“A massive racism hoax took place at Oberlin College in February 2013,” Prof. William A. Jacobson writes at his Legal Insurrection blog. Two Oberlin students “made seemingly racist, anti-Semitic and other such posters, graffiti and emails for the purpose of getting a reaction on campus, not because they believed the hostile messages. At least one of the two was an Obama supporter with strong progressive, anti-racist politics:
I was right. Michele Malkin was right.
The enormity of the hoax cannot be overstated, and it could not have taken place without the cover up by the Oberlin administration. Had Oberlin’s President gone on television or issued a statement that the acts were a hoax, the campus and media would not have devoted weeks to portraying Oberlin as having a racism problem.
The Oberlin administration has a lot of answering to do to the community, the nation, and to Oberlin alumni. How must those alumni feel to see their school smeared based on a hoax. Will Lena Dunham now tweet about it? Will CNN cover the hoax aspect as deeply as it did the incidents? Will Melissa Harris-Perry talk about the role of racist hoaxes in creating a false narrative of racism?
Read the whole thing. Are we at the point where the first assumption regarding any racial incident on campus is that it’s a false flag operation until verified otherwise from multiple sources?
Update: “I pretty much assume that any ‘racist incident’ is probably a hoax nowadays,” Glenn Reynolds writes, responding to the Oberlin hoax.
Related: My March interview with Greg Lukianoff of FIRE on his recent book, Unlearning Liberty.
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