Image 01 Image 03

Hoaxes Tag

The Jussie Smollett story of a racial attack was too politically convenient to be true. And as with investments, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We have covered several dozen hoaxes, including The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013. The Jussie Smollett story had all the indications of a hoax, of seeming too politically convenient and useful to be true.

Will corporations never learn that knee-jerk reactions to online outrage are almost always factually vapid? Apparently not. Fast food chain Chipotle recently fired a manager after a viral video showed her refusing service to a group of young, black men. She also suggested the group of men did not have money to pay for their food, saying the last several times they frequented the restaurant, they didn't have money to pay. "You gotta pay because you’ve never had money when you come in here. We're not gonna make food unless you guys actually have money," she said.

Campus race hoaxes are common and are usually meant to serve a specific purpose. Sometimes, the hoax perpetrators are doing it as a preface to issuing demands. In other instances, it's meant to advance a political narrative. In a recent case at the University of Maryland, it appears to be the actions of an angry employee.

Friday, eleven-year-old Khawlah Noman claimed that while she was walking to her school with her ten-year-old brother, a scissor-wielding Asian man in his 20s used scissors in repeated attempts to cut her hijab. Once she got to school, she told school officials who then escalated the complaint up the chain until the girl was sitting in front of a bevy of news cameras and Canada's Prime Minister was issuing statements on the incident.

Another day, another incident of fake hate revealed.  Two, actually.  Back in September, the United States Air Force Academy Prep School was rocked by the appearance of racial slurs on white boards in the campus dorms.  The resulting video in which Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria addresses the cadets and tells any racists among them to "get out" went viral. In another incident at Kansas State University, a black student's car was defaced with racist graffiti. Both incidents have been revealed to have been perpetrated by the black "victims."

2017, a most ridiculous time to be alive. Wednesday, internet sleuths thought they were really on to something -- the "Melania Trump" standing next to the president was not in fact Melania, they claimed. Dressed in a trench coat and sporting a fab pair of sunglasses, someone whose TV has jacked up aspect ratio decided the difference in appearance was substantial enough to suggest the first lady had a body double.