Police have shown that yet another “noose” is a campus hate hoax, only this hoax wasn’t the work of an actual faker, but instead the fault of a dean who immediately hit the moral panic button and assumed the worst.
The “noose” this time appeared at the University of Michigan’s University Hospital on June 20. The dean of the state university’s medical school immediately declared it a hate crime. Police investigated.
The dean was wrong. The “noose” wasn’t a noose. It was a knot used to tie fishing line to a lure or hook.
Hospital Hysteria
MichiganLive.com opened its breathless report on the medical-school hate hoax in Ann Arbor this way:
“University of Michigan police are investigating a possible racially motivated threat against two Michigan Medicine employees who found a noose left in their work area Thursday, June 20,” the website reported.
Thus did the dean, Dr. Marschall Runge, spring into action: “Yesterday, in one of our hospitals, a noose — a symbol of hate and discrimination — was found at the work station of two of our employees,” he warned. “We have taken immediate action to have this investigated as both an act of discrimination and a criminal act of ethnic intimidation.”
Ethnic intimidation in Ann Arbor, Michigan? In 2019?
Intoned Runge, “this act of hate violates all of the values that we hold dear and will not be tolerated.”
But the good doctor diagnosed the disease before looking at the patient.
Yesterday, MichiganLive reported that the tenacious gumshoes of the university police squad got to the bottom of the “noose” that was, according to the top doc’s examination, not only an “act of hate” but also an “act of discrimination and a criminal act of ethnic intimidation.”
“A rope resembling a noose found inside University Hospital was not the result of a hate crime, but a practice knot used in fishing, University of Michigan police have found,” the website reported:
An investigation by UM’s Division of Public Safety and Security concluded the spool rope used for medical procedures was being used by a person on a break to practice tying a “Uni Knot,” which is a type of knot used for fishing. After the spool was returned to the storage area, the knot was still in place and discovered the following day by an employee.
The rope from which the “noose” was fashioned is used to keep patients in traction after surgery, a spokeswoman told the website, and “the loose end of the rope was tied in the knot while still connected to the spool.”
How’d the cops find out? “An employee came forward to clear the air after the incident was reported, [the spokeswoman] said, explaining why the rope had been tied the way it was.”
Thus, a hate crime did not occur, but “if relevant new information comes forward, the case will be reopened, UM police noted.”
Reopened?
Other Hoaxes
Nooses are a particularly potent prop in hate hoaxes.
Jussie Smollett, the black homosexual actor who staged a hate hoax to get a raise, claimed that two Trump supporters snarled racial and homophobic slurs at him, then doused him with bleach and placed a noose around his neck. Video of Smollett’s removing the noose surfaced in late June.
In February, columnist Michelle Malkin provided a list of noose hoaxes. One of the latest occurred in Jackson, Mississippi, the day before a runoff election for the U.S. Senate. Democrats were behind that one, Malkin reported.
In May 2017, someone left a noose outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, but the leftist mainstream media, Malkin reported, has done nothing about the story since.
A “noose” at the University of Michigan in 2017 turned out to be a “packaged leather shoelace,” and other “nooses” have turned up at Kansas State, Salisbury State, and Columbia universities and the University of Delaware.
Racist notes and graffiti are another means of whipping campus administrators into frothing moral panic.
As The New American reported in December, cops nabbed hate hoaxers at Drake University and Goucher College, while earlier that year, Lieutenant General Jay Silveria became a media hero when he told “racists” at the Air Force Academy to “get out” after “racist” messages were found outside the room of a black cadet.
One of the putative “victims” staged the hoax, yet Silveria still received an award for his virtue signalling from the leftist Anti-Defamation League.
Image: Vladimir Kokorin via iStock / Getty Images Plus
