Daily Caller columnist Mary Rooke detailed Thursday evening on One American News Network (OAN) the truth exposed in the Caller’s new documentary “Demand for Hate” as it calls out the lies and impacts of hate crime hoaxes.
Rooke appeared on “Tipping Point with Kara McKinney” to discuss the outlet’s new film following former University of Virginia (UVA) student Morgan Bettinger, who was labeled as a racist following an encounter with a Black Lives Matter activist in 2020. During a Black Women Matter protest near campus, which blocked a street near a school, Bettinger was talking to a truck driver who closed off the road with his car.
The former student reportedly told the driver how thankful was that he was there to prevent the cars from turning protesters into speed bumps, but activists nearby did not spread the same story. Activist and UVA student, at the time, Zyana Bryant led the push to cancel Bettinger, claiming she threatened protesters and said they would “make good f–king speed bumps.” (RELATED: Demand For Hate | STREAMING NOW)
Host Kara McKinney asked Rooke for her take on the left’s “demand for hate,” suggesting the “supply and demand” for uproar could be the leading motivation for hate hoax crimes like Bettinger’s.
“So they [the left] have to essentially make it up in order to prove their point,” Rooke stated. “One of the psychologists that’s talking in the film, she talks about how [in] human nature we are always searching for a leader. And so in our secular world now, we are no longer looking to God for our leadership. Essentially, we’re looking for a charismatic individual who can lead us through whatever we want to do in our daily lives.For these protesters, they really kind of go towards someone like Bryant, who is going to be boisterous, who is going to be loud, who is going to make a big show of things, and kind of get people to her side.”
“I think the sad thing about this is that people like Bryant who ruined Morgan Bettinger’s life, they are never held accountable,” she added. “How many times have you seen one of these hate hoaxes be perpetuated? Whether it’s someone writing the N-word on the bathroom stall at a school or a swastika and you find out that it was actually not a white supremacist coming out to attack people. Do you ever hear anything else about that?”
“No, because the elite media likes to play this game where they run up the race flag,” she continued. “They put as many stories as they possibly can out — they put it in primetime. But when it comes time to retract the story, or help the actual victim involved, like boarding Morgan Bettinger, they are putting it on the end of the 11 o’clock news, where no one’s really paying attention, or the last page of the printed newspaper. No one’s really talking about how this ruined her life.”
Rooke called out the lack of responsibility shown by the UVA administration as Bettinger became a target of vicious harassment online, with some fellow students ostracizing her and refusing to join class with her. The Daily Caller columnist stated the part she finds most sad is how school officials could go towards a “side that they know for a fact is wrong.”
“Another big point is that the President and the administrators at UVA have an accounting to do within themselves,” Rooke went on. “I mean, Morgan Bettinger was the daughter of a police officer who died, when she was 16 years old, of cancer. She had no father figure in her life to protect her from the onslaught of the mob. And the president of the university absolutely left her for dead essentially. She was kicked out of everything, and this is after the school investigated and ruled that she was not guilty of any of the so-called crimes of racism and attempted attacking of her fellow students. None of that stuff was actually real, but because the student government decided that she was guilty of these things, he didn’t come out in support of her.”
“…A lot of the professors come out and they say, ‘Well, the schools are investing millions and millions of dollars into this diversity equity inclusion program.’ If they find out that the mob is going towards one side, they’re going to go towards the mob that they’re essentially paying and investing into rather than doing the right thing because then they’d lose money over it. To me, that is probably the saddest part of this whole situation is that they are going towards the side that they know for a fact is wrong,” she added.
Bettinger was later sentenced to 50 hours of community service, leftist re-education classes and put on probationary expulsion, even after a student panel agreed with the former student’s side of the story while reviewing the case. “Demand for Hate,” which was released this month, dives into the importance of how stories like Bettinger’s can ruin someone’s life, even if it’s based upon a lie.
