What Does Jussie Smollett, Bubba Wallace, and Our Fake Hate Crime Epidemic Tell Us About America?
Discover more from Culturcidal by John Hawkins
What Does Jussie Smollett, Bubba Wallace, and Our Fake Hate Crime Epidemic Tell Us About America?
Is there even a 50/50 chance a “hate crime” you hear about is real?
I will say this much about Jussie Smollett and his false claim that white guys wearing MAGA hats assaulted him out of the blue at 2 AM in Chicago, beat him, put a noose around his neck, and poured bleach on him… it inspired some really good comedy:
Now that Smollett has been found guilty of faking a hate crime, it begs an obvious question. Why did a successful actor, who is reportedly a millionaire and was making somewhere between $65,000 and $125,000 per episode on a successful TV series fake a hate crime? In a very real sense, Smollett was living a lot of people’s dream. So, what did pretending he was attacked by racists add to it? Here are some hints:
Being the supposed victim of a hate crime is enough to get more national attention than being a CELEBRITY. It’s enough to get the future President and Vice-President to speak your name. It’s also enough to spur all sorts of false claims about Republicans:
Let’s say that improbably, EVERYTHING Smollett had said was true and that he was assaulted by two MAGA hat-wearing, noose, and bleach-carrying racists looking for a celebrity victim in Chicago at 2 AM in the morning. Would it have really been an example of “surging hostility toward minorities” in America or would it have been an isolated incident? Are there people on the Right encouraging hate crimes or are they actually encouraging black Americans to “walk away” from the Democrat Party and join them in the GOP?
The Bubba Wallace case was arguably even more ridiculous than Smollett’s “this is MAGA country” hoax, even though Wallace didn’t fake it. Not exactly anyway. Basically, at some point, someone retied a door pull on a garage, Wallace and his team were eventually switched into that garage, and they decided the door pull looked like a tiny noose. In a sane country, this would have produced laughter and eye rolls, but as everyone knows, we don’t live in a sane country. Instead, the FBI WAS CALLED IN to investigate a door pull and NASCAR made a big show of letting the world know they supported Wallace. Wallace played the victim card to the maximum by milking every drop of publicity he could get out of the incident while insisting that it really was a noose, even as he simultaneously tried to claim the whole ridiculous affair wasn’t his fault because he wasn’t the one who originally reported it.
Again, here we have a millionaire who was on TV regularly, and yet he got more publicity out of making a big deal over a door pull than he was getting out of his NASCAR career. Doesn’t it seem strange that the best thing that ever happened to Bubba Wallace’s career was publicly pretending to be the victim of a hate crime over a DOOR PULL on a garage?
Is it any wonder that hate crimes hoaxes have become so common? Speaking of which, if you were wondering exactly how common they are, the answer is “very.”
Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher.
So, just to be clear, hate crime hoaxes ARE NOT RARE. There are literally several hundred confirmed hate crime hoaxes. On top of all this, see if you can spot the discrepancy between the numbers you are about to see:
The number of hate crimes reported in 2020 was the highest recorded in two decades, according to updated FBI data released Monday.
...In 2020, updated data shows that 8,052 crimes motivated by one kind of bias, deemed single-bias incidents, took place and involved 11,126 victims. In 2019, the FBI recorded 7,103 single-bias incidents involving 8,552 victims in total.
So, supposedly 8,052 “hate crimes” occurred in 2020 alone. Sounds scary! Well, it does if you don’t consider the ramifications of this:
Federal prosecutors concluded investigations into a total of 1,878 suspects in potential hate crimes during fiscal years 2005 to 2019, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
However, only 17% of the suspects were prosecuted by U.S. attorneys while 1% had their cases disposed of by U.S. magistrate judges.
The report cited insufficient evidence as the most common reason why hate crimes were declined for prosecution.
In other words, the number of “reported” hate crimes that the mainstream media breathlessly informs us about isn’t very relevant because an unknown, but certainly extremely large percentage of them are fake. How can you conclude anything else when there are more confirmed hoaxes (400+) than cases where the suspects were prosecuted (roughly 338) over a 15-year period? Then, when you start to consider that only 1 out of roughly every 55-to-60 cases even has enough evidence behind it to get to the investigation stage, it’s a clear indication that the vast majority of hate crimes that are reported aren’t real.
So, just to reiterate, are there real hate crimes? ABSOLUTELY. YES. Are most hate crimes that are reported real? ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT. Is it more likely that any alleged hate crime you hear about is more fake than real? ALMOST CERTAINLY, YES.
Again though, we come back to that question of “why.” Why do we have an epidemic of fake hate crimes? There are three big answers to that question.
The first is that we are now a victim-oriented culture and an awful lot of Americans LOVE to claim that they’ve been victimized. They love the attention, the pity, and yes, sometimes even the money that they get after faking a hate crime.
Now also consider that Americans hysterically overreact to “hate crimes.” Certainly, some of them, like the assaults we’ve seen on Asians in big cities like New York City, are very serious.
However, an awful lot of alleged “hate crimes” could fairly be called trivial. Although this particular example isn’t from a fake hate crime, it has always stuck with me and sets the tone for how much we tend to freak out over anything that could conceivably be tied to race:
Ole Miss Greek Life leaders cut their three-day leadership retreat to nearby Camp Hopewell short after black students discovered a banana peel dangling in a tree outside of one of the camp's cabins.
…She added that she and her friends were "all just sort of paranoid for a second" after noticing the banana peel, calling its appearance "so strange and surreal."
Alexa Lee Arndt, Interim Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life at Ole Miss, noted that an open forum was held after news of the banana peel had spread throughout the camp.
..."As the staff member responsible for the wellbeing of our community, I felt it was imperative to provide space immediately to students affected by this incident to allow them an opportunity to voice their pain and concern," Arndt told the newspaper.
After the open forum, Greek Life leaders decided to cancel the remainder of the weekend.
In a letter obtained by The Daily Mississippian, Arndt was quoted as saying that "members of our community were hurt, frightened, and upset by what occurred."
...Ole Miss senior Ryan Swanson, who was also in attendance at the retreat, said he discarded the banana peel in the tree because he could not find a trash receptacle.
Swanson told the newspaper that he "sincerely" apologizes "for the events that took place this past weekend."
If you’re white and on Twitter, you will semi-regularly see people talking about how much they hate people like you because of your skin color. Do you turn into a blubbering mess and stop your entire life? Even if it had been a racist who was trying to show everyone that he didn’t like black people by throwing a banana peel in a tree, so what? If you’re white, black, male, female, straight, gay, Republican, or Democrat, there are people that exist who hate you because of it. Again, so what? People sometimes hate you for unfair reasons or for no reason at all. Welcome to Life 101.
When we create this hurricane every time something arguably or even genuinely racist happens, we’re making it a more attractive act to fake. Do you want to get everyone talking? Do you want to create a huge buzz? Fake a hate crime and it’ll happen.
Last, but not least, we can’t forget that all of this is intimately tied to the fact that Democrats obsessively try to portray America in general and Republicans in particular as horrible, irredeemable racists. The problem for them is that by any reasonable, objective standard, this clearly isn’t true. So, when there is an enormous demand for racism and the supply is lacking, what happens? Well, then, people have to CREATE IT from whole cloth. One of the ways that’s done is through fake hate crimes. It makes sense, right? After all, for a lot of politically obsessed people, the only thing better than getting an “Oh, you poor victim!” tongue bath is sticking it to the “other side” at the same time.
At the end of the day, fake hate crimes are a SYMPTOM while the unhealthy way we approach race and reward victimhood in America is the disease. Until we address the underlying causes of these problems, the Jussie Smolletts of the world will continue to be the rule, not the exception.
What Does Jussie Smollett, Bubba Wallace, and Our Fake Hate Crime Epidemic Tell Us About America?
What does the fable of the little boy who cried wolf have in common with fake hate crimes? Eventually, no one believes the accusations. And what is with this bizarre need that some people have for notoriety, regardless of the risk of betraying themselves as narcissistic buffoons when their lies are revealed? I suppose the blame can be laid on the ubiquity of social media, but in the end people who need attention so badly they will be-clown themselves, or worse, to get it indicates pathological neuroticism and a culture empty of self-worth. I wish the evil genie of social media could somehow be forced back into its bottle and launched into a fiery volcano. Maybe then we could hope for some degree of reasonable normalcy to return.