Since Election Day 2016, corporate media and civil liberties watchdogs have flooded the airwaves with horrific accounts of minority Americans terrorized by bigoted, white Trump supporters: Muslim girls with hijabs torn from their heads, playgrounds scrawled with neo-Nazi graffiti, Jewish community centers evacuated by bomb threats and black churches burnt to rubble.
And one after another, these shocking crimes turn out to be big, steaming hoaxes, reported to weary police and a salivating press by attention-seeking, campus agitators, spiteful liberals, and random malcontents using Donald Trump and “white America” as convenient scapegoats.
As they do whenever a Republican is on the ballot, the establishment Left and their media handlers spent a full eighteen months trying to link Donald Trump and his supporters with racial violence.
A week before Election Day, a 110-year-old, African American church in Greenville, Mississippi was set ablaze. 80% of the structure was destroyed and “Vote Trump” was painted on the smoldering ruin.
Cleve Wootson of the Washington Post told readers that the fire was “sparked by the incendiary rhetoric of GOP nominee Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.”
The arsonist turned out to be 45-year-old Andrew McClinton, a black member of the church.
In a jaw-dropping statement, Mississippi State Fire Marshal Mike Chaney blandly told reporters, “We do not believe it was politically motivated.”
When voters handed Donald Trump an Electoral College landslide on November 8, the media went code red and launched the first phase in a multilateral response.
The New York Times fired the opening shot the following morning with “Donald Trump Win Has Blacks, Hispanics and Muslims Bracing for a Long 4 Years”, giving hysterical activists a handy fact sheet for the white supremacist hate wave it was looking for.
On cue – a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana reported that she had been attacked by “white men wearing Trump hats” while walking to campus.
She described being knocked to the ground, her hijab torn from her head and her wallet stolen while the white men yelled racial slurs. A local news affiliate covered the incident and, by the following morning, it was a national story.
At San Diego State University, another Muslim student reported being confronted in a parking garage by “white men who made comments about President-elect Trump and the Muslim community.” They tore her hijab from her head, grabbed her purse and car keys and fled the scene. When she returned with police, her car was gone.
Within hours, reports trickled in from San Jose and Michigan State. By the next day, identical incidents were flooding in from campuses across the country.
The terror sweeping California was so severe that State Attorney General Kamala Harris issued an urgent bulletin to law enforcement outlining state hate crime protocols and advising them to mobilize additional resources for the deluge to come.
By Friday, the New York Times fired off its follow-up editorial: “Campuses Confront Hostile Acts Against Minorities After Donald Trump’s Election,” exquisitely showcasing each student’s nightmare experience and warning of more on the way.
Melanie Eversley of USA TODAY cheerfully wrote that the “dramatic rise in the number of hate harassment and hate incidents happening across the country in the wake of Tuesday’s general election is not in anyone’s imagination.”
And one by one, each incident turned out to be a big, fat, whopper, hatched by the lying students and gobbled up by a vulturous press.
After fruitless hours of local and Federal agents scouring surveillance video and interviewing witnesses, the claims unraveled. The “victims” admitted they had made up the incidents, wildly exaggerated details or simply attached “Trump supporter” to entirely unrelated crimes.
The kids at Michigan State and San Jose were charged with filing false police reports and the student in San Diego turned out to be the victim of a black and a Mexican carjacking duo.
Scrambling to salvage the narrative, Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American Islamic Relations, told USA TODAY that “Donald Trump had mainstreamed Islamophobia” and his win “is just taking it off the charts.”
Rules of political correctness prevented anyone from responding to Hooper and pointing out that we were witnessing an “off-the-charts” rash of Muslim girls filing false police reports.
Not only did the press bury the disappointing outcomes, they doubled-down, providing saturation coverage to each new, outlandish claim that came through the door:
In Orlando, Florida, a young, black woman had a brick thrown through her car window, the back seat set on fire and a note reading “KKK Trump” was left behind. As firefighters doused the blaze, the woman’s disheveled boyfriend materialized, claiming he had been abducted by white men who committed the crime. The story made local news then was blasted across the America.
After basic police work came up cold, he admitted he had had torched the car himself and staged his abduction to get sympathy from his girlfriend after a dispute over back child support payments. The follow-up was reported in a handful of conservative news sites.
At Williams College in Massachusetts, graffiti reading “AMKKK Kill” turned up in a stairwell, putting the campus on lockdown. An FBI investigation was launched and Massachusetts State Attorney General Maura Healy set up an emergency hotline in anticipation of more hate crimes to come.
When the investigation hit a dead-end, two students came forward explaining they had painted the graffiti to “raise awareness of the effects of the presidential election” and activate fellow liberals to “take a stand against racism in American society.”
In New York City, menacing swastikas with “Go Trump!” were found spray-painted on phone booths, public parks and on the walls of Long Island College.
City Councilman Brand Lander posted photos of the graffiti on Twitter with the comment, “Yet more hatred & anti-Semitism from Trump supporters!”
After citywide investigations, the NYPD concluded the phone booth and playground graffiti were hoaxes and, a few days later, 20-year-old Jasskirat Saini, a Muslim student, was charged for painting the swastikas at Long Island College.
At Chicago’s North Park University, an openly bi-sexual student handed in threatening emails and a sign she found taped to her door, “left by Trump supporters,” reading “Back to Hell #Trump.” Chicago’s NBC 5 ran with the story and, within a day, it made national headlines.
After a police investigation turned up nothing, the student admitted she wrote the emails and hung the sign herself.
In Santa Monica, a gay, Canadian tourist posted horrific photos on Facebook from a local Emergency Room following an attack “by Trump supporters.” The incident was reported by the Associated Press and circulated widely on social media.
After pleas to the public for information on the attack, Santa Monica PD determined no “gay Canadian” had been treated at any local ER. The poster’s Facebook account had been deleted.
And again, in New York City, a Muslim girl went missing. Several days later, she reappeared with a harrowing tale of being accosted on the subway by three men “in Trump hats”, who yelled racial epithets as they snatched her hijab off her head.
It turned out she’d spent two days with a boy without permission and had cooked up the hate crime as her alibi.
Outraged when the girl was charged with filing a false police report, her sister insisted the girl was forced to lie “because America is filled with so much hate.”
Doing what she could to help, Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch released a statement saying that the FBI had concluded a study showing a nationwide increase in hate crimes, calling the 6% spike “deeply sobering.”
The ecstatic press ran with Lynch’s “hate crime spike” report, adding it to their hair-on-fire reporting.
What most articles ignored was that Lynch was referring to data collected between January and December – 2015.
The FBI compared the 2015 numbers with approximately 6,000 incidents reported in 2014, the lowest year in a two-decade, steady decline.
They also forgot to mention that 2015 was the watershed year that Black Lives Matter protests had swept Midwest, inner cities and college campuses, leading to faculty ousters and universities like the University of Missouri instructing students to report “hurtful speech” to local police as hate crime incidents.
Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told USA TODAY that “the white supremacists out there are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory and many are feeling their oats.”
In a scandalous report, the Law Center detailed “a national outbreak of hate, as white supremacists celebrate Donald Trump’s victory.”
The SPLC report stated that, “many harassers invoked Trump’s name during assaults, making it clear that the outbreak of hate stemmed in large part from his electoral success.”
Assuring readers they had carefully culled out any hoaxes, the report went on to include the Greensville church burning hoax, all the Muslim student hoaxes, the North Point bi-sexual student hoax, the New York City swastikas hoaxes, and dozens of more proven fakes.
The balance of “almost 900 post-election hate crimes” was made up entirely of reader-submitted anecdotes:
“In New York, a man drove by a Jewish woman waiting for a cab and yelled ‘nice nose!’ before adding, ‘Make America great again!’”
“On a sidewalk in San Antonio, Texas, a young man asked a girl waiting for the bus, ‘You’re Asian, right? When they see your eyes, you are going to be deported.’”
“In Dallas, an older white man walked by a Hispanic man and, unprovoked, yelled, ‘Go back to Mexico!’ An onlooker noted that most people looked surprised, but no one said anything.”
Despite the anecdotes offering no corroboration and sounding suspiciously like they were written by interns, the Law Center’s report was used as the definitive source by:
Newsweek – “Since Trump Election, U.S. Has Seen Nearly 900 Hate Incidents: Report”
The Washington Post – “Civil Rights Group Documents Nearly 900 Hate Incidents After Presidential Election”
NBC – “Hundreds of Hate Crimes Reported Since Election: SPLC”
CBS – “Hate, Harassment Incidents Spike since Trump election”
Slate Magazine – “Hate in America: A List of Racism, Bigotry, and Abuse since the Election.”
Salon.com – “Trump’s Election Has Created ‘Safe Spaces’ For Racists”
CNN – “’Make America White Again’: Hate speech and crimes post-election”
… and many, many others.
In fact, one of the only documented reports of violence committed by Trump supporters had occurred a year before Election Day when a black man was attacked at a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama.
Turns out, the man was swinging wildly and screaming “Black Lives Matter” and “F— Donald Trump!” His “attackers” were bystanders who tackled him to the ground and held him there until security removed him from the venue.
Other incidents, described in the news site “The Intercept,” detailed peaceful Black Lives Matters protesters harassed, intimidated and thrown out of Trump’s campaign events.
No wait – those accounts were written by reporter Juan Thompson, a Black Lives Matter activist who was fired for fabricating articles with quotes from fictitious attendees, even creating fake email accounts to send in the non-existent claims.
This was the same Juan Thompson arrested for calling in hoax bomb threats to Jewish community centers around the country, which the Anti-Defamation League also blamed on “Trump supporters.”
The other Jewish center bomb threats, over 140 since January 2017, were traced to a 19-year-old Israeli punk placing calls from his bedroom in Jerusalem.
We can’t stop the narcissists, the delinquent and the lonely from manufacturing hoaxes for instant attention.
We can’t stop ginned up social justice warriors who, like good Germans, are willing to stage a crime and turn in a fellow citizen to advance the #Resistance.
We can call out hair-trigger journalists who unleash havoc on society, using the First Amendment as a fig leaf while coyly claiming they’re working for the public good.
We can also expose publishers and “civil rights” outfits who foist hate crime hysteria onto the public before police investigations have begun, then cook the numbers and bury the outcomes once those crimes are revealed as frauds.
Perhaps we should require reporters, journalists, newspapers and networks to obtain a Permit to Publish: pay hefty application fees with 7-day wait periods, submit to invasive background checks, and face automatic denial if they’ve ever sought substance abuse or psychiatric treatment.
I guarantee America’s “culture of white supremacist hate” would virtually disappear.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BY PAX HART