Actor Jussie Smollett, who faked an anti-black, anti-gay hate crime against himself in the dead of the Chicago winter, and then escaped charges on likely political connections for filing a false police report, is starting to inspire copy cats looking for the same sweet deal.

A Manhattan straphanger who claimed to have been attacked by two men yelling gay slurs was actually the one doing the attacking, according to police.

Cops say the 25-year-old, who has not been identified, set upon the two men at the Chambers St. station in Tribeca while on an uptown A train.

They had gotten into a verbal altercation before things got physical, the young man originally alleged.

Police interviewed multiple people, however, who witnessed the incident and said the straphanger was the aggressor. Video obtained by police allegedly shows him spitting at subway riders when the suspects-turned-victims step in and try to stop him.

This isn't the only hate-crime hoax seen in the wake of the Smollett hoax - there have been other incidents around crimes, some against minorities, gay people or women in the wake of the incident.

But this new one pretty well illustrates what's going on here in the wake of the Smollett fiasco: Fake a hate crime, yell homophobia and after you're caught, worry not about consequences, because there won't be any. That's what happened in the Smollett case and sure enough, we are seeing a repeat in New York. Word is out.

Obviously, this is the going thing now, given that cops don't want to get too entangled in identity politics issues in the matter of stopping crimes, so the department declined to press charges. That's about par these days -- this case in England in 2014 also brought no charges. It signals that a pattern is occurring - a host of fake hate-cirmes -- and it's effectively now the status quo. Good luck to any cop who tries to solve a real hate crime, given the string of phoninesses incentivized by victim culture and lack of consequences with these incidents.

What can we conclude from this? That there will be more of these farces and they're starting, so pity the society that has to put up with them if heaven forbid, the cops aren't able to expose them as frauds and the city has to make a big payout for civil rights violations. Making hoaxes risk-free to hoaxers is exactly the formula.

Update: Blog item has been corrected. Thanks to Nick Robinson.