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Hate crime hoaxes, like Jussie Smollett's alleged attack, are more common than you think
February 22, 2019
The hate attack on Empire star Jussie Smollett is now alleged to be a hoax. That shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Smollett’s story was bizarre, bordering on the absurd. He claimed to have been attacked — at 2:00am in Chicago — by two men, in some early reports, wearing red MAGA hats, who called him “that Empire n_____,†yelled “this is MAGA country,†and poured bleach on him while putting a noose around his neck.
The questions here are obvious. How many Trump supporters even exist in the downtown of a city that went 83% for Hillary Clinton — and how many of them watch "Empire?" How many guys looking for a fight carry rope and bottles of bleach around with them? Almost every normal citizen had questions like these about this incident, and we were justified in having them.
That this case turned out to be a hoax shouldn't come as too big of a shock. A great many hate crime stories turn out to be hoaxes. Simply looking at what happened to the most widely reported hate crime stories over the past 4-5 years illustrates this: not only the Smollett case but also the Yasmin Seweid, Air Force Academy, Eastern Michigan, Wisconsin-Parkside, Kean College, Covington Catholic, and “Hopewell Baptist burning†racial scandals all turned out to be fakes. And, these cases are not isolated outliers.
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