Book Review: Hate Crime Hoax, by Wilfred Reilly

SYNOPSIS

Hate Crime Hoax: The Left’s Campaign To Sell A Fake Race War by Dr. Wilfrid Reilly (The $50,000,000 Question) is an absorbing and well-detailed account of the prevalence of American hate crime hoaxes and the glaringly negative results of their perpetration. Dr. Reilly is quite forthright in laying out the fundamental purpose and aim for penning the book at the onset, writing,

‘Hoax’ attempts to do for American race relations what Glassner did for American consumer advocacy: use hard data to penetrate an intentionally created fog of exaggerations and lies, and by doing so expose a surprisingly positive reality. To an astonishing degree, many Americans today, especially on the activist Left, seem to believe that the USA is a racist hell-hole on the brink of civil war. In the mainstream media, we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: “white privilege” and “cultural appropriation” and “subtle bigotry.” —Hoax, Reilly, p. 4.

Dr. Reilly makes good on his attempt to use hard data to penetrate the fog of exaggerations and lies surrounding his subject through the deployment of personal research, independent scholars such as Laird Wilcox, FBI and BJS statistics and a bevvy of other sources.

One of the most interesting aspects about the book is the way it unearths the reasons behind the culture of fear which permeates America as pertains to hate crimes and racial animus; in contrast to being merely a few hoaxes taken out of context, Reilly advances the notion that hate, like anything else, is highly profitable, citing, NGOs (such as the NAACP and SPLC), corporate diversity initiatives, affirmative action and minority business “set asides” as examples of a broad, series of vested interest groups who would lose out if it ever became widely known that the bulk of their narratives concerning hate and racism in the US were either completely fabricated or blown out of all reasonable proportion.

In many situations where a reasonable person might well conclude that no actual racism at all exists today – Hollywood’s Oscars ceremony? – it often proves very profitable and rewarding to invent some. —Hoax, Reilly, p. 7.

The author also makes the distinction between the harmless organizations and initiatives whose work is based off the presumption of America-as-hideous-bigoted-nation and those whose effects have a potent and overwhelmingly negative effect on the populace, in part or at large. Reilly at one point notes that one of the things he has witnessed in a personal capacity working a historically black college that most holds black students back is not some great edifice of anti-black restriction but rather, those very same black students’ belief in such a edifice, despite its nonexistence.

It is not a minor and justifiable quirk that a quarter of Black people think that their government is attempting to kill them. If this were true, it would indisputably be one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history. If this were true, I myself would currently be in armed rebellion against the United States of America. But, this is not true. — Hoax, Reilly, P. 8.

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STRUCTURE

The book is structured in nine chapters; Chapter 1 deals with the outline of the book itself and the main argument. Chapter 2 deals with details the broader social context in which the arguments are being made and recounts the specifics of numerous fake hate crimes which rolls over into Chapter 3 which looks at the issue as it has developed on college campuses. Chapter 4 details what Reilly amusingly refers to as the “Klan Springs Eternal” narrative, wherein minority groups continuously push the idea that some KKK-esque group is not only out to get them, but also on the political rise. Chapter 5 takes a look at the supposed hate crime cases surrounding the election of Donald Trump and his supporters. Chapter 6 documents false reporting on fake hate crime allegations. Chapter 7 takes a look back through the annals of hate crime allegation history and what it can tell us about the present. Chapter 8, diverts from its focus on the American Left and looks to one of the fastest growing trends in fake hate crimes, white Americans falsely claiming to have been the victims of acts of racial and political discrimination or violence. The book closes out at Chapter 9, which offers up advice and policy on how to detect hate crime hoaxes and bad reporting.

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METHODOLOGY

Given the topic, it is important to clearly and concisely lay out what one means by “hate crime,” this Reilly does at the beginning of the book by noting that he utilized the official FBI designation: a felony or misdemeanor offense based on or caused by bias against the victim’s “race, color, religion, national origin, gender/sex, sexual orientation (real or perceived), gender identity, or disability.” With his terms firmly laid out, Dr. Reilly then compiled a detailed list of 346 different hate crime allegations across America. After combing through the specifics of each case with a fine-toothed comb Dr. Reilly discovered that only 100 of those 346 cases were either unverified, unverifiable or outright untrue hoaxes. Somewhat later, in 2017, Dr. Reilly, compiles a base data-set of 409 different confirmed hate crime hoaxes, hyperlinks to which, the author graciously offers to any who ask for them. What is important to note is that Hoax is a principally a qualitative work and the author says quite explicitly that statistical number-crunching – while important – was not the main purpose of the book. He stresses however, that it is indisputable to know that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is very large, which can be deduced from his own data set of over 400 hate crime allegations, along with a fellow researcher’s list of 333 recent allegations, which were both coupled with Laird Wilcox’s 1994 research on around 400 allegations and then stacking those over 1100 different hate crime allegations against the FBI total of 5,850 (2015). This compilation of information is then compared with 2016 study information from the ‘Hate Response Team’ of the University of Wisconsin (LaCrosse) who discovered that 28 of 192 different reports of negative bias campus incidents either were hoaxes or had not occurred at all. Dr. Reilly then judiciously works through all the potential or outright stated motivations of the hoaxers throughout the various different cases, motivations which range from malevolence, to a desire for insurance money to wanting sympathetic attention. Reilly’s total case-study period ranged from 2013 to 2017.

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STYLE & CONTENT

Outside of the subject matter and the methodology used to obtain all pertinent information, another important consideration of any book is the distillation of that information. Dr. Reilly has a unique style of voice which avoids a lot of the problems common to most contemporary academic writing, chiefly a proclivity towards colleague referentialism and in-house vocabulary (ie. anthropocene, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Lacanian, etc) that is utterly impenetrable to the general public. Dr. Reilly’s book is straightforward and exhibits a clarity of explanation even when tackling fairly complex topics which confounding dates and expansive data-sets, which makes it not just informative, but often, highly amusing. It also bears noting that in addition to just examining in detail various different hate crime hoaxes, Dr. Reilly looks also to the broader socio-political context in which they occurred and pays specific attention for what he terms “the continuing oppression narrative,” which he believes to be a strong driver of hate crimes hoaxes among minority communities and, more recently, among white Americans as well. This is, in our estimation, one of the most interesting aspects about the book, as it isn’t just a list of different things that have happened and why – that is descriptive – it is also a highly prescriptive work, which suggests various way to better handle such situations moving forward.

There are certainly viable solutions to the problem of widespread false reporting of hate

crimes. Probably the two most critical are (1) Prosecutors must put political correctness aside and enforce the law, seeking at minimum jail sentences for anyone convicted of falsely reporting a hate offense or similar serious crime; and (2) we must all begin to challenge the narrative, pointing out as often as possible from the highest possible podiums the ACTUAL rates of real hate crime, fake hate crime, and for that matter inter-racial crime and police violence against Blacks and others. Interestingly, success in achieving Objective (2) – removing the unnecessary veil of tears created by false perceptions of oppression – would be the best possible thing for minority Americans, and the widespread proliferation of non-MSM new media may make this achievable in the near future. — Hoax, Reilly, p. 29-30.

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CONCLUSION

If you are at all interested in hate crime hoaxes as well as the politics of US race relations and how they are often artificially strained, then we’d highly recommend Hate Crime Hoax.

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Note: Hate Crime Hoax is currently available only for pre-order from Amazon or Barnes & Noble with a release date of Feb 26, 2019. Furthermore, we should like to thank Dr. Reilly for the advance draft-copy of his excellent book which he so graciously gifted to Logos before its public release.
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Metamorphosing TLC Sigil

 

Glitch-Art Self-Portraits

Taking a break from writing and engaging in some aesthetic experimentation with various digital manipulation programs. Haven’t titled any of them yet. A touch narcissistic but I make a more compelling subject for the kind of effects I was attempting to achieve than mugs, rugs or coffee cups.

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The Beautiful Syncretism of Tatsuo Horiuchi: A Introspection On Progressive & Purest Artists & Their Failings

Kaiga (絵画) or Japanese painting is among the oldest of the Land of the Rising Sun’s visual arts and has had a tremendous impact upon both Japanese culture as well as the artistic culture of The West. There are many different variations and permutations to Kaiga, however, the most well known variant, Sumi-e, was traditionally created via ink and brush on washi (hand processed Japanese paper, tougher than mechanically processed paper which is made from local materials).

However, one man has taken the traditional style of Japanese painting and merged it with modern technology in both a technically impressive and aesthetically pleasing fashion. His name is Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 77 year old painter from Nagano, Japan. After retiring, Mr. Horiuchi decided that he wished to spend his waning years painting but was possessed of both a shrewd and experimental mind and thus decided that traditional methods of brush, oil, ink and canvas were far to messy and, more crucially, expensive, so he set himself to discovering how he could “paint” with his computer. Whilst there are no shortage of art creation programs, they are, just like traditional methods, extremely expensive (although generally cheaper in the long run). Thus he decided to simply use a program which was already installed on his computer.

Microsoft Excel.

Yume no Ura (A 
view from Cherry Blossoms and the Oiseiro) Cherry blossom and the superb view from the veranda of Taichoro / Hukuzenji temple at Tomomachi in Hukuyama.

Whilst Microsoft Excel is generally utilized for business purposes, such a spreadsheet graphs for presentations. Mr. Horiuchi, in a recent interview for Colossal Magazine, stated that little by little, he figured out how to both layer, shade and colorize the images with a extremely high degree of precision. This precision (which in his old age would have been rather difficult to achieve with a brush and ink) combined with the ability to print out any number of the same image and the lack of need for paint mixing (a lengthy and expensive process) made him choose the medium.

Snow’s Okura (Intermontane river in snow).

The majority of Mr. Horiuchi’s painting focus on the beauty of Japan, primarily it’s mythic landscapes, though he also, occasionally turns his eye toward rural life in the island nation as well.

A child who delights in the sunrise cold early in the morning
(MountTukuba).

It is a difficult thing, to properly navigate the realms of the artistic Purest and the artistic Progressive. The devout Purest – the pure Purest, if you will – raises all art from a particular time and place upon a pedestal and denigrates all others. This strain of thought is particularly apparent in Classicist circles wherein modern music is considered bad because it utilizes computers which makes the music “inauthentic” or “inorganic.” Yet when asked why computer programs are somehow more inauthentic or inorganic than, say, a violin or a trumpet, you will more likely than not be met with silence. The Purest problem lies in it’s complete and utter inability to change, for in refusing to change one refuses to adapt. Whether in art or politics the inability to adapt to change is paramount to suicide. No army brandishing sticks and stones and sheets of bark as shields, however well trained, can hope to best a modern militarized platoon equipped with Twaron and Kevlar body-armor who carrying M16 5.56 caliber rifles nor can any artist, no matter how “pure” his traditional artistic methods, capture the attention and imagination of his compatriots if he does not attune his style to the frequency of his world’s own bio-hum, to hear it’s spirit and feel the vibrations of it’s essence.

Odori & Momiji.

Whereas the Purest fails because he cannot change, the Progressive artist fails because all he can do is change. In constantly seeking “originality” he ends up viewing originality itself as the highest aim for art which births one of the greatest problems in modern art: The pursuit of originality for originality’s sake. So chaotic is the mind of the Progressive artist that he cannot moor himself to ANY values concurrent with his social milieu and thus he abandons the pursuit of value entirely and instead focuses on novelty. Such works are as quickly forgotten as they are produced (how many pop songs can you recite in whole or part after a single listening? My assumption would be very few – and how many of them would you really go out of your way to play again?).

Mr. Horiuchi deftly weaves together both the traditional style of his people and the modernist technology of The West to form a beautiful synchronicity that dodges the pitfalls of the Purest or the Progressive. From thrift and dedication, a simple but timeless and idyllic idealization of the Land of the Rising Sun in it’s most resplendent serendipity. A echoing reflection of national pride. Confident and content in one’s placing without waxing braggadocios.