The Poop on the Poop Swastika [With Comment by John]

It appears the infamous University of Missouri “poop swastika” is authentic—which still doesn’t mean it isn’t a hoax. The police have released their report, and photos. In the interest of keeping Power Line from becoming a crappy site, I won’t repost the photos here. If you want to see them, wander over to our friends at The Federalist, who have been chasing after the story. (I was just telling Ben Domenech of The Federalist on Monday that at Power Line, we wake up every morning and say, “Beat Ricochet!” and now also “Beat The Federalist”!, since they are our best competition. But sometimes we gotta give ’em a link.)

If you care to take in the photo of this purported fecal fascism, I think you’ll be as underwhelmed as I am. If this was actually done as a deliberate racist provocation (rather than a hoax), the perpetrator is pretty pathetic.

Over at Commentary, Noah Rothman reports on why we can expect most of these incidents to be hoaxes:

When it comes to investigating accusations of racism on campus, there are mountains of reasons for skepticism. . .

A plague of incidents involving falsified accusations of discrimination, often perpetrated by the accusers themselves, has recently become lamentably commonplace on American college campuses.

In order to combat the supposed scourge of “structural racism,” it seems that much of it has to be invented. A grossly racist flyer circulated on the campus of Ohio’s Oberlin College in 2013 sparked massive campus-wide protests and resulted in cancelled classes. The pamphlet repeatedly used anti-gay, anti-Jewish, and anti-black slurs, and demanded that all these undesirables be locked in “cages,” but it turned out to be the work of two liberal activists. One of the hoaxers was a member of the group “White Allies Against Structural Racism.” Worse still, the campus administrators knew that this incident was a hoax even as the classes for which their students were paying exorbitant fees to attend were being cancelled.

In 2012, a University of Wisconsin, Parkside student found herself on a racist “hit list” that included the names of a number of African-American students targeted for violence. That list appeared several days after two nooses made out of rubber bands appeared on campus. The incidents exploded in the news and became the focus of an investigation by the Kenosha County District Attorney’s office, but that investigation revealed that this student who originally exposed the plot was behind the whole affair. What gave her away was the fact that the only name on the “hit list” spelled correctly was her own.

The student activists on Vassar College’s Orwellian-named “Bias Incident Response Team” found themselves busy indeed in November of 2013. They were supposedly combating an epidemic of hateful and insensitive messages directed toward blacks, women, and the transgendered scrawled and spray-painted on student residencies. Guess what? The perpetrators of this act of bias were none other than the members of the anti-bigotry brigade themselves.

JOHN adds: I don’t understand why the swastika, assuming it wasn’t a hoax, is taken as a provocation against African-American students. The swastika is associated primarily with anti-Semitism. I’m not sure I have ever heard of it used specifically as an anti-black symbol, whereas anti-Semites, when they spray-paint symbols on synagogues, etc., universally choose the swastika. So did Jewish students at the University of Missouri obstruct the homecoming parade, pitch tents, demand concessions from the administration, throw bricks through windows, and so on?

I know, stupid question.

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