Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War is a timely and witty new book from Wilfred Reilly, a youngish black professor of political science at Kentucky State. He concludes that America’s real problem is not the vaunted outbreak of Trump-inspired hate crimes but instead the Establishment’s hate hysteria:
There is no race war in the USA in 2018. Let’s stop letting liars tell us there is…or we might actually get one.
Reilly, whose politics seem to take after conservative eminence Thomas Sowell, has assembled a database of 409 recent fake hate crimes, which is a lot.
So, what percentage are fake? Reilly’s problem is with coming up with an appropriate denominator of total hate crime allegations, fair and fake, to go along with his numerator of 409 phony ones. Therefore, he’s not willing to offer a precise calculation of what percentage of widely reported hate allegations are phony, merely estimating broadly that “Between 15 and 50 percent of hate crime accusations are flatly false.”
Last week, I analyzed all 21 incidents reported in a couple of 2016 “This Week in Hate” columns in The New York Times. Rather than counting stories that are “flatly false,” I counted instances that turned out to actually uphold the Times’ theme that straight white male Trump supporters were out of control. My best guess is only about one-third of the NYT’s curated cases actually supported The Narrative.
Hate Crime Hoax: How t...
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In any case, Reilly observes sensibly, it’s clear that hoaxes are common enough that the media and college administrations should be less credulous about promoting any new hate assertion until substantial evidence for its validity is assembled.
Moreover, authorities need to be aware that some kinds of hate charges are inherently less likely to be true than others. While racist violence out behind a biker bar at closing time might not be implausible, many of the most publicized tales are set in improbably non-Trumpist surroundings, such as the women’s dorm at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. Reilly writes, “But my strong suspicion is that at least half of college campus hate incident reports are fakes.”
Reilly recommends that colleges immediately call the police rather than leave the investigation up to, say, the college’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIBs) department, which is likely to exploit it for its own ends.
In contrast, the police, to their credit, seem to treat hate allegations with evenhanded skepticism. Unlike the immense number of hate crime accusations that fizzle out under police scrutiny, there don’t appear to be very many cases of people who have been unjustly convicted due to hate crime hoaxes, fortunately.
Interestingly, Reilly reports that while in the past, blacks, such as Tawana Brawley, perpetrated most of the fake antiblack hate hoaxes, in recent years leftist whites appear to be pitching in with more antiwhite hoaxes.
And, over the past dozen years or so, rightist whites have started to stage a few hate hoaxes of their own. In the later 20th century, antiblack hoaxes such as Susan Smith’s and Charlie Stuart’s were generally personal scams in which whites tried to get away with murder (literally in these two events) by blaming unknown black carjackers for their dead loved ones, but did not allege hate crimes.
