Not long after Charlottesville, a news story spread nationally that I wrote about here at PJ Media. It seemed to perfectly match the violence and hysteria we were seeing from Antifa: it was about a guy who said he was attacked for having what his attacker thought to be a “neo-Nazi haircut.”

It turns out it was manufactured:

Police became skeptical of [Joshua] Witt’s story when they reviewed surveillance video and saw no one running from the scene. They also found a transient who lives in the area who matched the description Witt gave, but cleared him as a suspect. Video from a nearby sporting goods store showed Witt purchasing a small knife. When police confronted Witt with that information on Aug. 24, he admitted accidentally cutting himself with the knife while in his car parked in front of the store.

So much stupid here.

First, this is illegal. Reporting crap that never happened is a crime, and Witt will be prosecuted for it.

Second, if Witt thought he was somehow helping the fight against Antifa, he wasn’t. In fact, this is a massive setback in a lot of ways. Now, unless we have video of violence against the right, the left can point to this incident right here as a reason to disbelieve it ever happened.

How do I know that will be the case? Because it’s what we do. We’ve had so many false reports about people on the right attacking leftists that turned out to be false that many of us just roll our eyes when we hear about a new one. We don’t take it seriously anymore.

Yes, we have a lot more examples of “false flag” operations designed to make everyone on the right look like a hateful racist, but it doesn’t take much. This will serve the left well enough, at least for a while.

This doesn’t even touch on the waste of resources the police department spent looking for a fictional attacker, time that could have been spent looking for real criminals.

To say I’m furious over this is an understatement. The friends who believed him, people like me who wrote about him sympathetically, the police who spent time and resources trying to track down the attacker: Witt exploited us all.