With the benefit of hindsight, we can look back at a hate crime hoax and wonder how anyone was ever naive enough to believe it.
How could any investigator believe that actor Jussie Smollett just happened to run into the only two Trump supporters in deep blue Chicago on a cold winter night? How could anyone who spent their career in NASCAR garages believe that the door pulley in driver Bubba Wallace’s dock was actually a noose?
It’s often not naivety that leads to hate crime hoaxes, but pure and utter cynicism. We built a system to empower liars — and punish anyone with the power to stand up against them.
The Daily Caller’s latest documentary, “Demand for Hate,” exposes how we built a society that favors people who would callously invent a hate crime to boost their own profile. What started with sweeping affirmative action infrastructure on college campuses has now bled out to the real world.
“Demand for Hate” is available to stream exclusively for Patriots members.
Catch a first glimpse below.
From “Hands Up. Don’t Shoot” to “This is MAGA Country,” hate crimes hoaxes have become an all too common part of American life. Race relations have improved so much over the past several decades that America is one of the least racist countries in the world, but hate crime hoaxes reinforce the opposite idea: that we are an irredeemably racist country in need of radical change. So, if they are to find support for their radical political agenda, the left is forced to invent the “hate” they claim to fight.
The ideas behind these “systemic changes” originated in the far-left screeds of American academia. Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell laid the foundation of Critical Race Theory in the 1980s, which holds that racism is quietly built into all of America’s institutions — “the system” itself. His protege, Kimberlé Crenshaw, expanded the framework with the concept of “intersectionality,” that different minority groups face overlapping layers of oppression. Pseudo-scholars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have taken these dense theories and repackaged them to sell “anti-racism” to the masses.
Therefore it’s no surprise that most hate crime hoaxes occur on college campuses, according to political scientist Wilfred Reilly. Reilly, who tracks hate crime hoaxes throughout the country, told The Daily Caller’s investigative team that up two-thirds of the incidents he sees occur on campus.
“The campus is a unique environment, in that there’s a great deal of support for this kind of thing,” Reilly explained. “There’s an entire infrastructure set up to support it.”
And it’s not just the radical professors.
You have armies of college administrators whose only job is to root out so-called bias. Top brass is risk averse; they mouth the right words to keep the peace — and enrollments flowing in. Then you have the diversity officers whose careers are built on fighting discrimination. So if there is no hate to be found, they don’t get paid.
You also have myriad student groups aligned around identity affinities or left-wing causes. Their primary incentive is to promote their own group interests, and those interests often intersect along the same ideological lines. As Reilly points out, the Black Student Union will encompass a massive portion of the black student body — and will use their influence on behalf of a self-declared victim of hate. Because of intersectionality, other “oppressed groups” will jump in as well.
Then you have everyone else. They might be normal, all-American college kids, not particularly political. But even they see the way the wind blows on campus and know that if they stick their neck out the mob will take their head.
In all instances, the truth gets lost in the narrative.
For a long time, conventional wisdom held that these radical kids would leave college, get their first job and adapt to the “real world.” But the opposite turned out to be true. They made the “real world” adapt to them.
“You are seeing the impact on leaders and decision makers,” Reilly explains, “whether you’re talking about judges, district attorneys, jury foremen.” In an “environment that can obviously get increasingly hostile, where people are at the very least going to access the media, where there might be physical rioting,” the easy decision is to bow down to the mob.
This is how hate crime hoaxes that beggar belief get blown up into national crises. When your professional advancement is put on the line; when the media is ready to destroy your reputation; when you risk mobs showing up in front of your home and rioters burning down your community — the easy decision is to shut your eyes and pretend to not see the truth. But when all do this, society forgets the very meaning of the word.
We’re all living on a college campus today. Hardly anyone will tell you the truth — not politicians, not journalists and certainly not the educators we entrust with our youth. But at The Daily Caller, we’re determined to cover the stories no one else will and follow the truth, wherever it may lead.
Watch “Demand for Hate” now to learn more about how our leaders have empowered the worst people in America — and how good people are finally beginning to stand up to them.
The Daily Caller’s documentary productions are made possible by our faithful Patriots members, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them. To watch “Demand for Hate” today — and to help support future investigative documentaries — please consider becoming a member.
