Rod Thomson

The final take-away from what follows is that America is a pretty frickin’ amazing country when it comes to racism and bigotry.

It’s so good, in fact, that a small but booming industry has sprung up creating hoaxes to perpetuate the illusion of a bigoted country when the fact that there are so many hoaxes is one of the strong proofs of how little there is in reality.

The Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax — he paid Nigerians to pretend to attack him, pour bleach on him and put a noose around his neck — is just the latest. It follows in a long line of hate crime hoaxes being perpetrated by the left, Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, creating an industry that was super fueled by the Trayvon Martin race hoax.

But Trayvon was only the start. Fuel was added in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere. And all of the straight up hoaxes or race-baiting misrepresentations and grew into wildfires with the belching bellows of a credulous, fellow-traveling media.

This running annual survey by Gallup Poll on race relations shows the damage done by a series of hate crime hoaxes starting in 2013.

What happened in 2013? It’s what happened in 2012 that led to 2013. George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, after Martin attacked him and knocked him to the ground. It was self defense. That was the initial State’s Attorney decision after interviews with witnesses and examining all of the physical evidence. No charges.

But 2012, you may recall, was an election year. Barack Obama was in the midst of his re-election campaign and had already shown himself more than willing to stoke racial tensions — both purposely and incidentally — for his own purposes. The national media, and we all understand they are aligned with Democratic politicians and were major allies of Obama, ginned up the story of outrage that a white man had killed a young black teen in cold blood and was walking away scot free. Pictures of Trayvon in the media were from when he was 13 and pretty young and innocent looking.

The problem was that Trayvon was 18 and a filled out man. His social media accounts showed a full-size young man brooding in a hoodie or giving us all the finger — pictures the media refused to run, sticking with the five-year-old photo of a skinny kid. The other problem: Zimmerman was not white. He was Hispanic.

The photo the media ran most often:

Photos of the young man who actually attacked Zimmerman:

No matter. The narrative was set. This is not to say it was OK to shoot him because of the photos. His actions apparently dictated that.

It is to say that the media was particularly egregious on this hoax, actively participating in it. Beyond just absurd credulity and using the wrong photo, CNN and NBC News were both caught manipulating Zimmerman’s 911 tape to twist him into a racist by badly taking things out of context and warping some of the words. ABC News actually airbrushed a photo of Zimmerman’s bloodied scalp to remove the wounds he received from Martin.

The narrative whipping up the public, prosecutors ended up charging Zimmerman with murder — a wild overreach that was doomed from the beginning. It went to trial and Zimmerman was duly acquitted after a full-fledged circus because while the race-inflaming industry had changed the narrative and the charges, the evidence itself had not changed.

But the damage was done. Florida was branded again as racist. America was racist. Black men were being gunned down on the streets. And the racial tensions that had been finally healing were cut back open again because it benefitted Obama and the Democratic, race-hustling machine let by Al Sharpton and the NAACP.

Gallup’s poll showed a plunge in American attitudes on race relations the following year when it was taken. All based on a hate crime hoax.

It got worse. In 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a black community, part of the St. Louis metro area, a black teen named Michael Brown was shot by a white cop and killed, his body laying in the street until paramedics arrived. The race-baiting industry, led by the media megaphone portion, went into high gear, including reporting that Brown had put his hands up and said don’t shoot. “Hands up don’t shoot” became the mantra of activists and many in the media. Riots ensued. The police officer went into hiding and Black Lives Matter was birthed.

But this too was a hate crime hoax. It turns out, when the investigation was done and all the evidence in, even Obama’s race-driven Justice Department found no cause against the police officer because “hands up don’t shoot” never happened. What actually took place was that Brown, always called a teen despite being a nearly 300-pound 19-year-old man, had just robbed a Korean grocery store and threatened the owner. It’s on tape.

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When the officer responding to the call saw him walking down the street, he told him to stop. Brown ultimately ended up attacking the officer, punched him in the face and tried to take his gun. The officer shot Brown multiple times and killed him. There’s no disputing this as even Obama’s team had to admit this is what happened.

But the burning, looting and rioting that resulted from the irresponsible (at best) media hoax reporting had done more damage to American race relations. In 2014 and 2015, Gallup’s poll fell further. It leveled out at a much worse place by 2016 and has actually stayed steady at that point through 2018. So six years ago, the number of blacks who thought race relations between blacks and white was bad nearly doubled, from 29 percent in 2012 to 53 percent by 2015. It actually dropped a little by 2018 to 47 percent, but still very high. Whites track that trajectory.

Hoax hate crimes are nothing really new. They’ve been used to further the left’s agenda for decades. In 1987, Al Sharpton created the Tawana Brawley hoax, which claimed that four white men raped a black girl. It never happened, it finally came out. But riots and at least one actual death stemmed from the hoax.

Sharpton has been well-rewarded for lying and creating hysteria over the hoax. He got national recognition and displaced Jesse Jackson as the ultimate race hustler. He made millions of dollars, was given a television show, a talk radio show and even ran for president in 2004. Oh, and he was invited to Obama’s White House 82 times — to advise on matters of race. Frankly, it appears Obama took his advice.

The Daily Caller has compiled a list of 21 of the most egregious hate crime hoaxes just during the Trump administration. (Other sites have the total, including small ones, at nearly 400.) There are many more, but these are a few that stand out. They range from racist hate crime hoaxes to anti-gay hate crime hoaxes to anti-Muslim hate crime hoaxes. Basically, the full panoply of the left.

Note, that these all disappeared from the news immediately upon being determined by authorities to be hoaxes. But the media continues to jump on the next one. Remember way back to the Covington school boys hate crime hoax, before the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax?

Of course, unless you file a false police report, and the police decide to actually charge you with that — there is no downside to hoaxing and a lot of upside potential. The cost-benefit analysis for the hoaxer is very positive.

There will be more, and the media will leap to believe them. And American race relations and divisions will either remain bad or get deeper.

Wait, here’s one new hot off the presses. Two days ago, The Detroit Free Press reported that a transgender, gay-rights activist who had fought for a local anti-discrimination ordinance in Jackson, Michigan, and had his house burned down in 2017, blamed haters, was just charged with arson for setting the fire himself. It’s like clockwork.

Notice that the hate crime hoaxes are not just regarding blacks, although they are an important part of intersectional politics of the left. It is also gays, Muslims and so on. This has helped fuel intersectional politics, continuing the broad hoax that America is a racist, bigoted place.

The really ironic part is that progressive Democrats have to continually keep making up these hoaxes, because there is so little racism and bigotry left in the United States. Yet the perceptions are wildly different. We know why, and we know who benefits.

Rod Thomson is an author, host of Tampa Bay Business with Rod Thomson on the Salem Radio Network, TV commentator and former journalist, and is Founder of The Revolutionary Act. Rod also is co-host of Right Talk America With Julio and Rod on the Salem Radio Network.

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