2013 Hate Hoax Roundup

It’s been an interesting year. The progressive machine spent most of it barreling forward into absurd self-parody, reaching one of its many peaks in August, when it packed four new hate hoaxes into only one month.

First, a “vile bias incident” in which anti-Black text messages were sent to a Black candidate for high school student government at a mostly White New Jersey prep school turned out to have been perpetrated by the candidate himself, “ostensibly to garner attention, sympathy, and votes”.

Then Oberlin College, shortly after being horribly besieged by a girl wrapped in a blanket who was ‘mistaken’ for a Klan member, saw a Nazi flag raised in its science center by an Obama-supporting leftist who worked for an organization called “Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism”. The college canceled classes to “address racial incidents” anyway, and its administration covered up that it was a hoax.

Oprah joined in, charging a Swiss store with racism after an employee allegedly refused to show her a $38,000 handbag (must’ve been because she was Black, she said… those pesky Swiss racists!), then backpedaling after the media storm had quieted down, saying, “maybe she actually just didn’t want to reach for the bag because it was up too high … who knows? Either way, I had a great time in Switzerland”.

And an unruly group asked to leave a restaurant cried racism on Facebook, in a claim that, predictably, made its way into the media… before it turned out that, as an employee of that restaurant later said, “The group was being loud and obnoxious to both customers and staffers. They kept complaining about their long wait and were talking about how “whitey” was able to get seated, but they were not. The problem was that they had a large group and insisted on sitting next to each other. We only had one area that could accommodate their large group and the patrons in that area were not done.” A group of 25 can’t get a seat, and is asked to leave for “standing in the middle of the walkway, making it difficult for customers to leave … we asked them if they could move over, but they said they can stand wherever they want”? Must be racism!

Unfortunately, it didn’t end in August. There was also Donglegate, where the ‘developer evangelist’ Adria Richards got two men fired for making “dongle” jokes at a tech conference, and the two-minutes hate against Pax Dickinson for not being a leftist… and much more. Here’s what else happened:

In the town of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, the mother of a 13-year-old mixed-race boy who played on his school’s football team, the mascot of which is a knight, reported to the police that someone had spray-painted “Knights Don’t Need Niggers” onto their house. The school’s football season was canceled, the town held a vigil, Anderson Cooper and Piers Morgan called the family onto their shows and the latter railed against the “gutless little cowards” on the team… and then two cans of spray paint were found on their property, and the mother stopped cooperating with authorities and instead became the sole suspect. To which the Worcester Telegram & Gazette replied: “Reaction to news that the graffiti may have been a self-perpetrated hoax reveals much about our views on race in general. And some of them aren’t pretty.”

Meg Lanker-Simons, an award-winning liberal blogger (yes, really) and 28-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, submitted the following Facebook post unsigned to the page UW Crushes:

I want to hatefuck Meg Lanker Simons so hard. That chick runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its so hot and makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican bitch.

After the college rallied to her defense, after all the ‘rape culture awareness’ protests, it turned out that she had written it herself.

At another college, Vassar, hate messages written on students’ doors and reported to the college’s Bias Incident Response Team (again: yes, really) turned out to have been written by the only student member of that team.

Then there were the hate receipt hoaxes. First, Toni Jenkins, a waitress at a Red Lobster restaurant in Tennessee, posted online a picture of a receipt she had allegedly received, with “none nigger” written in the tip section. The case was picked up by the media and she got ten thousand dollars in donations—but two handwriting analysts said that Devin Barnes, the accused racist, didn’t write the second word:

The handwriting expert found no match between Barnes’ handwriting, seen on a note written by him below, and the writing of whoever wrote the offending term on the receipt. Barnes acknowledges being a lousy tipper. He said he wrote “none” on the tip line when he and his wife had to leave in a hurry and switched their order to take-out.

The handwriting expert also ruled out Barnes’ wife as the writer of the word.

Then, a second handwriting analyst, hired by the conservative news web site The Daily Caller, examined the receipt and concluded that Jenkins herself was the perpetrator of a hoax.

“I believe within a reasonable degree of certainty that the waitress actually wrote the word,” forensic handwriting expert Bob Baier told the Daily Caller, citing similarities in Jenkins’ handwriting and the word on the receipt.

Admittedly, handwriting analysis is not an exact science, so this isn’t conclusive—unlike the second case. After Toni Jenkins’ receipt made its rounds in the media, a lesbian waitress in New Jersey made a similar claim: she said she had gotten a receipt with no tip and a note that read, “I’m sorry but I cannot tip because I do not agree with your lifestyle and how you live your life.” She received thousands of dollars in donations, but the accused family came forward with a copy of the real receipt—where they tipped almost 20 percent! Then it turned out that, in the words of one of her friends, “every story she comes up with has been a lie”:

Morales has been caught in multiple lies, telling co-workers she shaved her head because she had brain cancer and later telling them it was her friend who had brain cancer, her colleagues and friends said.

They said she also told co-workers at a day care center where she once worked that Superstorm Sandy severely damaged her home in Stony Point, and sent a boat into her living room. Concerned co-workers dropped by her home and found only minor damage to the carpet by her front door and no sign of a boat, they said.

She also lied about her military service: she was a former Marine Corps reservist who had been dishonorably discharged without ever seeing combat, but she claimed she had served in Afghanistan and survived an explosion that killed everyone else in her platoon. The donations she received ended up getting refunded.

The most important 2013 hate hoax of all occurred many years ago, but was only made known as a hoax this year: the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay, HIV-positive man who was brutally murdered in 1998 by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, allegedly out of homophobia. Shepard’s murder resulted in the creation of the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the tagline of which is “Embracing Diversity” and the passing of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and was followed by a dramatic increase in the number of uses of the term “hate crime”. But new research says that McKinney, the primary killer, was himself not heterosexual, having frequented gay bars, prostituted himself to other men, and been once caught “buck naked and playing around” with two men in the back of a limousine. the killing was over drugs:

By the time Shepard died, the motive of homophobia was solidly entrenched in the media. Then the leader in the killing, Aaron McKinney, and his girlfriend both cited his gay panic as a motive, apparently in the belief that it would be seen as a mitigating factor.

Now both of them say that story was a lie. And McKinney told a detective the night of the crime that Shepard “said he could turn us on to some cocaine or something, some methamphetamines, one of those two, for sex,” according to the book. From prison, McKinney now says his “original plan” that night was to rob a meth dealer, but when that didn’t work out he decided to rob Shepard instead. Prosecutor Cal Rerucha told the author that the murder was “driven by drugs.”… [McKinney] and [his friend Ryan] Bopp said he’d been up for a week on a drug bender the night of Shepard’s murder.

So, that was 2013. Here’s hoping next year won’t have any of these hoaxes—but hoping in vain; they’ll still happen as long as people have an incentive for making them happen, and the progressive Cathedral provides them with plenty of incentives.