The attentive folks at The College Fix, a student-run watchdog group, have pulled together more than 50 hate crime hoaxes perpetrated on U.S. college campuses during the last seven years.
Between 2012 and 2014, The College Fix reported nine such campus hate crime hoaxes, such as that of two black students at Montclair State University who complained of hateful and threatening graffiti on their dorm room doors targeting blacks and women.
One of the messages read, “Black Bitch you will die.” During their investigation, however, police discovered that the students had written the graffiti themselves.
The College Fix reported another 11 hate crime hoaxes in 2015, including the story of a female Muslim student who claimed she was “stalked and threatened by a guy with a gun.” It turned out that she had fabricated the entire incident.
Three “nooses” discovered hanging near the hall where Black Lives Matter had held a meeting at the University of Delaware turned out not to be nooses, but “remnants of paper lanterns” left over from an event.
In 2016, Elon University students were appalled by graffiti saying, “Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista” after the presidential election. It was learned that a Latino student wrote the note.
In December of that year, a female Muslim Baruch College student complained she had been assaulted on a New York subway by “three drunk white men” who were shouting, “Donald Trump!” Police later arrested the woman herself for having made up the story.
In 2017, a group of liberal students had hung posters with the message “Report Illegal Aliens; America is a White Nation” in an effort to incriminate conservatives.
A black Air Force Academy cadet confessed that year to writing “Go home ni**er” on black students’ dorm room doors, while in Kentucky, a black man filed a false police report about N-word graffiti and a threat painted on his car near Kansas State University. Investigators learned the man himself had written the note.
Similarly, a threat on social media targeting black students at a Maryland high school last March turned out to have actually been written by a black student.
For a rundown of the list of campus hate crime hoaxes, see here.
Unsurprisingly, The College Fix was one of the first groups to unearth inconsistencies in the recent Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax, noting that the case “sounds a lot like college race hoaxes.”