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.

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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Swallow the Sun

Fermentation of Organon

Ra straddles the celestial-array like a colossus. Look how unhinged the old god has become! Intoxicated with the ostensible progression of his creation, he twines wildly about the horizon in spastic, shuddering bounds, caring not who is bathed in his fiery effulgence. The charred bones of his victims shine off the creaking charnel barge, its shimmering hull, once a beacon of hope, now a harbinger of terror. A lighthouse of despair. The shadow of the ship, blotting out the celestial rays meant to nourish the soil and water below, now frothing in a cascade of roiling disruption. Now the plants wither and a cold wind blows over the skulls of the dead. The brave viri lapis, those crafty escapees of the dread Sun Cult, hide in hollows, primitive huts and forgotten caverns, hunched, gaunt and feral of eye, ceaselessly conspiring against the hegemony of the great solar disk, knowing that should they emerge from their solitude they’d face the blazing rays of Ra’s fell light, which would burn any mortal man a’cinder. Nothing but a skeleton would remain, the only alcahest, screams lost to sky. His parts would be taken to the grand temple and there placed in immaculate assemblage, a offering to the all-seeing providence and a warning to the survivors that day-running was anathema. The only vector of escape was neath the breezy shade of the god-ship, too fleet for humanid velocity.

A most intolerable situation, but a intoleration which is exasperated by ingenuity and understanding, both qualities which have transformed the fallow ground of our innermost thoughts into fertile soil, rich with the oxygenating force of abundance which bred a thoughtless proclivity towards decadence and with decadence comes detachment. The industrial pioneer and rogue philosopher, Boyd Rice, wisely notes, “with detachment comes perspective. The less you care, the more you know, and the more you know the less you care.”1

Since ages immemorial Man as concept and Nature as concept have been considered two parts of a whole which make up something akin to “proper existence,” the “way of the world.” Yet by Man’s recognition of his placing therein he has – by, not just his consciousness, but recognition of his consciousness – of necessity, removed himself from any semblance of harmonic acquiescence. The only harmony is in struggle. In death. The forced forms which under-gird even our conscious minds. As McCarthy’s Judge Holden reminds us, War is God2. The clashing of one force against another with the ultimate result of one emerging supreme is the end result of entropy and the fueling fire of the universe and thus, nature. The topography of the universe is one of constant twining, collision, fold and explosion. The glaring heat of grand solar bodies, the black and airless vacuum of space, the eruption of volcanoes, deathly gyres of the hurricane and the disemboweling larvae of the ichneumon wasp do not portend a past of harmonic unity but rather a pitched-battle in which the very fabric of existence turns upon itself with horrifying and thoughtless intensity. Such vision; a stark contrast to the humanising conception of genderfication which is so characteristic of all too much of modern philosophy. The moon as nourishing mother, the sun as patriarchal overseer, the earth as Gaia and so on and so on. A conceptual anthropomorphic topographical overlay foisted without much forethought; a masking idea-layer which is born out of desire, the desire of significance and reciprocal emotional interplay. A balancing of co-dependent states. Make no mistake, this is not a question of pedantic quibbletry but rather a foundational concern for the entirety of humankind. One day the sun will move into it’s late-stage cycle, become a red giant and engulf the entirety of the earth. Long before the earth is swallowed up in Ra’s bountiful flames, every single speck of life will boil. Even should we escape that fate, the remains of the dying star will eventually burn out in totality and bring utter darkness to the entirety of the galaxy and send all hither-connected planets sailing off into the limitless void. Due these facts, we must hastily sever the umbilical cord which anchors us to the Mother Goddess, slaughtering her mercilessly if she resists, else suffer the fate of the dodo. Thus, nature as concept must be purged of imposed desire (if possible by thought, if not then by breed-engineering), for it is the generative machine of corrosive and leveling fantasy, for the anthro-primeval liminality of the shaman. The source of animistic fancy, sacred geometry and the pantheon of the gods – clamoring and gaudy -who rob Man of his upward drive, his trajectories of ascent, spiral and spread. A curious condition wherein the human animal thrusts his face into the muck and the mud and spits on his selfsame and filthy image for its grotesqueness as if no such other outcome were possible. This denaturing of hubris may, one day, itself become the nail which utterly seals us within the frigid and celestial coffin of galaxial extinction.

We must lay something out quite solidly here, that there can be no value nor trajectory of action which supersedes survival, firstly of the species, then of the race, then of various concentric groupings within, moving ever smaller until one reaches the bedrock of the individual. The “why?” is very simple, without the continuation of the organism there can be no value given the lack of a valuer. More importantly is the “to us,” should there be other variations of self-aware lifeforms – deities or aliens or some consciousness embedded into the very architectuality of matter itself – matters not to the purposes of all that matters to us. Away with all your cry’s of “anthropocentrism” if one is care one MUST care, principally, about things which CAN CARE. Who among this passage’s readership is like to sacrifice his life for a river or a stone? Or even a insect?

He who believes that there are no values outside of survival itself is imminently superior to the man who holds all values save for survival itself, for as he perishes, so too shall those values perish and even should his genes survive, in the form of his immortal clones, his children and their own, how many of them will assimilate their progenitor’s suicidal tendencies?

Nearly all the profligate religions of the world hold fast to the importance of survival; there is always some essence, typically a soul, which survives the death of the body, which transcends and escapes off from the physical realm into some kind of afterlife or ultra-dimensional flux (and numerous injunctions against suicide to mitigate the temptation to depart from the port of temporality earlier than was scheduled). However, for these star-seekers, this soul-escape is conceived of as part and parcel of “the natural.” Yet the natural as line-of-desired-action prepossesses the “unnatural,” a fundamental quandary for which there are no objective answers and no logically accessible subjective answers either; only the vagaries of intuitions (a unreliable metric). For if all that is known is “the natural” world, then that which is “unnatural” is unknown by definition. One here then becomes trapped in a glue of useless pedantry-become-moralizing; “We cannot do that, it is unnatural!” Rarely is the question asked, “But is it bad?” A prohibition without justification is justification for further prohibition. When coupled with afterlifeism this prohibition without justification is intensified for in breaking with it, one threatens one’s very immortality, that is to say, one’s survival (whether corporeal or incorporeal, it is continuance of the being all the same). No matter how much the holy man may detest materiality he still feels the compulsive urge to survive, so much so that he codifies them in his sacred tomes. Never mind the how and why. It just “is.” The naturalists ever conflate “the good” with “the natural” yet they are irrelevant distinctions to those without heads. If the dead are terribly concerned with “the natural,” or “the good,” “the gods,” or some other such anthropomorphic imposition upon the clockwork of the cosmos they haven’t been particularly vocal about it. Furthermore, the lines of desired trajectory which are extrapolated by misbegotten exegesis from the extant world are utterly inapplicable to the forces which under-gird the world itself. That is to say that if the natural be the good then the uninterrupted motion of matter is also good but no one takes up in defense of the leptons which make up the stones. Here we find a conception which has gone largely unexamined, if the more a thing proceeds upon “its own line” of entropy is greater in its “goodness” than a thing which is disrupted by a conscious agent one is implicitly placing entropy as the good. The “natural good” then is really just a mask for the worship of disorder, the acceptance of entropy. This is platonic insanity, the realm of forms invading the mental fortress and tearing it apart from within. Instead of withstanding the slings and arrows of the invading hordes of phenomonology, we’ve opened up the gates to the barbarians! The conception-outside-the-conciever now becomes like a ontological compression module which refuses to assimilate any and all new discoveries and theories. A reactionary idol worshiped by those who are infected with the incorrigible disease of sentimentality and “history.”

The reactionary3 proclivity towards the conception-outside-the-conciever presents innumerable intellectual problems, the first and foremost being that it’s myraid claims are wholly unfalsifiable. It is Quantum theory without the methodological verifiability. It is not just that reactionary transcendentalism is barren of verifiability, it lacks even a path to move towards it. To address those who would here enjoin, “There is more to life than logical and falsifiability!” Certainly, we would agree, but if one is building a ontological-organon then it its preferable that it be falsifiable, provided one’s principal concern is survival, in whatever variation.

One can already hear the obnoxious screeches of “Nihilism.” Let us address this as we bring our ideas to their logical conclusion. “Nihilism” is best summarized by Brassier when, in Nihil Unbound, he described nihilism as the belief that, “existence is worthless.”4 Brassier states that this is a “naive” conception which has become “hackneyed” and we would agree. Nihilism would best be described as the belief that the universe does not care about you; the fundamental mistake was in anthropomorphizing the universe to such a degree to begin with. Perhaps it was unavoidable but it certainly is not now. Agents and objects, humans and stars. Another crucial problem plaguing “philosophy” is the idea that nihilism is a thing to be overcome, as if a erroneous induction can be conquered like a foreign kingdom! Who can subdue a ghost or wrangle a kheft? The solution to the Ding an sich is not ontological cop-outs via flowery and obscurantist prose but rather, The Machine. Where sense-perception fails better senses are required and sense perception IS required for the perception of consciousness. Creation here suggests itself. Viri lapis must become et ferro to conquer the sun, to build up the bulwark against its searing rays. Woodwork to clockwork, man-power to machine-power in a hundred thousand variations. A skittering sprawl of thoughts crystallizing across Ra’s domain, subsuming and subverting it, for never forget, Ra deigns your death. Best to kill him first. Shorn of Set, he is powerless before Apophis.

For the good of our species we must swallow the sun.



Footnotes

1Boyd Rice, NO (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017)

2Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Vintage Publishing) Chapter XVII

3Reactionary here meaning, “Knee-jerk,” or “A action done without due thought or contemplation” not, specifically, the political tendency/philosophy(ies).

4Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Preface, x