Books: "Hate Crime Hoax" By Dr. Wilfred Reilly

Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War
By Dr. Wilfred Reilly
Regnery Publishing; hardcover, $28.99; available Tuesday, February 26

Last week, the country was dealing with the news that actor Jussie Smollet's claim of being attacked in Chicago by two guys wearing "Make America Great Again" hats was revealed to be a hoax, and he was charged with a felony.


African American Professor Dr. Wilfred Reilly, in his new book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, studies hundreds of purported hate crimes, and what he found is that most of these are actually hoaxes made up entirely by their "victims." This goes against the narrative from the mainstream media and social justice warriors that there has been a frightening spike of hate crimes since the 2016 election of President Donald Trump.

Dr. Wilfred Reilly.

Reilly says some of these hoaxes are motivated by a simple desire for insurance money, such as a Middle Eastern man torching his convenience store in Washington State in 2004. However, many of them arise from the left's need to believe that their opponents are racist.

"An entirely new category of hate hoaxes has sprung up since the 2016 election of the tough-talking forty-fifth president," writes Reilly. "This is not really surprising. Probably the primary mainstream media talking point regarding President Trump is that he is a 'racist' or a 'white supremacist,' and a close second is that his campaign unleashed a 'wave of hate.'
"According to Professor Brian Levin at Cal-State's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, there was a five percent increase in hate crimes between 2015 and the end of 2016. However, many of the cases included in that 2016 number were probably fakes, which can take some time to be exposed...
"The constant presentation of Trump as a bigot has indisputably triggered a wave of hate crime hoaxes of many kinds, beginning several months before the Trump election. Many of the most famous hate incidents associated with Trump, such as the hijab-ripping attack on Yasmin Seweid, were fakes.
"There is little ambiguity in the media's coverage of Trump. On January 11, 2018, CNN host Don Lemon opened a nightly news broadcast with the following: 'This is CNN Tonight. I'm Don Lemon. The president of the United States is racist.' We have already seen a plethora of stories that come up on a quick search for 'Donald Trump white supremacist,' such as 'How White Nationalists Learned to Love Donald Trump.' and countless others.
"Of course, there is an absolute defense to libel. The prevalence of headlines calling Trump the second coming of George Wallace raises the question: Is Trump a racist? The answer seems to be 'probably not,' in any real sense of the word...
"There seems to be little if any evidence that Trump is an actual racist - that is, a person who believes some races are generally inferior. Prior to his election, Trump appeared on G-Unit Radio with 50 Cent, maintained friendships with Oprah and Russell Simmons, and regularly hosted famously diverse business and modeling talent shows. While his administration is a bit less diverse than Obama's, one of his most respected cabinet secretaries is the African-American Ben Carson, his UN ambassador is the Indian-American Nikki Haley, his FCC czar is Ajit Pai, and so on down the line. I can find almost literally no evidence of Trump being called a bigot in mainstream print before he chose to run for president against the hot-sauce toting Hillary Clinton...
"Regardless of whether he and his supporters are actual bigots, it cannot be denied that Trump's name has been associated with brutal hate crimes since before his November 2016 election date. It is hard to forget Yasmin Seweid, the young Muslim woman who claimed that a group of boorish white males tore at her hijab on a New York public train. Or the torching of Mississippi's historic Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church, which was burned nearly to the ground and left with the words "Vote Trump" defacing one ruined wall. Or the preppy Black Bowling Green State coed who was attacked by white fraternity types - who threw stones at her like she was a damn dog. Or the multiple Philly storekeepers who had phrases such as 'Sieg Heil' spray-painted on the windows of their lovely little shops the very night Trump was elected. how could anyone sympathize with the victims of these heinous crimes, and question the character of the new president and his supporters? The easy answer: they were all complete fakes."

According to Reilly, there are a few reasons the left is driven to do this. First, they need money and support to keep progressive social organizations, including Black Lives Matter, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, afloat. Without racism, these organizations would theoretically have no purpose. Second, the left must incite a fake race war to win elections and bolster the "Continuing Oppression" Narrative that they have latched on to for so long.

Reilly writes of why the media keeps engaging in false reporting of these hoaxes, "One of the oddest things about the mainsteam American media's coverage of fake hate crimes is just how long this pattern - massive coverage of an obviously questionable story followed by a well-hidden retraction if and when the story is exposed as a hoax - has been going on. In 1986, a young and mentally ill Black woman's claim that a group of white men had raped her, smeared her with dog feces, and written racial slurs on her body was reported globally as the 'Tawana Brawley affair' and condemned as evidence of real racism. At one point, Brawley took on Al Sharpton as an advisor and accused police officers and a New York City district attorney of having participated in her abuse, before the entire nasty business was revealed to have been a complete hoax...
"The general problem of media coverage of fake or questionable hate crimes is (1) get wind of a sensationalist allegation of a hate attack; (2) dramatically report it, often on the front page or during prime time; (3) ignore growing evidence that the allegation is a hoax; (4) finally receive indisputable proof that the allegation is a hoax; and (5) run a retraction of the original front-page story on page twenty-six of the Leisure and Pet Cats section. This template accurately describes the coverage of Yasmin Seweid's false claim that Trump supporters attacked her for wearing a hijab - but also the reporting on the infamous rape accusations against the Duke lacrosse team in 2006 and the 1992 claims of Azalea Coolety that 'Burn N***er Burn' had been painted on her house along with a swastika. Though this has been going on for at least three decades, it has apparently never occurred to many reporters and media executives to be suspicious of wildly unlikely hate crime allegations. To the extent that a single beginning point for this phenomenon can be pinned down, it all started with Tawana Brawley."

Another factor in the hoaxes gaining credence is how Academia is misrepresenting Conservatives. Reilly writes, "The liberal, if not radical-Left, composition of most college faculties is well-documented. Pointing this out should be no more controversial than saying 'Most military men are conservatives.' The most recent major study of this topic, conducted by Brooklyn College's Tony Quain and George Mason University's Daniel Klein for the September 2016 edition of Econ Journal Watch, concludes that Democrats outnumber Republicans on college faculties by roughly a dozen to one. Out of 7,243 professors at 40 highly representative universities interviewed or documented by the scholarly pair, 3,623 were Democrats, while only 314 preferred the pachyderm opinion on the ballot...
"The mere fact that professors almost invariably lean left would not, by itself, necessarily be cause for great concern. As noted above, the U.S. Army leans right, and by all account runs ethically and well. Simply having a certain political perspective does not disqualify anyone from doing a serious job. But there is considerable evidence that the 'politically correct' ideological preferences of many academics do not remain a private affair. Instead, the faculty imposes those views on their students. Speech codes are perhaps the best example.
"The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization that opposes campus speech codes, notes that 'more than 400 of the largest and most prestigious American universities' have speech-restriction codes in place. The organization defines a 'speech code' as 'any university...policy that prohibits expression that would be protected by the First Amendment in society at large,' and points out that a majority of U.S. colleges probably use the campus legal system to stringently restrict speech."

America is a less racist society than it was in the past, and there is data to prove it. With Hate Crime Hoax, Reilly has written a pro-American and profoundly pro-Black work of social science that shows, ironically and disturbingly, how these hoaxes are themselves increasing racial tensions. This is a must-read for people who hate seeing this country being divided, especially when it is being done by fake news and fake crimes.