How many hateful acts are actually committed by “rightists”? So few, apparently, that leftists have repeatedly seen fit to fake them.
Yet another example comes to us from Chicago’s North Park University in Illinois, where an openly bisexual college student was found to have fabricated a story about having received anti-homosexual, pro-Trump notes. As NBC 5 had reported November 15, before the deception was revealed:
Taylor Volk says she is openly bisexual — and last week the North Park University senior from DeKalb was singled out by a hateful note she found taped to her door Friday morning. The note reads “Back to hell,” and “#Trump” along with homophobic slurs. Volk also said she’s received two anonymous emails saying similar things — so she went public with it on her Facebook page.
“This is a countrywide epidemic all of a sudden,” Volk said.
She says she’s confident North Park is investigating, although the school would not comment directly on the matter to NBC 5. The university’s marketing director, Chris Childers, said in a phone interview “any incident that is reported to North Park is taken extremely seriously.”
The NBC 5 piece closes with “As for who’s behind the nasty notes?” “‘I just want them to stop,’ Volk said.” Of course, this was assured.
Because the “them” was Volk herself.
As the Washington Times wrote Nov. 25, “The university investigated the alleged harassment and determined this week that Ms. Volk had fabricated the story. ‘Sadly, we discovered that the incident and related messages were fabricated; the individual responsible for the incident is not continuing as a student at North Park,’ the Christian university’s President David Parkyn said in a statement. ‘We are confident there is no further threat of repeated intolerance to any member of our campus community stemming from this recent incident.’”
One may wonder what Parkyn meant by “sadly.” Does he believe Volk’s hoax is more destructive to the community than the act would have been had it not been a hoax? Or is he just disappointed that instead of the onus being on an allegedly “conservative” Donald Trump supporter, it now is on one of the president-elect’s leftist opponents? Given the politically correct nature of Parkyn’s statements, it does seem that one of these conclusions is more likely than the other.
As for Volk, she was smart enough not to file a false police report, which could have subjected her to criminal prosecution.
Unfortunately, the media aren’t wise enough — and don’t have enough integrity — to realize that an “epidemic” (in Volk’s loose sense of the word) is in question here: an epidemic of “hate” incident hoaxes. And while the Southern Poverty Law Center recently sought to give these deceptions legitimacy with a report entitled “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Presidential Election on Our Nation’s Schools,” these hoaxes greatly pre-date the president-elect’s November 8 victory.
Just consider these post-election examples provided by the Stream:
• Asian-origin University of Minnesota student Kathy Mirah Tu claimed that, while crossing a bridge, she was harassed by a white man who told her to “go back to Asia” and grabbed her wrist. Yet area police departments contradict her story, she wouldn’t respond to a local paper’s request for comment, and now she has apparently deleted the Facebook page at which she posted her allegation.
• An 18-year-old Muslim woman “claimed she was attacked and robbed by two white men near the University of Louisiana Lafayette campus. The men yelled racial slurs and stole both her wallet and her hijab in the alleged attack. She also told police one of them was wearing a Trump hat,” wrote the Stream. “The woman later admitted to the Lafayette Police Department she fabricated the story, and the incident is no longer under investigation. She will now be charged with filing a false report.”
• A black woman named Ashley Boyer alleged that she was harassed by a group of White Male Trump Supporters™ at a gas station in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The Stream reports that in a viral Facebook post, Boyer claims the political zealots “‘proceeded to talk about the election and how they’re glad they won’t have to deal with n*****s much longer,’ she wrote, adding that one approached her and said: ‘How scared are u, u black b****??? I should kill you right now. You’re a waste of air.’ Another pulled out a weapon and said: “‘You’re lucky there’s witnesses or else I’d shoot you right here.’” Moreover, “Boyer later deleted the post and replaced it with another claiming the men were caught and charges were filed,” the Stream continued. However, none of these “witnesses” have been produced, and local police say there were no reports at all about the incident and that no charges have been filed.
In fairness, there’s no proof that every aspect of the above stories is false. But the pattern is unmistakable. As Forbes writes, “After reading through myriad stories since Election Day, what’s clear is that the widely reported episodes of violence and intimidation are usually vague, involve roaming gangs of indistinguishable white males, and produce no witnesses. Often the police aren’t even called, but when they are, the stories tend to fall apart.”
For example, a Hispanic high-school girl claimed that white girls from St. Francis Prep in Queens, N.Y.C. harassed her aboard a school bus, saying, “Aren’t you supposed to be sitting in the back of the bus now? Like Trump is president!” The story received much attention, too. Yet once an investigation was launched by school officials, the supposedly aggrieved girl suddenly didn’t “want to discuss the matter any further.”
In reality, Forbes points out, “it’s much easier to find examples of violence against students who have openly backed Trump” — as video evidence attests. Just consider the white California high-school student attacked for supporting Trump:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgHt0s2UQHQ
Then there’s the homeless black woman who was attacked for defending Trump (warning: foul language):
Then there were the Trump supporters harassed and beaten outside a California Trump rally earlier this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u038-WW0G1E
That there are many other videos of this nature raises a telling question: With video recording devices everywhere today, where’s the footage of these “violent” Trump supporters? Are they all vampires whose images cannot be captured by camera?
In contrast, leftist “hate” hoaxes are legion. Forbes reports on some more here, as I did here and here. And Breitbart informs that there have been more than 100 hate-crime hoaxes in the last 10 years.
Also interesting is that while the mainstream media (MM) have embarked on a crusade against “fake news,” they readily peddle it themselves, facilitated by a good dose of self-deception. As an example, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke recently pointed out that the MM happily promoted the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” lie in the Michael Brown shooting’s wake (note: alternative outlets such as The New American had the story right from the beginning).
Not surprisingly, though, while the MM will set the presses on the fast spin cycle when reporting on a story of politically incorrect “hate,” once it’s exposed as a hoax, they tend to quickly move on — sometimes to the next piece of fake news.
