Jussie Smollett and Hate Crime Hoaxes
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I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. What happened that night, Chessie? When I landed in Chicago and Frank Gatson, who's like my uncle, he picked me up and then we got back to the apartment. There was no food. And so I went out to Walgreens thinking that they were 24 hours and to have a smoke. Walgreens was closed. So I called him up and I said, hey, I'm going to run to Subway, which was across the street, and I'm gonna get a salad. Do you want anything?

In January 2019, the actor and singer Jussie Smollett claimed that he was the victim of a violent hate crime. I went to the subway and got the order. And as I was crossing the intersection, I heard "Empire." And I don't answer to "Empire." My name ain't Empire. And I didn't answer. I kept walking, and then I heard, "Empire ." So I turned around and I said, "The did you just say to me?" And I see the attacker.

He said, "This MAGA country punches me right in the face." So I punched his ass back. Smollett said that two men beat him up, poured bleach over his head, and shouted homophobic and racial slurs at him. And then he said they tied a noose around his neck. I noticed the rope around my neck and I started screaming. And I said, "There's a rope around my neck." It sounded completely horrific. Immediately after the news broke, celebrities filled social media with their support.

Many said that they were saddened to hear about this racist and homophobic attack, but that they weren't surprised. In the words of actress Lena Waithe, this is America. Politicians soon followed suit. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris cited what happened to Jussie as a perfect example of the continued practice of modern-day lynchings, and they pushed Congress to pass their anti-lynching bill. But some, maybe many, in private, had doubts.

Chicago is the liberal capital of the Midwest. It's been run by Democrats since 1931. The night of the attack was one of the coldest of an already cold winter. It was dipping down to 10 degrees below zero with wind chills in the negative 30s. How strange that Jussie would randomly be out in a polar vortex at 2 a.m., only to be recognized by two violent Trump supporters as one of the actors from the TV hip-hop show Empire.

Yet, if you looked for this kind of skepticism from the journalist who covered the story, you couldn't find it. It's been two weeks since that night left actor Jussie Smollett bruised but not broken, and he's still processing the raw emotions. In fact, when Smollett sat down for his first television interview... I'm pissed off. What is it that has you so angry? Is it the

The attackers? It's the attackers, but it's also the attacks. He used the opportunity to say that anyone asking for evidence or suggesting that parts of his story didn't quite seem to add up. It's like, you know, at first it was a thing of like, listen, if I tell the truth, then that's it because it's the truth. And then it became a thing of like, oh, it's not necessarily that you don't believe that this is the truth. You don't even want to see it.

the truth. — were just further proof of America's refusal to see the true nature of this country. It feels like if I had said it was a Muslim or a Mexican or someone Black, I feel like the doubters would have supported me a lot much more, a lot more. The story, Jussie explained, was so much bigger than him. And that says a lot about the place that we are in our country right now, the fact that we have these fear mongrels

these people that are trying to separate us, it's offensive. And when asked why he thought these Trump supporters specifically targeted him: Why do you think you were targeted? I can just assume. I mean, I come really, really hard against 45. He said it was because of his activism against Donald Trump. I come really, really hard against his administration.

If the attackers are never found, how will you be able to heal? Um, I don't know. Let's just hope that they are. Let's not go there yet. Let's, um... I was talking to a friend and I said, "I just want them to find them." And she said, "Sweetie, they're not gonna find them." That just made me so angry because... So I'm just gonna be left here with this?

So they get to go free and go about their life and possibly attack someone else and I'm here to left with the aftermath of this bull. I still want to believe with everything that has happened that there's something called justice. Because if I stop believing that, then what's it all for? I will never be the man that this did not happen to. I am forever changed. Good morning, everyone. Before I get started,

on why we're here. You know, as I look out into the crowd, I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention because that's who really deserves the amount of attention that we're giving to this particular incident.

After weeks of investigating, Eddie Johnson, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, held a press conference. This announcement today recognizes that Empire actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career. It turned out that Jussie Smollett's story appeared to be completely, totally made up. I'm left hanging my head and asking why.

Why would anyone, especially an African American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations? How could someone look at the hatred and suffering associated with that symbol and see an opportunity to manipulate that symbol to further his own public profile?

How can an individual who's been embraced by the city of Chicago turn around and slap everyone in this city in the face by making these false claims? The police said not only did Jussie Smollett lie about what happened to him, he himself directed the attack in great detail.

He hired and paid two Nigerian men, men that were his friends, and he rehearsed with them and coached them on exactly how to attack him. Now, our city has problems. We know that. But to put the national spotlight on Chicago for something that is both egregious and untrue is simply shameful. To make things worse, the accusations within this phony attack received national attention for weeks.

My guest today, Wilford Riley, is an expert on hate crime hoaxes. He literally wrote the book. It's called Hate Crime Hoaxes.

Will is a political scientist at Kentucky State University, which is a historically black university. And today, the two of us go through the surprisingly long history of fake hate crimes. We talk about just how common they are, what social incentives drive them, and why he thinks Jussie Smollett, a rich and famous celebrity, would go to such lengths, risking his career, his reputation, everything, to gain the status of a victim.

Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Will Reilly, thank you so much for doing this. Glad to be here. You have taken on a subject that's controversial to the point that even I, and I'm someone who's generally not afraid of controversy, I'm sort of scared to touch. How did you get into the topic of hate crime hoaxes? Well, my super villain origin story, I guess. Super.

So I was in Chicago. I was living kind of that grad student life. I took the major papers. I'd read them in the morning. And there were, in this one period of time, these horrific hate incidents in block that were reported in the city of Chicago. And you may yourself, as a journalist at the time, have read about some of these. But Velvet Rope Ultra Lounge, which was a very gay-friendly club, it was popular with female bisexual college grad students and thus with lots of other people, was

I mean, friends of mine used to dance there. It was burned to the ground. These horrific gay slurs were written throughout the building. Another one, a student at the University of Chicago, I believe a fellow grad, Derek Cacolene, kind of campus activist guy. He claimed that his Facebook and LinkedIn were hacked and people were making these crazy threats to him, threatening to rape him because of his campus activism. And he called his persecutors the UChicago Electronic Army.

Again, a regional, if not national story. He claimed an entire right wing hacker group was chasing him down. The University of Wisconsin Parkside, there were a series of nooses found throughout the campus. And there were these kind of broadsides put up around the campus. Have you ever been there? Very pleasant little suburban Chicago location. And Will, these crimes that you'd been reading about in the paper, how many of these actually turned out to be true?

None. None of them turned out to be real. That's the origin story. I mean, the velvet rope case actually was hilariously unreal. The owner apparently owed a bunch of people a lot of money, and he set his business on fire to collect insurance money and was apparently successful in doing this until his buddy was arrested in a separate drunk driving sting and kind of spilled his beans to the police.

And so they went after this guy and they found out that he'd painted the slurs. He'd bought the paint. He'd set the fire. The U Chicago case was simply made up. They were able to verify by IPs that this guy had done whatever you would have done in that situation, logged into one computer to target himself on another. And Wisconsin Parkside around the same time, they were actually able to identify the perp

Because on the list of black students, the only name spelled correctly, these are mostly ethnic names, was hers. Here at UW Parkside, sheriff's deputies investigating a hit list with the names of African-American students were quickly drawn to one student's name. So all the other names are spelled incorrectly and her own name was spelled correctly.

And our detectives kind of looked at that and said, well, that's interesting. The sheriff's department says Friday night, the suspect confessed to writing the hit list and including her name on it while never intending to act on the threat. So that's what inspired the book. I saw five or six of these stories. There's also one of these at Michigan Tech.

And when you see five or six of these national stories collapse, you begin to wonder how often does this happen? So without getting too lost in the numbers, give me a little bit of a sense of the data here. What is the breakdown between real hate crimes and...

and hoax hate crimes. In other words, when I read or hear on Twitter or the Times or wherever about a hate crime, better to assume that it's real or better to be skeptical?

Well, I think it really depends what you're talking about. For example, in the case of sexual assaults or, you know, jumping outside a club or something, I think that the large majority of reported crimes and even hate crimes probably occurred. So, I mean, police shouldn't become mocking and unsympathetic to people that claim, you know, mundane stories of criminal violence. If someone says that they got their ass kicked outside a country bar or a tough black club at 2 a.m., I mean, that probably happened.

But the more high-profile stories in this genre really did turn out to be fake more often than not. What do you feel people need to hear the most from this story? I think that what people need to hear is just the truth. Jussie Smollett. He said you're lazy. Erica Thomas. You need to go.

That is Representative Erica Thomas of Austell. Now, she says a man confronted her at a Publix in Mableton when she was shopping with her nine-year-old daughter. This is this Congresswoman who claimed that she was assaulted verbally in a high-end grocery store, but it turned out that she got into a slight verbal argument with another guy. He was a Cuban Democratic Party activist. He actually showed up at her press conference to rebut her. So to call me what she wants to believe for her political views

purposes is so untrue. The terrible Nikki Jolly house fire. A court hearing is scheduled today for the gay rights activist who's accused of intentionally starting a fire that destroyed his home in 2017. Set their house on fire with all these purebred dogs in it, claimed that bigots had done it. The fire on August 10th of last year injured two firefighters and killed two dogs and three cats that were inside.

Today, prosecutors charged Jolly with starting that fire. I mean, you had this case in D.C. where someone claimed they were held down, where their dreadlocks were chopped off by what she called tough white boys. A 12-year-old girl in Northern Virginia admitted she lied about three white classmates cutting off her dreadlocks. The girl accused...

There's Grand Rapids. Hurled racial slurs at the five-year-old while he urinated on the little girl's head. This young black girl claimed that a white man peed on her. No charges will be filed against the man accused of urinating on a five-year-old girl, and it's because, according to prosecutors and GRPD today, the child involved...

lied about what really happened. - Air Force Academy, where a general had to come to campus and make a speech against prejudice. - You may have heard that some people down in the prep school wrote some racial slurs on some message boards. If you're outraged by those words, then you're in the right place.

That kind of behavior has no place at the prep school, it has no place at USAPHA, and it has no place in the United States Air Force. People are saying he should run for the Senate or even the presidency. You should be outraged not only as an airman, but as a human being.

It turned out every one of a series of apparent hate offenses had been committed by a disaffected black cadet. Graffiti was discovered this morning on the side of a building at Anne King Hall. And on the wall, KKK painted in red, white, and blue with the word "leave" and the N-word.

University leaders are condemning it. Eastern Michigan, I mean, this is someone's writing graffiti, the worst kind of slurs. 29-year-old Eddie Kerlin, a former student here, has been charged with three counts of malicious destruction of property. He allegedly spray-painted KKK and the N-word around campus. Turned out to be a black student trying to draw attention to racism. It started Wednesday with a noose hanging in a residence hall. Michigan Tech. A barrage of racist death threats.

Death threats sent to everyone on campus. Bomb threats and death threats against people of color. These stories that draw the attention of the national media because they are so sensationalistic and they seem to indicate no racial change, all of those were fakes.

Wow. So when it comes to high profile cases that make their way into the front pages of our newspapers, into primetime on cable news, those are the ones that tend to be suspicious. Yeah, it would be very difficult to think of one of those cases in the recent past that's been confirmed as true.

So, OK, just before we leave the numbers behind, you're saying that the likelihood that a hate crime that I hear about in the press is a hoax is like half the time it is a hoax, more than half the time? What I really just say when discussing this is there are only about 7000 hate crimes reported in a typical year. If you go look at the FBI hate crime data.

And of those, I find that only about 8 to 10 percent of hate crimes receive the kind of national or reputable regional reporting I need to put them in the data set. So you're now talking about 700 cases a year. And again, over a period of five years, although it's a little bit of range there, I found 500 fakes.

So, I mean, that would be the estimate in the book is that there's a confirmed faking rate of perhaps 15 percent, at least in widely reported, widely discussed incidents. So let's go back to what I think of as the first big high profile hate crime that I was ever aware of that turned out to be untrue. And that, of course, is the case of Tawana Brawley. Can you remind us of her story?

Yeah, in 1991, a young woman named Tawana Brawley went missing for a few days. Tawana Brawley, a black teenager from Wappingers Falls, New York, was found last November in a plastic garbage bag. Brawley turns up laying on the street in Wappingers Falls, New York, kind of working class suburb. Brawley said she'd been abducted and raped by six white men.

One supposedly a police officer. She's covered with feces. It's been smeared into her face, into her hair. She had KKK written across her chest and nigger nigger across her stomach. She's got racist language written on her, as I recall, KKK and things like that. And she's covered with what looked like fine golden hairs. So this became this major story of...

We are brutalizing our young black women. No justice, no peace! Sharpton showed up, Reverend Al Sharpton. Led by Reverend Al Sharpton, her lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, charged police and even the governor with a cover-up in the investigation. They said Brawley couldn't get justice in a system insensitive to blacks.

They told Tawana and her family not to talk to anyone. And the short form is that it collapsed. Those allegations are untrue. The people who made those allegations lied. After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony, and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found beyond any doubt Tawana Brawley's story is a lie. I mean, the NYPD...

They found out the feces came from a large dog in a house a couple yards down from Brawley. The cuts and so on to her coat, her clothing had been made by her boyfriend's knife. - Their outrageous, irresponsible acts

have increased the atmosphere of tension between the races. There was no doubt that this was a hoax. The actual story is that Brawley had spent a couple nights with her boyfriend. She was a young woman, as I recall, about 16. Her father was going to react in typical working-class dad fashion. She was afraid. And so this whole story was invented to derail that. This is an enormous national story. Once it starts to unravel...

What happens? What happened to some extent was that the black and white allied radical communities didn't change a thing. You would have to be a fool or a racist or a combination of both to believe.

T-shirts saying Tawana told the truth became very popular in New York. How shameful you are that you would take a young girl and try to discredit her and try to say in Emmett Till fashion she did it to herself. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. It was almost unbelievable to watch. Yeah, I mean, in the Spike Lee movie, Do the Right Thing, there's graffiti in the movie that says Tawana told the truth.

Yeah, this just went on and on. And Tawana Brawley, as far as I understand, has never just said that she committed a hoax. My name is Tawana Brawley. I'm not a liar and I'm not crazy. I simply just want justice and then I want to be left alone. And that ties into...

The full narrative here, because there's an audience for her saying that she told the truth. There apparently is a pool of people that believes that the entire sort of white run justice system set up this poor young black girl. It's not a tiny pool. Right. I mean, the line that stays with me about the aftermath of this case comes from Patricia Williams, the legal scholar.

She wrote this thing in 1991 that I think sums up so much about where we have landed in general on this topic. And she said this, she was the victim of some unspeakable crime, no matter how she got there, no matter who did it to her, even if she did it to herself. Which reminds me of the perspective that so many have about Jussie Smollett, that no matter the details of his case, it may as well be true because he is both a black man and a gay man in America. Mm.

My take on this is that this is a very common perspective among elite journalists in the academy. The problem is that it's dangerously wrong and racist in a subtle way. But yeah, there's a fondness for this kind of nonsense. I mean, I remember the exact line that you just said, whoever did it to her and even if she did it to herself.

The idea being that any pathological, insane criminal behavior on the part of a black person is a response to some racist force out there in society. And we've seen the same thing with Jussie Smollett. I mean, the idea is that the very fact that a black person is behaving in this lunatic, amoral manner must indicate that real incidents like this have happened or that—

He'd been driven mad by the level of racism he experienced. And I would propose an alternative hypothesis.

which is that far from racism being constant and blacks and whites being at each other's throats, we've created a formal system of programs like institutional affirmative action that reward victimization. And black people are just people like anyone else. We're closing the test score gaps, and we've made up a decent chunk of the last block of presidents and vice presidents, and black people are responding intelligently to these incentives.

But yeah, many people seem to believe the opposite, that the fact that a black person is a criminal implies that he is a victim of racism or something like this. I just think that's crazy. Let's go through, if we could, some of the more recent cases of hate crime hoaxes. And I wondered if we could go to 2015. Tell me the story of Scott Lattin, the police supporter in Texas and what he did.

So Scott Lattin was a guy who had a nice new, probably $30,000 four-wheel drive vehicle. And he wrote, bleep your family, your faith, and your flag on the side of the truck, as I recall.

He wrote Black Lives Matter over the logo that said something like Police Lives Matter. He essentially destroyed this piece of property and tried to blame this on Black Lives Matter. And again, police got involved, their cameras in the neighborhoods, they've got forensic teams, and it turned out he had done this.

And this was one of a couple of cases of this kind. She said she was violently attacked at an ATM, all because of a bumper sticker on her car supporting John McCain. The first one that I found was a woman who had been campaigning against Barack Obama. Woman's claims that someone robbed and beat her and scratched the letter B into her face. Who had...

bee into her own cheek and said that she'd been attacked by black people who objected to her being a conservative voter and campaign worker. But as police dug deeper into this local McCain volunteer story, they found huge inconsistencies. And now they say her whole story was a sham. There's an entire segment of cases like that that come from the mostly white hard right.

And they look exactly the same as the cases on the left. Exactly. And it's like they're examples of people who are sort of

trying to say in the way that they're carrying out or staging this hate crime, look, this is who they really are. This is who the other side really is. And in our polarized world, especially in our polarized media, the reason these stories catch fire is that, you know, everything is sort of a set narrative and these things are like the most sort of extreme versions of a story that's already been written in a way.

Yeah, that's actually an excellent way of putting it. I mean, in political science, we would say that dehumanizing your opponent is a negative but very common step in extreme politics. So in the case of All Lives Matter, for example, so why are you supporting these extreme pro-police policies? Well, because look what they are and look what they did. They said, screw your flag and your faith and your family, and they did it by destroying my truck. Again, the only problem is that it didn't happen. So

So what you say is pretty much correct. Like when you're hearing a lot of stories about things that are on the very boundary of the potential during kind of a heated time, during a public debate period, be very skeptical of them. I think that's a good point to take from this. Let's go to the case of Kayla McKelvey and what happened to her on campus. Most of my friends are in their rooms.

They haven't left since the tweets went out. The threat started on Tuesday night as black students gathered underneath the campus's clock tower for a peaceful rally to bring awareness to what they say is racism on college campuses. Yeah, so the Kayla McKelvey case is one of the craziest of these. I mean, Kayla McKelvey, this was 2015, and she was a student activist leader at Keon University up there in New Jersey.

And she was leading what she had expected to be a fairly major anti-racist protest on one particular day. And there wasn't very high student attendance. And this had been, if you want to call it that, a problem at well-integrated camp.

So she actually left the event and set up a Twitter account with, this might be apocryphal, but a name like kill black students at Keon and started tweeting out these extreme threats. One of them was a death threat to all of the minority members of that Keon campus community. And obviously...

People started going to the protests. I talked to several professors on this campus today who told me that they canceled their classes because there were so few students planning on coming. And those who did have classes said there were maybe three or four students in classes that normally have 25 or 30. Administrators here at Kean University say they don't have a solid count, but it was clear that hundreds, if not

thousands of students steered clear of this campus today in the wake of those threats. In fact, this became the center of a small but real storm of anger. I mean, people were asking whether the president of the college was competent to handle the extremes of racism, quote unquote, that were taking place on campus. Wouldn't you think on a day that your campus had received bomb threats and death threats against

people of color that you would have all type of law enforcement there until you can substantiate that that claim has been put to rest. A coalition of black ministers who called for Kean University's president to step down.

But the person responsible for kill all black students at Keehan was the campus protest leader. A former leader of a black student group at a North Jersey college admits to tweeting anonymous threats against black students. Kayla McKelvey entered a guilty plea yesterday to creating a false public alarm. I mean, there was a substantial amount of local and federal time devoted to finding out who was responsible for this. Right.

Right. They spend like upwards of $100,000 only to identify Kayla McKelvey as the creator of these threats. Yeah. So it's not without cost. I think sometimes we can look at these instances and sort of laugh and say, isn't that crazy? But it's resources that could be going to actual crimes. The other thing that stuck out to me about this example is that

Kean University put out a statement at the end of the whole brouhaha saying that the school continues to, as they put it, wholeheartedly respect and support activism. So they couldn't even come to the point of sort of chastising this person. At least five or six of these cases have ended with that exact statement. I mean, we at Blank University continue to full-throatedly support diversity and activism.

And that might not necessarily be my reaction to one of the larger minority student groups on campus wasting $100,000 of my money. But...

Yeah, it's a complicated dynamic. I think that you see so many of these in academia first. I do think there is a strategic picture here, though, because people know that, one, they'll be taken very seriously by power players like the dean, the provost, even the local department office of whatever three letter agency, because they are upper middle class students at a top 300 university. I think that is their.

But they also know that there's going to be a pretty automatic rewards procedure while that's happening. One of the things that I kept noticing was that a lot of these cases weren't followed by kind of an unsympathetic police interview. They were followed by sort of mass rallies, you know, public statements from the campus, events hosted where the student who made this accusation got to speak, and people's

And people are more likely to engage in, quote unquote, bad behavior when the incentives support it. And I think the incentive structure on a university campus is very different from what it would be in a working class urban neighborhood, for example, or even an office park in that same city. OK, one last one, because it's one that I find actually quite heartbreaking. Talk to me about Yasmin Saweed.

Yeah, so Yasmin Saweed, this is an example of another category of this that we've seen pretty often. I think you could put even Tawana Brawley in this category, where people, unfortunately, generally women, given a lot of the social norms and kind of trad working class America, have been doing something like spending the night out having sex and drinking and find themselves needing an excuse, right?

And solving that problem by claiming to have been attacked by, and again, we've seen this on both sides, kind of the other man's warriors. Yasmin Saeed is someone who claimed that she was riding one of the famous cross New York City trains. I think it was the 6th.

And she was attacked. Yasmeen Saeed claimed that a group of drunk men yelled at her and tried to tear off her hijab. They kept saying, you don't belong here. Get out of this country. Go back to your country. And finally, they came really close and they were like, take that rag off your head. The young woman said she was approached by three drunk men who ripped the strap on her purse and tried to pull off her hijab.

They were surrounding me from behind and they were like, oh, look, it's an effing terrorist. New York City, which has a few crimes on an annual basis, decided to devote a whole lot of time to this one. So they pulled the film on the train and they hauled the weed in for three or four interviews and so on. And I think, again...

Her goal would have just been to make up the story, have the report go to the desk of the old flatfoot cop, have him ignore it and have her life continue. She'd been out partying apparently pretty hard with her boyfriend, who was a Christian guy from a different region.

But that's not what happened. The investigation went on for a while. It found out she was a fraudster. Her story seemed to be just one more case among many similar reported assaults on Muslim women in recent weeks. Mysteriously, though, one week after she spoke out, police announced that Saweed was reported missing from her family's home in Nassau County. She reappeared on December 10th, but it's unclear where she was during that time. She was questioned again about the alleged hate crime she endured.

This time, investigators say she confessed the story was a lie, something she made up to get out of a, quote, family problem. She later showed up in court. She faced some charges. Here you see her in court, her head shaved. It turns out that she, in fact, admitted to making up that story in order to get out of a family problem. She's been charged with filing a false report.

And she showed up in court with her head shaved. Her father had apparently felt ashamed, grabbed her, beaten her up, and shaved her head. Wow. So there actually is a real story of domestic violence or traditional family violence that underlies this. Like, I actually view Saweed as one of the more sympathetic people in the book. Well, yeah, I mean—

Several of the cases that we've mentioned, frankly, it's a little hard to feel sympathetic to the person because you think about the lies that they told. You think about the way that they've smeared and ruined other people's reputations. You think about the resources that they diverted from police and other law enforcement, you know, that should be going to actual crimes.

But, yeah, in this particular case, you know, you can imagine very easily a girl who's in a very religious, maybe very strict home. And she's dating this guy who's of a different faith. She's out drinking, doing things that she shouldn't. And the lie is sort of told for her.

In my view, much more sympathetic reasons. It's because she wanted to go out with her boyfriend. It's not because she wanted to, you know, stoke political frivolity.

foment for the other side, if you get what I'm saying. Yeah. The deeper thing, I mean, we're almost working out a causal model here to some extent. I mean, the causal model framework is we've given power to victimization. So people can now, putting aside the phony dreck about constant racism and so on, people throw up to try to block this. It's really simple. We've given power to victimization in the USA. This

This is especially true if you're a member of a designated minority group, except for perhaps Asians or Jews. But you can invoke this power to get out of particular situations. You can claim that racial violence is the reason you did something that was considered to be immoral.

You know, you can use a claim of racial or whatever violence to motivate people in your political movement. And because this incentive structure exists, we see I think it's fair to say more and more people doing this. There's no chance that you would find 500 or 1000 cases of this kind concentrated within, say, a decade between 1950 and 1960 or something like that.

Of course, the case that's most relevant right now is that of Jussie Smollett, a case I cannot look away from. What jumps out to you about this case that makes it different from the ones that we've been discussing? I think that the Jussie Smollett case is interesting because it's kind of the archetype.

I mean, the Mona Lisa is not the best human painting, but it is probably the best representative of a genre. And the image has stayed with us for that reason for hundreds of years. And similarly, Smollett is kind of the archetype of this genre where he made this extraordinary claim.

He brought the entire nation to his side. He claimed this was entirely typical. He did it for a partisan and financial reason, and the whole story collapsed. So I think when you look at Jussie Smollett, you see a whole genre of stories that everyone on the urban left kind of knows exists, but that you're not supposed to discuss. Well, I went into a rabbit hole on Jussie Smollett after this story came out, and it

It made his story kind of more confusing to me in a way because I learned that his father is a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union and presumably worked amazingly hard to give his family the kind of opportunities he never had. And Jesse seemed like the culmination of that hard work. He's rich. He's famous. He's beloved. He's great looking. I couldn't figure out how that wasn't enough. Like, how do you understand what motivated him?

Well, I actually think I may understand what motivated him. I mean, I'm interracial myself. I'm black, white, a little bit Native American. I grew up in the hood, but that was because my mom was an inner city teacher for big chunks of her life. I mean, she comes from an upper class family, the wards in Chicago. And there are complicated dynamics around race and class that never really bothered me, but that had a significant effect on a lot of my friends.

So I think for Jussie Smollett, in addition to that sort of question about am I white or am I black, he might have been dealing with the question of why do I seem to feel almost no oppression? The reality of being, in fact, pretty privileged as a black upper class guy in the affirmative action era.

But constantly being told that you are oppressed has a really weird impact on a lot of guys. And with someone in a business as competitive as Jussie's, that seems to have also tied into this idea that I can abuse the power of victimization. So that whole cocktail is going on. Like there probably is a little bit of confusion about racial background. There's the wonder of am I black enough probably at some level because you're not as the son of –

you know, a Russian scientist and a black woman popular in area in a big city, you're not taking a lot of abuse. Am I missing something? Am I...

giving white people too much credit because I don't assume that they're racist against me? All these questions might be running through Jussie Smollett's head. And he's also dealing with being a gay man. And it's interesting to speculate psychologically what was happening with him. But I mean, from a non-sympathetic conservative perspective, you also could just say he believed a great deal of this modern American woke BS and it ended up torpedoing what his father would have wanted for him or his mother as well, probably.

So you think that Jussie Smollett's sense that maybe he wasn't black enough motivated him?

I mean, obviously, if you look at the fact that he faked the most famous racial incident ever, I mean, there had to be some questions about race and class going on in his head. I mean, in law, we call that res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. So the idea that Jussie Smollett had some mental issues and some racial conflict internally, I don't really think is all that debatable. It's a fun game of kind of amateur psychology to try to figure out what motivated him to do what he did.

What I notice is that a lot of upper middle and lower upper class biracial kids seem to have a really complicated relationship with race. And I think one obvious reason for that is that they have experienced in their lives almost no real prejudice of any kind.

At the same time, because we're still sort of insanely following the one drop rule, you're told constantly that you are black and that one of the identifiers of being black is that you have suffered this racial abuse. So a quandary becomes, am I really black? Am I black enough? You often find an intense focus on the tiny examples of racial conflict that do occur in the American upper middle class.

because they illustrate the racism that makes people black. I mean, this is a kind of pastiche of half-assed psychology and sort of Shelby Steele writing, but it's something that you can't help but notice in any urban area. And I would just assume something like that probably played a role here.

Leaving the sort of armchair psychology to the side for a second, one of the things you write about is the motivation not just of the perpetrators, but of all the stakeholders that promote the hoax. This is what you write. An astonishing edifice of power and profit rests upon the assumption that the United States is a racist nation.

I want you, if you could, to talk through this edifice that you're referring to. Let's maybe call it the oppression industrial complex. How do people and organizations profit from this narrative? And maybe let's use the case of Jussie Smollett to explain how that works. Yeah. I mean, one of the realities from a power-based political science perspective is

of American life, again, specifically American upper middle class urban life in particular, is that this massive colossus of entities came together to break racism in the 60s and it never left. And that has substantial impact on the United States. It's just silly to ignore this. I mean, the NAACP, the ADL, a lot of these groups would be among the most powerful in American political life by any reasonable standard. The SPLC, for example, has a well-invested endowment of about $500 million. Right.

That's a bigger endowment than my state university. That's the simplest way to put it. That's one of about 70 such groups.

Black Lives Matter, even we might think of these as sort of kids with signs. But I mean, the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, if I have that name correct, was one of the groups that helped raise about 10.6 billion over the past year and a half. So these BLM chapters have taken in billions of dollars in the recent past. So you're saying that if the reason for your organization existing is to fight hate, then

and you need to fight a particular kind of hate in order to justify your existence, then a high-profile hate crime story, let's say like Jussie's, helps generate donations and elicit support. Now, what do you say to the person who hears that and says, that is like the most cynical possible read?

I mean, I would say I was in the business world for a while and a military guy would be even more cynical than me. I mean, anyone who has spent any time in a serious competitive field, business, the military, athletics, if you look at the average tenure of a coach, journalism, would be very, very skeptical of the claim that people are motivated by morality rather than incentives. I think I'm putting that quite politely. To put it less politely, that claim is idiotic and childlike.

The idea that if you have, say, 10% of the financial power in a society, all of academia, most of major media, all of television media except for Fox, NGO sector, the SPLC, HRC, so on, everyone you see south of Embassy Row in D.C., everyone you see north of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, the idea that all of these people have no incentive following problem and they're just out there seeking to do good is the sort of thing an 18-year-old nun would say. Right.

For whatever reason, we're expected to ignore it in society. But quite obviously, if your institutional mission is fighting racism and racism type A, the refusal to hire or date people of another race has vanished to almost nothing, which it has, the sources are widely available, you're going to do some looking around for racism type B. The one concession I'll make to the non-skeptics is I don't think people say this openly. With the exception of a few straight hustlers like Jesse Jackson, who

No hate for the brethren. But I think most people will say something like, now that we have finally moved past racism type A, as Thomas Sowell would call it, we can recognize the subtler, more micro forms of bigotry that must do nearly as much harm. That's kind of the conscious mind thought process. But the reality—

is nonetheless that that means that you're going to have to redefine racism in nonsensical ways, as we've recently seen Ibram Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, et cetera, do. And it also means, B, there's going to be a massive incentive to respond when you see a type A case. So when Jussie Smollett came on the horizon, the idea was that this is the biggest type A case of all time. Right. It was, I mean, Kamala Harris called it a lynching.

Well, I mean, they had a rope. You know, the Jussie Smollett case was presented as a metaphor for what America is when we thought it was real.

In fact, the real story would have been a metaphor for what America was. And the hoax is a metaphor for what America actually is today, if that makes sense. The reality is that in America, interracial crime right now, if you're looking at classic, like violent interracial crimes between blacks and whites, that's 3% of crime. Like there are 20 million violent crimes and very serious property crimes, you know, burglaries, carjackings in a year.

Of those, about 600,000 max are going to be violent crimes involving a black perp and a white vic or a white perp and a black vic. And

And of those, 80% or so are going to be black on white because they're five times as many whites and they have more money and there's a higher overall black crime rate. So the reality here is that there's almost no problem in this sector. So we often focus on this much older narrative that hasn't been true for 40 or 50 or 60 years.

kind of ignoring the obvious reality in front of everyone's eyes, which is that until last year, crime was way down. And, you know, a vastly disproportionate amount of it is committed by young minority men. So what Jussie Smollett alleged might have been representative of an older America, the reality, which is that in a newer America, less than one person in 10 is a bigot. Stories like this are fake very often. So on is also metaphorical, but not in the way that Smollett intended. We'll be right back.

Let's talk about the media, putting myself in the hot seat and the media's role in repeating stories like Jussie Smollett's uncritically. It seems to me that a lot of these stories follow the same pattern, which is the press milks as many stories and headlines as they can out of the outrage.

Then, uh-oh, turns out to be untrue. And then there are these very, very quiet retractions, but almost never a kind of public mea culpa. That's typically what happens. Recently, though, it seems to me that it's actually gone further than that or sort of taken on a new dimension, which is that the media creates the hoax themselves. You know, think about a story like Covington Catholic in which a short video clip of

becomes a story about white supremacist teenagers bullying a Native American. And the best crime, so to speak, that The New York Times and others could come up with was a condescending smirk on the face of one kid. And a condescending smirk somehow becomes the biggest story in America for a long weekend.

How do you understand this evolution in the phenomenon of hate crime hoaxes? How do you understand media's sort of evolving role in not just amplifying a hoax, but creating it? Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, I don't agree with Donald Trump that the mainstream center left media is the quote unquote enemy of the people, but it very often is the enemy of the truth.

Right.

In the Kyle Rittenhouse case, I'll try to keep this as empirically as possible. The probably 70 percent majority of African-American men I've talked to at things like drinking or sporting events think that Rittenhouse killed exclusively black people. Hmm.

And that's because of an obvious take that you see if you watch perfectly mainstream CNN shows. He went to a peaceful protest. He shot Black Lives Matter protesters protesting for black lives. What would you think? The reality is that pointing out any element of reality, such as the fact that this was a violent riot, the downtown Kenosha was heavily damaged and the Chicago press, we saw that much of it had been burnt to the ground, reporting that all of the people shot were white criminals and

reporting that there were literally left and right wing militias fighting in the street because the police had stood down. Reporting on any of the reality would have completely destroyed the narrative. It's some of the most egregious coverage I've ever seen. But that was followed almost immediately by the Waukesha thing.

Where my guess would be that in response, conscious or non-conscious, to the Rittenhouse verdict, which had been announced, what, the day before? You know, a guy who is a black activist rapper. I've listened to Math Boy Fly on Chicago CDs. That's who he was.

hit a parade route in an 80% white town and killed a bunch of people, the coverage there wasn't at all introspective or self-searching. No one asked, not said, but no one asked, could our coverage of the Rittenhouse trial, as we did for a year, have provoked this situation? No one did a deep dive into Math Boy, who is quite well known in the area. You can see the Black Lives Matter stuff on his Facebook page.

Right. And I'm not in the business of speculating what motivated Daryl Brooks, I believe is his real name, to get into his SUV that night and murder six people and injure so many more. But what I can say is that Kyle Rittenhouse was a story that was incessant for months.

The SUV story in Wisconsin was the biggest story for, what, a night? And then it seemed to completely disappear once the identity of the driver was made public. Yeah, the story on the Lexus or on Google was a lead story for a day. And by the way, I'm not saying we know exactly what motivated this guy either, although there's a pretty obvious theoretical framework that you would lead into by asking him. But I guess what I'm saying is that nobody seems to have asked him.

I mean, there's no crime reporter on the Milwaukee beat. Milwaukee's got some fine papers that's been allowed, as I understand, to go in there and just ask him, why'd you do this?

Even how do you feel about Kyle Rittenhouse? It just hasn't been done. And it's impossible to imagine the same kind of coverage had a white supremacist who was a well-known white supremacist heavy metal singer plowed down the Jesse White tumblers in Chicago. There would have been hysterics for months as an entire group of guilty white lower elites, you know, frantically tore their hair shirts and talked about nothing but this. But I mean—

All of what we're both saying ties into the same pattern that you brought up initially, which is that, I mean, I think there are two forces here. One is sensationalism. Right-wing media is certainly no less sensationalistic. I mean, you know, 154 days behind enemy lines. I mean, it's also true. Like, it's the media, right? What's the horrid old line? If it bleeds, it leads. That's always been true. So I'm curious what you see as being different about what's happening right now.

That's a good question. I think the best answer I've ever heard to something like that was actually during a martial arts demonstration. It was described as pace of change. We all do the same thing. Some do it better and faster. I think the media has become far, far more sensationalistic as it attempts to respond to social. There's no comparison between MSNBC or OANN now and...

ABC and TNT 22 years ago. So that's one thing that's happened. And it's worth remembering that especially for the television boys, what they're selling is an ad delivery vehicle. Like the reason that we freak people out is that our actual goal is to sell as many Ford trucks and boner pills as possible.

So that is the ugly reality. But anyway, my ranting about the media aside, I think sensationalism has picked up another issue. And if you're on the right or the center right, you always get criticized as a partisan for saying this, but it's just that the media is so incredibly one-sided.

I mean Pew 2004 is still the best study on this. What they found was that the media is 7% conservative and right of center. 93% of national media journalists – this is print and television – were either – I assume they started with the normal Marxist category. I know they had leftists. They had left-leaning moderates. And I guess you just have some regular moderates in there.

So the combination of sensationalism and this incredibly one-sided bias is what leads to these crazy-ass stories like, Ayo, is the president a Russian spy? Well, to me, one of the costs of the way the media stokes sense that we are living in an epidemic of

hatred and racial violence. And in certain ways, things have never been worse than they are right now. It's actually really warping people's perception of reality. There was this recent survey in Skeptic, and they found that half the people that they spoke to who identified politically as very liberal, they said that they believed that a thousand or more unarmed Black men had been killed by police in 2019. Right.

14% of them thought that police had killed 10,000 unarmed Black men. 10,000. And I think the accurate number for 2019 is more like 13%.

I wonder if, you know, the amplification of these stories and the way that they give us all a sense that everything is doomed, hatred is all around us. Like it makes us a more paranoid, fearful, isolated, atomized, tribal society.

Yeah, that's extremely well put. I mean, the short answer to your question is, yeah. The combination of incessantly sensationalizing to sell product with almost 100% partisan bias in the academy and the serious, real pre-substack media, the Times, the Post, the Tribs, so on, I mean, that has an effect.

I don't think there's any way to deny that. And I think it's an extremely negative thing. Modern American urban upper middle class, I'll use the same stereotypes here, life is full of an incredible level of fear.

The survey from Kextc, the great European consultancy, found that the average American thinks 9% of the population has died already from COVID. And they specifically used, I mean, their sample would probably break down to urban upper middle class women if you look at what their sampling was. That doesn't surprise me. That's often who takes these surveys. But if you ask about the core things that we know in empirical social science about COVID-19, like terrible plague, but the IFR for the virus is 0.26%.

The vaccines, in fact, are very effective. They reduce your risk by 92 percent. Last I looked, just all of this stuff. I mean, after two years, we've lost one person in 500. We've seen about a 350,000 boost in the death rate every year. But the annual death rate is 2.8 to 3.1 million people. Now, this is becoming kind of pure wonkery. But the point is that I don't

think a lot of people know the pure wonkery because the journalists that are supposed to be almost on par with the wonks and that are supposed to present this honestly haven't been doing that. And that's how you get the average belief from a well-educated housewife. Ten percent of the country is dead. And you have to ask, don't you look around? Is that what you're seeing? One thing I've been thinking about as we've been discussing this and in general, as I've been watching the Jussie Smollett case is my big question, which is,

Who do hate crime hoaxes hurt? Well, I think that hate crime hoaxes hurt a bunch of different groups of people. I mean, you could begin by getting excessively moral and saying they hurt the individual who involves himself in an act of evil. But I mean, more to the point, they obviously hurt the police who have to spend their time on this crap.

They hurt the campus communities or the law enforcement communities beyond the local department that have the diffuse costs of this. The group that's most hurt, though, is the victims of actual crimes. Yeah. I mean, this is one of those things that just kind of obvious. I mean, if you were actually jumped by a group of white or black guys and you reported that to the Chicago PD after velvet rope.

and Derek Cochrane and Michigan Tech and Jussie Smollett, there's probably a decent chance of you getting laughed at in your report thrown in the quote unquote round file. And that's a real problem.

I mean, Chicago has just had the worst year for murders in 30 years when we still have a month to go. Already a thousand people have been killed. Yeah, unbelievable. Three University of Chicago students were shot and killed. The most recent one was shot at 2 p.m. on campus. And yet of all of the actual crimes that have taken place in Chicago, many of them murders, the most media attention was given to a crime that never happened at all.

Yeah, crime among poor men. I won't even say black crime because we have epidemic rates of crime in Appalachia. It's just a lower population density. But crime among poor, mostly fatherless men has been a problem in America for a long time since the 1960s social revolution. We did see a dip following broken windows in the 90s. You're now seeing that amplified by the police pullback post-George Floyd, in my opinion.

That's a real issue that's occurring. I mean, you mentioned in Chicago so far there have been a thousand homicides. That's included beautiful little kids that have been shot in the head, you know, left dying on their parents' porches, so on. That doesn't seem to be the focus of the mainstream media as much as this totally fictional narrative of white supremacy. Why is that? I think the reason is background cultural conditioning at a very deep level.

If you actually go through a modern American elite college now without having had some preparation in the real world that you can contrast that with. And again, I grew up in a tough area of a giant city, and I'm thankful for that at this point. But you're going to come out with a lot of ideas, whether or not you recognize them lodged in your mind. One of them among white intelligentsia seems to be that any evil done by a minority is actually just evidence of racism.

This is sort of Ibram Kendi's argument. It's just a complete tautology. But what he says is any gap in performance between ethnic groups has to be due to racism. So when you see a higher black crime rate, what you're seeing isn't black thugs and goons. You're seeing racism. So what you need to do is eliminate racism to reduce the crime rate.

What this argument breaks down to is I know there's a lot of racism because there's a lot of the thing that I have defined as racism.

At no point does Kendi show that or anyone like this, Robin DiAngelo, Nicole Hannah-Jones, at no point do they show that these gaps are due to racism. And in fact, they're pretty obviously not. Asians and black immigrants have some of the lowest crime rates in the country. Poor whites have one of the highest. When you get into a range of things from DWI to child abuse to opiates, it's on par with that in black communities. And there's just no explanation for this because the theory is nonsense.

But whether it's nonsense or not, and it is, a lot of people have internalized this. So there's a real desire to look away from this almost holocaust in many urban black communities. And that's combined with a total disinterest on the part of rich whites in poor whites who are seen as kind of irrelevant MAGA scum. So if you're ignoring the blacks and you're ignoring the poor whites—

What percentage of American crime are you ignoring? 90, 97. But you're going to focus on those remaining incidents that it's allowable for you to talk about. And that's why there's such an incredible disconnect between what's going on in the streets and what the media reports on. What's going on in the streets is on the black side of the fence, riots, incredible levels of gunplay.

What's going on in the poor white side of the fence is suicides, you know, record ODs. There's new drugs like fentanyl are coming in from Mexico, outsourcing. But you can't talk about group one and you hate group two. So you wind up with this incredibly narrow focus on things that occur in your sector. That's how these birdwatching disputes have become national news. There's two other things that I think about when I think about who these hoaxes hurt, right?

One is that it hurts the people that actually sacrificed and worked so hard to do away with things like segregation and Jim Crow and redlining and systemic racism. It erases the heroism of civil rights leaders by suggesting that, you know, there's a lyncher around every corner. The other thing that I think about is that

there actually are hate crimes. I mean, I'm from Pittsburgh. I became a bat mitzvah tree of life where the most lethal attack on Jews in American history happened a few years ago. And that was a real hate crime motivated by a real white supremacist who really hated Jews and immigrants.

And when you numb people with stories like that of Jussie Smollett or many of the ones that we've talked about, I think it makes people skeptical that hate crimes exist at all.

I wonder if you worry at all, given your focus on this subject, that some will look at your work and say, "Are you suggesting, Will Reilly, that we should reduce our vigilance toward hate crimes?"

Are you worried that you are sort of telling people to be skeptical when racism really does still exist in America? How do you respond to that? It's a question I'm sure you've gotten before. I'll give a very blunt response to that. No, I'm not particularly worried about that because I think that the invention of racial conflict today may be a more serious problem than racism. Hmm.

I'm not saying that this is a more serious problem than the legacies of racism in the past, like decreased black wealth. I work on these things as a black businessman. But I mean, if people are regularly saying that, for example, Klansmen are attacking them in the streets of the Chicago club district.

That would be a far bigger problem than anything that we see today if it were true. And the constant presentation of that is true in terms of how it might motivate blacks or whites to, for example, arm themselves is also, to me, more significant than the tiny level of racism we see in the diverse Chicago nightlife scene. So, no, I don't think that calling out these enormous lies is—

in any way implies that someone who actually is beaten on camera where evidence exists shouldn't be taken seriously. And I say that throughout the book. Both are important. We should take residual racism seriously. We also should not allow people to polarize the entire country by falsely claiming they're being attacked by Nazis. Your broader point is actually a really interesting one. I'm not the most emotive or conventionally moral person ever to live,

So, I mean, in terms of the does it does it hurt those people active in the civil rights movement who are still alive? And that's a fascinating question. I do think that at one level, what it does is kind of dishonor them.

and more importantly, present a false narrative about what they did. So the great secret of the civil rights movement is that we won. And I'm sure both your ancestors in the American Jewish community, mine, and the black urban community fought in that conflict. In fact, for that matter, in my day, the thing that I was a canvas manager for was the human rights campaign. This was gay rights right before Obergefell.

So, I mean, I and a number of other like right-leaning guys who'd been in a boxing gym before signed up to campaign for this cause and traveled around the country and were sometimes often verbally, sometimes physically attacked for it because all people have the right to be free. But I think the original civil rights campaigners, I mean, Brown v. Board rendered de jure segregation totally illegal back in 1954. Right.

The Civil Rights Act made most racial discrimination civilly, if not criminally illegal, 10 years later in 64. We've had pro-minority affirmative action since 1967. So I think this is one of the elephants in the room here. When people talk about white privilege on Harvard's campus, they are also—

vary to almost certainly, if they are people of color, beneficiaries of programs that are designed specifically to advantage minorities. And this is one of these things you're not supposed to talk about, but that's a result of the successes of the past. So creating this narrative of the world, right,

Where those successes never happened and you are oppressed today as a Yale student not only insults your ancestors, it also gives those around you an incredibly unrealistic sense of your prospects and their own. The reality is that that sort of victor instead of victim narrative doesn't just sound better to me as a bro. It's much more likely to produce better outcomes.

Will, last question here. What is it that you hope people take away from your book and your research and maybe the lesson that they can learn for those who have not paid attention to this topic, who are just now tuning into the case of Jussie Smollett?

One thing that I encourage people to do, and this is the core theme of my research, is compare the mainstream media and even academic narratives on left and hard right to reality because they are almost always wrong.

This is something that's true to just an astonishing extent. Most of the major narratives in society, Black Lives Matter, the race war narrative of constant interracial crime, systemic racism, white privilege, cultural appropriation, a lot of the Christian and alt-y stuff on the hard right. There is very little empirical support for these things to a degree that's going to shock you.

The book Hate Crime Hoax was just an intro into this space because it just became so obvious that in just this one field, hundreds of the most famous cases had not happened and not all by that point had been exposed. So I guess what I would say above anything else is trust your eyes, trust your brain, trust in common sense, and don't always believe that MSNBC or CNN or for that matter, Fox has your best interest in mind.

Will Reilly, thanks so much for talking with me today. Thanks for having me, guys. This week, Black Lives Matter put out an official statement about the Jussie Smollett case. In it, they defended him, arguing that his trial shouldn't even be taking place because in an abolitionist society, quote, our communities would not have to fight and suffer to prove our worth.

It went on to say, The jury in Chicago didn't see it quite that way. On Thursday, Jussie Smollett was found guilty of five counts of disorderly conduct.

Special Prosecutor Dan Webb called the verdict, quote, a resounding message by the jury that Mr. Smollett did exactly what we said he did. Thanks for listening. As always, please send your tips and guest suggestions to honestlypod.com. And we're especially interested in hearing from you about your quick questions. See you next week.