Hate Crime Hoaxes Are More Common Than You Think

USA Today carried an opinion piece by a different author with a similar title:

Hate crime hoaxes, like Jussie Smollett's alleged attack, are more common than you think https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/22/jussie-smo...

Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax https://www.amazon.com/dp/161577783 , I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922915180 . To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher.

...

In this context, what hate hoaxers actually do is worsen generally good race relations, and distract attention from real problems. As Chicago’s disgusted top cop, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, pointed out yesterday, skilled police officers spent four weeks tracking down Smollett’s imaginary attackers — in a city that has seen 28 murders as of Feb. 9th, according to The Chicago Tribune https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicag... . We all, media and citizens alike, would be better served to focus on real issues like gun violence and the opiate epidemic than on fairy tales like Jussie’s.

Hoax [thing] is also a good way to bury real [thing] by simply casting a shadow of doubt over all occurrences. Just like articles that portray themselves as pro or against something but use arguments that are so ridiculous that they make you doubt the validity of the original claims even when it comes attached to real arguments.

Earlier today a pro-feminism article on HN used the argument that phones are so big because that's the limit of what a man can use with one hand. This of course completely ignored the fact that average US/world male height is ~1.75m which makes the average phone (5.5") also too big for their hands.

A casual "on the fence" reader could very easily conclude that feminism is made up or just a pile of BS, and this discredits many valid future arguments and articles by mere association. And you can do this for any topic.

I've been saying this for years.