- A political scientist found that fewer than 1 in 3 of 346 such allegations was genuine.
"When I asked Wilfred Reilly about last week’s appointment of a special prosecutor in Chicago to take up the Jussie Smollett case, he was cautiously optimistic.
Mr. Reilly is author of a new book, “Hate Crime Hoax,” in which he details how the initial publicity for supposed hate crimes tends all but to disappear if the allegations are exposed as fake.
...Mr. Reilly eventually compiled a database of 346 hate-crime allegations and determined that less than a third were genuine.Turning his attention to the hoaxes, he put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017.
He allows that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large,” he writes. “We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.”
...The sad reality is that there is no shortage of individuals and entities with a vested interest in exaggerating racial tensions in the U.S.—from civil-rights organizations to corporate diversity officers to professors of race and gender studies.
...But Mr. Reilly has a larger point to make.
The Smollett case isn’t an outlier.
Increasingly, it’s the norm.
And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem."
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