Great piece that blows up the narrative.
Via Detroit News:
It’s been repeated so often it’s taken as fact: Hate crimes have soared over the past two years, and the blame rests with President Donald Trump and supporters inspired by his hateful rhetoric.
It’s a compelling story, supported by statistics that show an increase of 17% in the number of hate crimes reported to the FBI during the Trump presidency.
But it isn’t true. The surge has little to do with Trump and his red hat brigade. This according to Will Reilly, a Kentucky State University associate professor, who extensively researched hate-fueled violence in America for his book Hate Crime Hoax.
“Almost all of that surge is due to the simple fact that in 2017 the number of police departments reporting hate crimes to the FBI increased by 1,000,” says Reilly. “The surge narrative is pretty dishonest.”
And destructive. The perception that hate-filled mobs are roaming the streets attacking minorities, gay and transgender people and other vulnerable citizens in the name of Donald Trump keeps us on edge and makes us distrustful of our neighbors.
It also creates a gullibility that that allows us to believe things we should know aren’t true. Like Jussie Smollett’s ridiculous tale of being attacked by two MAGA-hat-wearing thugs on a frigid Chicago street. Before the actor’s whopper unraveled, it was wildly parroted by a media too eager to believe anything that confirms its conviction that America is boiling with hate.
Smollett’s fake hate crime is not a one-off. Reilly’s research finds that most high-profile hate crimes over the past few years have turned out to be hoaxes.