Wave of Fake ‘Hate Crimes’ Sweeps anti-Trump Social Media
Fake reports of “hate crimes” committed by fans of President-elect Donald Trump are sweeping the nation. Meanwhile, real crimes continue to be committed by anti-Trump rioters in dozens of cities across America.
One fake “hate crime” involved a Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who claimed that she had her hijab torn off by two white males. Lafayette police now report that she “admitted that she fabricated the story.”
Other incidents are being reported as “crimes” that are not crimes at all. CNN published a list of “hate crimes” on Saturday that includes an incident where a group of middle school students chanted “Build the wall!” in a cafeteria.
That is not a “crime”; it is juvenile behavior by boorish 12- and 13-year-olds.
Another “crime” on CNN’s list comes from a university where “somebody chalked the words ‘Trump,’ ‘Build wall’ and ‘[Expletive deleted] your safe space’ in front of the library.
That’s right: they used actual chalk.
Other than that, there’s not much. Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason.com has posted a more extensive list of cases where police were unable to verify the allegations being made, including an alleged attack on a gay man in Santa Monica, California.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) documented three men showing up at a Veterans Day parade with Confederate flags. Provocative? Deliberately. Offensive? Yes, to most. Hate crime? No.
And yet Huffman blamed Donald Trump: “We need to prepare for more of this because the Trump campaign has legitimized and given public space to some shadowy groups that used to hide from public view.”
(For the record, Trump supported efforts to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol.)
Meanwhile, thousands of people flood city centers in Los Angeles, Portland, New York and elsewhere, in some cases setting fires, smashing windows and vandalizing anything they can.
Night after night, the protests have continued, organized by radical left-wing organizations such as MoveOn.org and ANSWER, in rejection of the results of a democratic election.
And some of the rhetoric of the protests has been bigoted, and violent. One sign at a Los Angeles protest Saturday read: “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
Some of the protests have resulted in violent attacks on police, and dozens of arrests.
And there have been real hate crimes against Trump supporters, including a videotaped beating of a white man who was targeted because he was accused of voting for Trump.
The wave of anti-Trump crimes — “hate crimes” and otherwise — committed by anti-Trump thugs overwhelms, by several orders of magnitude, whatever crimes are being attributed to Trump supporters.
The narrative about a wave of “hate crimes” inspired by Trump is a deliberate fabrication, meant to tarnish the President-elect. It is a continuation of false accusations, during the campaign, that Trump represented the second coming of Hitler.
It is an attempt to organize a new opposition, based on lies, and the deliberate sowing of mistrust at a time when Americans have been called — by both presidential candidates — to come together.
