Victimhood is profitable. On the internet, it can get you thousands of dollars in crowdfunding donations. In the media, it can win you national prominence and a cooing audience of credulous sycophants. On campus, it can get you attention and plaudits from fellow grievance-mongers.

Convince enough people you’re a victim, and everyone from presidential candidates to celebrities will come rushing to support you.

So it’s little wonder that charlatans and opportunists regularly seek to take advantage of our species’ natural instinct for empathy. False flags, in which people deliberately stage attacks on themselves to win the support of society, are as old as history itself.

That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way. They’re really as old as history itself. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once recalled how Peisistratos, a man who would become the dictator of Athens, staged a fake attack on himself to gain the support of the city:

Wounding himself and his mules, he drove his wagon into the marketplace, with a story that he had escaped from his enemies, who would have killed him (so he said) as he was driving into the country. So he implored the people to give him a guard. Taken in, the Athenian people gave him a guard of chosen citizens … These rose with Peisistratos and took the Acropolis; and Peisistratos ruled the Athenians.

Faking assassination attempts are risky these days, and the benefits are questionable. A failed murder attempt might make the local news, but unless you’re already a celebrity or a politician, there isn’t much to be gained. Claim to be a victim of a hate crime, though, and half of today’s uber-progressive, touchy-feely society will run to your doorstep to offer its support.

That’s assuming you get away with it, of course. The typical victim hoax is so clumsily implemented that it is only believable to those that are well trained to embrace their victimhood status and, as is also necessary, suspend their critical faculties.

That’s why they don’t work so well on conservatives, who are more sceptical of such claims. Think of Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz blaming Roger Stone and the Trump campaign for the “sex scandal” story, when it was widely known that Little Marco’s people were the ones shopping the story.

Victimhood isn’t just used to push agendas and win power. It can also be used to make money. Professional victims like feminist pest Anita Sarkeesian have received thousands of dollars in donations after complaints about unkind words on the internet.

Little wonder that there’s been such an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes in the past few years, particularly among regressive activists on university campuses. We’ve seen students scrawl swastikas on the doors of their own dorm rooms, send themselves anonymous rape threats, and falsely accuse fraternities of queer-bashing.

So severe is the problem, lawyer and author Mike Cernovich has taken it upon himself to compile a guide on how to recognise common patterns in these hoaxes.

An epidemic of lies

This got Breitbart thinking. How many hate crime hoaxes have occurred in, say, the past decade? Progressives seem to get busted every other month, but surely that’s just our own biased impression.

When we started our search, we were expecting to find twenty, perhaps forty examples from the past decade of high-profile hate crimes that turned out to be frauds.

If only. We found over a hundred, spread across race, gender, sexuality and religion.

Perhaps thanks to the effect of social media and citizen-led sleuthing, reports of hate-crime hoaxes undergo a massive surge in the years after 2011. 2015 seems to have been a high point — our search found over 20 incidents in that year alone.

Then again, we’re only a quarter of the way through 2016. There have already been four major hate crime hoaxes this year.

And consider this: those are just the ones that were reported. How many other hate crime hoaxers are still out there, undiscovered and unpunished? It’s impossible to say, but given human empathy’s tendency to override scepticism, we suspect the number is high — and probably rising. Because the left is running out of real haters.

As British journalist Douglas Murray likes to say, the Left has a supply-and-demand problem with bigotry. There simply isn’t enough of it to go around, so reporters have to go “rape shopping” like Sabrina Erdely did for Rolling Stone, or they have to enlarge the definitions of “racism” and “homophobia” to include minuscule perceived infractions, called “microaggressions.”

If you live in an Anglosphere nation, you are living in one of the most tolerant, peaceful societies in recorded history. Attitudes towards women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of other races have never been more progressive. Among Millennials, attitudes to abortion, gay marriage, and other social issues are vastly more liberal than their parents. If history is any guide, the next generation is likely to be even more socially liberal.

With the Left reduced to chasing imaginary microaggressions and pizza-shop owners who’d rather not cater lesbian weddings, it’s little wonder that they have to turn to hoaxes to convince the public that bigotry is still alive and well.

It will do them no good. Despite the scaremongering, bigotry in western nations is in terminal decline. Soon, only the hoaxes will remain.

We can’t be far off from social justice education at top universities including courses on effective victim hoaxing. This may seem incredibly brazen to those of us with a modicum of integrity, but it isn’t a big step from where we are today. After all, we already have courses that do little more than teach students that straight white males are the devil and which peddle outright conspiracy theories such as the “patriarchy” and “systematic oppression.”

On the bright side, candidates for the PhD in SJW Hoax Studies may be hired by the CIA for false flag operations abroad, marking the first time a graduate of a left-wing course has been hired anywhere outside of academia, diversity offices and McDonalds.

Interestingly, false flag hoaxes in the West almost exclusively use white males at the hoax’s target. Why not use Militant Islam which is a much more believable aggressor?

I guess one explanation is that it’s hard to fake chopping your head off, or having you and your loved ones blown to bits, when you can, as a Tennessee lesbian couple famously did, burn your own house down after scrawling QUEERS on the front wall to collect the insurance money.

The media, and society as a whole, needs to become less gullible. Activists ought to give the police at least a week to determine the culprit before leaping to Twitter to coin the next hip protest hashtag. Journalists should let the police investigate before writing long, sympathetic stories about what the “hate crimes” say about our allegedly bigoted society.

Because, in reality, there’s only one thing that these hoaxes say about our society: that we’re all mugs. Especially white people, who typically serve as the villains in these hoaxes and beat themselves up every time one of these nasty progressive liars dreams up a poop swastika.

HATE CRIME HOAXES: A TIMELINE

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook. Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published. Hear him every Friday on The Milo Yiannopoulos Show. Write to Milo at milo@breitbart.com.