Race hoaxes have been getting traction over the past couple years. Let's take a trip down memory lane and rediscuss a few that happened on college campuses in the past two years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| [MUSIC] | |
| From the New York Post, it says a black student's allegations that she was | |
| targeted for eating while black at a private Massachusetts college were deemed | |
| unfounded according to investigation of the incident. | |
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | |
| Umo Kanute, then a rising sophomore at Smith College, had claimed that all she did was be black when a janitor called security on her when he found her in a closed lounge in July 2018. | |
| A 35-page investigation carried out by an outside law firm found no evidence of discrimination. | |
| The findings were issued in October 2018, but not widely reported. | |
| The incident began when Canote was inside a cafeteria and dormitory that was reserved for a summer camp program for young children. | |
| Since students were not supposed to be used in the area, a cafeteria worker, Jackie Blair, reminded her of that fact, but then decided to drop the issue. | |
| A janitor who was in his 60s, had poor vision, then noticed a figure in the distance eating in a closed-off lounge area. | |
| And so school guidance calls for employees not to confront strangers on their own. | |
| So the janitor notified security about the person who turned out to be Kenote, the outlet reported. | |
| The janitor, who reportedly later claimed he couldn't tell the person's gender because it was dark, told dispatchers that there's someone sitting there lying down in the living room. | |
| A security officer then drove over, engaged in a polite conversation. | |
| But this woman recorded it, and so she was where she was not supposed to be, and you had school, you know, employees followed proper protocol to enforce the rules, what they were supposed to do. | |
| Now you also have to keep in mind from their perspective, you know, you've got a stranger in this area where they're not supposed to be, it's reserved for a summer camp for kids. | |
| If they don't say anything and allow that person to be there, And then, you know, if something happens, anything happens related to that that person, well, they're going to be in trouble for that. | |
| You know, they might be liable for that. | |
| So they enforce the rules and. | |
| And the woman claimed that it was racism. | |
| No basis for that claim whatsoever. | |
| This was back in 2018. | |
| The media ran with it. | |
| Everyone ran with it. | |
| It went viral online. | |
| I vaguely remember this when it first happened, hearing something like this. | |
| And of course, you know, as a rational person, when I first heard the story, I immediately thought, is there any evidence that this is race-based at all? | |
| Obviously there wasn't. | |
| But, Even so, a lot of the people involved with this, the janitor was placed on leave the following day. | |
| I mean, people lost their jobs, people were smeared across the media as being racist. | |
| These are normal, and you're talking about a janitor at a school, these are normal working class people, totally innocent, who were smeared, libeled, defamed as racist. | |
| Had their lives ruined, had their careers ruined. | |
| Lost their jobs? | |
| All because of this. | |
| All because of this lie. | |
| From this despicable person who was looking for attention. | |
| You know, for her, she's at this fancy college, everything's going well in her life. | |
| Her life's gonna be fine. | |
| But she wanted a little bit of attention. | |
| She wanted some attention on social media, she wanted to get some Facebook likes, and some retweets. | |
| And for that, just for that sake, she was willing to destroy the lives of however many people. | |
| Didn't matter to her. | |
| Think about what a sociopath you have to be. | |
| For such little reward, you're willing to completely destroy innocent people. | |
| [MUSIC] | |
| Speaking of lies, reports last week about racist graffiti, the good old racist graffiti gambit. | |
| Um... | |
| Racist graffiti found around campus at a college called Albion College in Michigan. | |
| The graffiti said, here's what the graffiti said, KKK white power, die n-words please, and we do exist, KKK. | |
| And then there was a Star of David with the number 666 written across it. | |
| I guess it was supposed to be an anti-Semitic thing. | |
| Now, this was a big deal locally. | |
| Got a lot of attention. | |
| The students protested. | |
| We got some footage of that there. | |
| Pretty long line of them. | |
| This is a small college, but it looks like they all came out. | |
| Look at them all marching. | |
| They all came out to march against racism on campus. | |
| And then, what is it? | |
| I don't have to tell you what happens next, do I? | |
| You already know. | |
| You heard racist graffiti, and if you've been paying attention at all over the last 10 years, you know exactly where this is headed. | |
| It was a hoax. | |
| It was a black student that wrote the graffiti. | |
| You know, even without the history, even without knowing the history, you probably would have already guessed that this is a hoax. | |
| Because this just isn't KKK white power. | |
| Who do you think is going to sincerely write that? | |
| Even if it was an actual white racist, why would they write that? | |
| But as we've covered many times, people who want to invent hate crimes and turn themselves into a victim, they have a lot of trouble doing it persuasively and convincingly. | |
| Because they really have not encountered a lot of racism from white people. | |
| So they don't even know what that would be like. | |
| If racism from white people was common in this country, number one, you wouldn't have to invent it. | |
| You wouldn't have to make it up. | |
| And number two, if you did make it up, you would have encountered it so often that you should be able to make it up and impersonate it convincingly. | |
| But this is obviously someone who has never encountered a white racist in his entire life. | |
| He has no idea what a white racist would say, which is good, by the way. | |
| He's never encountered one. | |
| That's a great thing. | |
| We should celebrate that. | |
| So instead, he bases it off of, like, movies that he saw and TV shows and stuff. | |
| That's one way that you know that it's a hoax. | |
| And the other way you know it's a hoax is that, as far as I can remember, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'll at least say this, I cannot think, in the last 20 years, I cannot think of a single case where so-called racist graffiti or a racist note left on a receipt or left on someone's car windshield or slipped under their door turned out to be sincere. | |
| Every single case that I can think of, they were all hoaxes. | |
| Has there been even one real case? | |
| I'm assuming, just law of averages, there have to have been, right? | |
| The last 20 years, there have to have been at least a couple of these racist graffiti cases that was actually done by a white person. | |
| Maybe? | |
| Anyway, MLive has the report, says, Albion College and the Albion Department of Public Safety says that a student is responsible for racist graffiti found in a dorm last weekend. | |
| Albion Police brought the 21-year-old black male in for questioning on April 6th. | |
| The student admitted to creating most of the graffiti and video evidence from Albion's campus safety department confirms the statements made by the student. | |
| So I take it from that that he was on security camera footage. | |
| They said video evidence confirms it, so... I'm assuming that probably he was right in front of a security camera, scrolling this thing. | |
| When it comes to hate crime hoaxes, they're really not sending their best. | |
| But here's the response to this from Albion College. | |
| And I could be pronouncing the name of the college wrong. | |
| Never heard of them before, now. | |
| But here's what they tweeted. | |
| They put this out, I think it was yesterday. | |
| This is after it was already known who was responsible for this, and this is their tweet, okay? | |
| They said, earlier today, we identified the individual responsible for the racist and anti-Semitic graffiti in Mitchell Towers. | |
| The student who is acting alone acknowledged our responsibility for these incidents. | |
| They have been immediately removed from campus and placed on temporary suspension while we conduct a full investigation as part of our student judicial process. | |
| But we know the acts of racism that have occurred this week are not about one particular person or one particular incident. | |
| We know that there is a significant history of racial pain and trauma on campus, and we are taking action to repair our community. | |
| We will change and heal together as a community because we are committed to doing the work. | |
| Right now, we encourage all members of our community to listen, respond, and care for one another, and lean on the faculty, staff, and community members who have been gathering today to make sure we're supporting you. | |
| We have your back. | |
| Okay. | |
| Aside from the normal tripe about, we'll do the work, we're committed, the phrase, do the work, has become to me as grating and annoying as the phrase, lived experience. | |
| And they're always said by, usually in the same sentence, by the same sorts of people. | |
| I'm surprised lived experience didn't appear in this statement here. | |
| We'll do the work to understand your lived experience. | |
| But do you notice? | |
| So we got to do the work, we got the buzzwords and everything. | |
| You notice what's missing from this statement? | |
| They never say it was a hoax. | |
| They never say that it was a black student who did it. | |
| In fact, they intentionally give the impression that it was a white student. | |
| They don't say that. | |
| But they tie all this into historic racism, racial trauma, so on and so forth. | |
| They're clearly trying to give the impression, without saying it, that the graffiti really was done by a white racist. | |
| That's the way the school has decided to handle it. | |
| And if that doesn't work, then they will at least try to disperse the blame We're not going to blame this one individual. | |
| We're going to blame the institutions. | |
| This is not about one particular person. | |
| It's about a history of racial pain. | |
| No, it is definitely about one particular person. | |
| It's about the guy who did it. | |
| A guy who, they say, has kicked off a campus. | |
| That's good. | |
| He should also be charged with a crime. | |
| A hate crime hoax is a hate crime. | |
| I'm not a fan of the hate crime designation at all. | |
| I don't think it should exist, but as long as it does, it should be used equally and in a way that's at least sort of coherent. | |
| And what that means is that a hate crime hoax should be considered a hate crime. | |
| It is a hate crime against the group of people that you're trying to frame. | |
| That's what it's a hate crime against. | |
| So a black student putting that graffiti up, pretending that a white racist did it, that is a hate crime against white students. | |
| He is trying to inflame hatred towards the white students. | |
| And guilt by association, he's trying to, you know, defame them as racist. | |
| That's the way we should, that's the way these things should be handled. | |
| [MUSIC] | |
| All right, this is from the New York Post. | |
| It says, Stanford University has launched a hate crime investigation after a noose was found hanging from a tree at a residence hall. | |
| In an email to students and staff, university officials said campus safety authorities immediately removed the noose and retained it as evidence. | |
| The official at the university says, we cannot state strongly enough that a noose is a reprehensible symbol of anti-black racism and violence that will not be tolerated on our campus. | |
| It is the moral responsibility of those with any knowledge of this incident to come forward. | |
| I'm only reading this story because I want to go... | |
| Usually, I ignore these stories until it is inevitably revealed that it's a hoax. | |
| So, I'm going to go on the record right now and say this is either a hoax. | |
| Now, there's two possibilities. | |
| One is that it's just a straight-up hoax, probably the most likely one. | |
| The other one is that, and often we find in these kinds of stories, it turns out that it's like a tire swing that somebody misinterpreted or a garage door pull, famously, like at NASCAR. | |
| So I'm gonna go on the record right now, and I give it about a week until we get the meek, quiet sort of little update from the police saying, oh yeah, it turns out that, nevermind, just forget about this whole story. | |
| And despite that fact, despite the fact that these hoaxes are so common, that when you read the story, you already know for near 100% certainty that it is a hoax, despite that, When they find the quote, noose, the statement immediately says, oh, it's a symbol of anti-black racism. | |
| I ask again, has there actually been a real authentic case in the last, in this century, in this century, has there been a real authentic case of an anti-black racist, a white person hanging a noose somewhere as a symbol of racism? | |
| Has that happened at all anywhere this century? | |
| I'm not aware of a single case of it. | |
| And I highly doubt that this incident at Stanford in California will be the first such authentic example in the past century at least. | |
| But one thing we can be sure is that the FBI, the federal government, they're going to be on the case here. | |
| They sent, what was it, 20 agents to investigate the garage door pull in Bubba Wallace's garage? | |
| So how many are they going to send to Stanford? | |
| While they have crazed mobs violating federal law and hunting down Supreme Court justices, they don't have time to deal with that. |