crime at Emory. It was only after dozens of pages about all the wonderful consciousness-raising — and shakedowns of administrators — that resulted from the response to the atrocity that he acknowledged that the victim orchestrated the whole thing. But that was irrelevant, according to Loeb, because “other racial harassment has unquestionably occurred again and again, at colleges nationwide.” And besides, so much consciousness was raised! I wrote at the time, “When students are taught that the coin of the realm is race and rage, invariably some will spend that currency on self-aggrandizement and controversy.

Or, to paraphrase Dale Franks at the q & o podcast [6] on Friday, when victims are lionized, victimhood becomes the coin of the realm.

Jonah, and Dale, are both precisely correct here. Consider the nearly 700 hate crimes [7] directed against anything to the right of Fidel Castro compiled by the Breitbart folks some Independent news sources.

Related:

Hate Crime Hoaxes are More Common than You Think [8]