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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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