And Now for Some Real “Fake News”

David Burge, the incomparable “Iowahawk,” put out one of those tweets a few months ago that cuts right to the heart of the matter. I don’t have the exact Tweet handy, but it ran something like, “Why is it that racist graffiti always seems to turn up in Brooklyn rather than Alabama?” He might have added college campuses, where the supposed sighting of a “poop swastika” in a bathroom has very nearly ruined the University of Missouri.

I know of a few genuine incidents of racist graffiti by alt-right nutjobs, but most of these incidents of racist graffiti turn out to be hoaxes, provocations by leftists—and usually minorities. (One recent partial exception may have occurred at Berkeley, where a poster announcing an upcoming pro-Israel speech from Alan Dershowitz was defaced with a swastika, but I suspect this was done by the kind of leftist who perversely equates Israel with Nazism, so the basic theorem still holds.)

Today the Washington Post reports on another such recent case out of Michigan:

A black man is charged in racist graffiti incidents that shook Mich. campus, drew national attention

By Fred Barbash

Last fall and in the spring, the otherwise quiet campus of Eastern Michigan University was hit by three ugly incidents of vandalism targeting blacks that rocked the community.

The first came in September, when “KKK” was sprayed in red, white and blue paint on the wall of a dormitory, along with a threatening racial slur telling blacks to “leave” the school in Ypsilanti, about 11 miles southeast of Ann Arbor.

Then, on Halloween, the same ominous hate message using the n-word and ordering blacks to leave showed up on another building, this one right next to the campus’s monument to Martin Luther King.

“It really has rocked our community,” Judith Kullberg, an EMU political scientist and president of the faculty senate told The Washington Post. “In this whole context of a very tense presidential election it has raised anxiety here considerably.” In the spring, a third racist message was left in a men’s restroom stall.

Coming as other campuses were being hit by similar acts of what appeared to be hate vandalism, the incidents sparked protests and made national news.

On Tuesday, the university was shaken again when police announced that a 29-year-old black man, a former student, had been charged with all three crimes.

At this point, why should the university be “shaken”? You’d think that the social science practice of “pattern recognition” would have kicked in by now. Instead, just about every time one of these incidents occur the college will go to DefCon1, cancel classes for a day, hold garment-rending teach-ins, etc. As the Post story reports on this series of incidents:

The incidents prompted strong reactions throughout the community, both on and off campus. The faculty senate condemned them, and held a day-long teach-in about racism and diversity, and some professors held a vigil at one of the vandalized buildings, wearing black to show support for students of color. Student leaders, Ypsilanti city officials and NAACP members held a candlelight vigil. More than 100 students marched to the university president’s house, demanding action.

The school launched several efforts to combat what were seen as hateful attacks, including increased spending for security, additional lighting and cameras on campus, expanded diversity training for university leaders and others, and a presidential commission examining diversity and inclusion.

Here’s an idea: Instead of going to DefCon1 every time someone splashes some racist graffiti on a college campus, how about ignoring it? How about not getting all “shaken” every time someone does something stupid? One reason leftist provocateurs keep doing this is that it gets the desired reaction. Keep in mind that a key demand of race-mongering campus radicals these days is that courses on race, class, and gender be required for all students, and required to be offered in every department—even physics. That the demand their outlook be made compulsory subject matter shows how weak it is. And few things supposedly reinforce the “need” for such instruction that some kind of racist “incident” on campus.

The Post helpfully notes:

The arrest was one of several around the county over the past year in which an apparent act of racism or anti-Semitism was traced not to a hate group but to a suspect belonging to the targeted minority.

In December, for example, an African American member of a historic black church in Greenville, Miss., was charged with setting fire to it, and writing “Vote Trump” on the outside of the building. In March, an American-Israeli Jewish man was arrested in connection with a series of bomb threats aimed at Jewish community centers in the United States and elsewhere.

Seems like maybe people would start to get a clue and not get taken in by the ultimate example of fake news.

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