DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Inventing Victimhood — Universities too often serve as “hate-crime hoax” mills.
On November 9, 2016, Oberlin students Jonathan Aladin, Endia Lawrence, and Cecelia Whettstone fought with Allyn Gibson, the owner’s grandson, after he tried to apprehend Aladin for stealing alcohol. The students claimed that they had been racially profiled. Students, professors, and even some in the Oberlin administration launched a boycott of the bakery, including protests and pickets. The school cancelled its contracts with Gibson’s. But the allegations proved baseless: the students had in fact been caught stealing from the store, and they admitted as much when they pled guilty the following August.
Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students. The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University—about 90 miles west of Oberlin—said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story. That same day, Kathy Mirah Tu, a University of Minnesota student, claimed in a viral social-media post that she was detained by police after fighting a racist man who had attacked her. Campus and local police said that they had had no contact with her. And again that day, a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette made up a story about being attacked and robbed by Trump supporters, who supposedly ripped off her hijab. For weeks after Trump’s election, America was fed a series of outrageous stories of campus race hatred that fell apart upon examination.
As Rick Moran wrote in February, the Chicago PD were initially terrified of vigorously questioning actor Jussie Smollett’s claims of MAGA-wearing, noose-toting attackers. Even at this late date, “Google Protecting Jussie Smollett From ‘Disparaging’ Searches,” according to the Washington Free Beacon in mid-June. Because conservatives have seen these sorts of stories over and over and over again for years on college campuses, (where the will to power has long derived from victimhood, to coin a phrase), they were much quicker to raise red flags over his stunt right from the start. Or as Roger Kimball wrote on Smollett, also back in February, “The less hate there is in the United States, the more hate crimes must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.”