Hate-crime hoaxes - why people commit them, and why left-wing journalists believe them

The New York Times is currently featuring a weekly round-up of "hate crimes", no doubt in an attempt to underline the message that Trump's victory has unleashed a wave of race hate attacks by barely-human white deplorables whose savagery had only previously been kept under control by Saint Barack of the Links. No doubt there have been many instances of unpleasant, hurtful, racist behaviour - but given that America has an ethnically diverse population of just under a third of a billion people, that blacks commit a disproportionately large amount of crimes against white people, and that there are an estimated 15 million illegal immigrants in the US, that's hardly surprising. Whether these incidents have anything whatsoever to do with Trump supporters (or with the fact that the current president has spent eight years lecturing American whites on how racist they are) - who can say? What's certain is that many of the race hate incidents gleefully reported by the left-liberal media have turned out to be fakes.

Here are a few examples of hoax race-hate incidents:

A Muslim teen in New York City who claimed to have been harassed on the subway by men chanting "Donald Trump" and told her to get out of the country has been arrested and charged with filing a false police report. Yasmin Seweid, a student at Baruch College, first reported the harassment on Facebook on December 2, and chided the bystanders who did not come to her aid. Seweid was charged with filing a false report on Wednesday.  (Townhall.com, 14th December)

And this one from Breitbart, 18th December:

A Nassau Community College student was arrested after allegedly drawing over 100 swastikas on campus since President-Elect Donald Trump’s election, along with anti-Semitic phrases and symbols. Jasskirat Saini, 20 years-old, was arrested and charged by Nassau Police for the threatening graffiti, telling police his motivation was because he felt mistreated by the Jewish community in his area.

And this one from Breitbart, 20th December:

Two college students who are President-Elect Donald Trump supporters have been cleared of accusations that they harassed other students after celebrating Trump’s victory with police finding no evidence to support the hate crime claims.

Following Trump’s stunning victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, Babson College students Parker Rand-Ricciardi and Edward Tomasso drove through Wellesley College in celebration.

Other students claimed Ricciardi and Tomasso drove through the campus harassing on-lookers, spitting, and yelling slurs at anti-Trump students."

If you want more evidence of lefties and ethnics making up lies about mean old Whitey, just visit the excellent Hate Crime Hoaxes website.

Britain suffered a similar spate of stories featuring white racist Brexiteers being mean to immigrants, some of which may have been true, but most of which probably weren't.

So why do white leftists and people of colour make up this crap, and why, more importantly, does the left-liberal media automatically believe it? (I say "more importantly" because, if the broadcasters, newspapers and left-wing politicians didn't swallow these lies, the perpetrators probably wouldn't bother making stuff up.) Why they make it up is simple enough to explain - the massed ranks of the left-wing establishment instantly accord the liars sympathy and respect, and the liars get to look noble and aggrieved in newspaper photos and TV news video clips. Perhaps the pseudo-victims have actually suffered racial abuse in the past and want to get their own backs. Or maybe it's just that nobody pays them any attention and they want to be made a fuss of for a change. Some will probably be grievance-mongering political activists who wish to further their cause, or they've spent too long on left-liberal websites or watching MSNBC and, encouraged by the utter outrage of liberal compassion-mongers over the Trump result, want to appear on the media being similarly outraged, because it looks kinda fun. There could, I suppose, be a question of financial reward - say from the media or social services.

As to why left-liberal editorial types swallow this nonsense, that's more interesting. Essentially, it boils down to what the great Thomas Sowell wrote: "The fundamental problem of the political left is that the real world does not fit their preconceptions." And how. If the real world did fit their conceptions, oil-rich Venezuela would be a happy, prosperous democracy, the EU would be succeeding brilliantly, Oxford and Cambridge would be packed with black dons, Arabs wouldn't have so far bagged a grand total of nine Nobel prizes, compared to the 182 awarded to Jews - and terrorists wouldn't be slaughtering the indigenous people of Germany, the country which has (foolishly) opened its doors (and taken them off their hinges and burned them) to anyone who feels like being rehoused and picking up a free welfare check.

The result of the perpetual disconnect between the world and their world-view is that leftists are willing to believe anything - anything at all - which fuels their utopian dreams.  Television news, in particular, tends to frame stories to bolster an alternative narrative (alternative to reality, that is). That's why broadcasters have been so utterly at sea ever since the Brexit vote - they keep trying to push the "Economy collapses as Britain isolated by strong, united Europe and Brexit voters feel buyer's remorse" story, but Europe appears far from united, the Italian banks are about to go tits up, several EU countries are facing popular revolts, Brexit voters aren't showing the slightest sign of regret (they just want the government to get on with it), and the British economy is doing rather nicely, thank you. Yet TV news has responded to reality with all the nimbleness of a supertanker changing course: it's even occasionally been reduced to pulling the tired old "increase in post-Brexit anti-immigrant hate crimes" chestnut out of the fire and waving it excitedly in our faces, shouting "Look at the tsunami of terror you've unleashed, you Brexiteer bastards! Well, we hope you're jolly proud of yourselves!"

As for the Trump victory - how else could explain the refusal of voters to do as they were damn well told and put the vigorous, charismatic, eloquent, attractive and utterly honest Hillary Clinton in the White House? Well, of course, it must be America's very own brand of original sin - racism! But there aren't many actual real-life examples to support this alternative narrative so... what's that? a bunch of redneck Southerners shouted pro-Trump slogans at a woman in a hijab?... an immigrant woke up to find a swastika painted on their garage door?... a Mexican illegal's car was set on fire?... a white man gave a black woman in a supermarket queue a funny look - while wearing a Trump cap! The monster! Next thing you know, the main headline is "Post-Trump America in the grip of racist terror - we speak to a swarthy guy who made up some bullshit he knew we couldn't resist."

You may say I'm a dreamer (I'm not the only one), but wouldn't it just be simpler if left-wing journalists stopped looking for stories to fit their false, alternative narratives - and simply reported what was actually happening out there? What was that? The Slovenian transport minister has said Britain will be made to rue to day it voted Brexit?... some Hollywood liberal claims he has a tape recording of Donald Trump plotting to murder the Queen?... you've found some Germans who are willing to adopt the burqa to make immigrants feel more welcome ? Scrap the running order - we've got some real news to report!