Levels of Hate

It took less than a week for the media to begin asking hard questions to anyone associated with Donald Trump. Like this one:

"How is President-elect Trump going to stop the racist, Islamophobic, anti-Mexican, anti-LGBT incidents that are occurring regularly across the United States since his election?"

Hard, probing question are good—that's something that should have been done for the past eight years, but wasn't. I'm pleased that the trained hamsters of the media have grown some teeth.

But the media's questions should be based in fact, not the nightmare landscape imagined by unhinged thinkers on the left. Sadly, the question noted above is the latter.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown comments:

Let's get this out of the way: there's no doubt that Donald Trump's policies may pose a direct threat to certain classes of American people. But in the wake of his Tuesday night election as president of the United States, there has been a wave of people worrying for the physical safety of Mexicans, Muslims, and anyone else who isn't white, male, and gender-conforming. The fear seems to legitimately be that there are would-be perpetrators of sexual assault and race-based violence that have been well-behaved so far but will now, emboldened by a President-elect Trump, suddenly go wild with the raping and the hate crimes.

Implausible? I think so. But the narrative has been bolstered by a few high-profile incidents of alleged aggression in Trump's America.

The first one to really go viral involved a Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana who claimed to have had her hijab ripped off and her wallet stolen the day after Trump's election by two white men wearing Trump hats. But on Thursday, local police announced that the young woman had admitted she fabricated the story. "This incident is no longer under investigation," the Lafayette Police Department said in a press release.

In another incident, this one in San Diego, a young Muslim woman's purse and car were stolen by one white male and one Hispanic male. While the men allegedly made negative comments about Muslims, it seems car stealing was more their motivation than harassment or intimidation—which is obviously shitty, but not necessarily a Trump-inspired act of bigotry.

And an alleged incident of a gay man named Chris Ball getting beaten up by Trump supporters in Santa Monica on election night seems to have not happened the way it was initially recounted, if the incident even happened at all. The Santa Monica Police Department posted a message to Facebook Thursday saying that neither the department nor city officials had "received any information indicating this crime occurred in the City of Santa Monica" and "a check of local hospitals revealed there was no victim of any such incident admitted or treated."

Other instances of "Trump inspired" violence and vandalism have also turned out to be hoaxes or misinterpretations. An alleged Ku Klux Klan rally in honor of Trump's victory turned out to be an old photo of conservatives carrying U.S., Gadsden, and Christian flags that were billowing out in a manner mistaken in a grainy photo for Klan robes. There were no Southern Illinois University students posting blackface selfies to social media after Trump's win.

Because these make-believe instances fit perfectly into the trained hamsters' narrative, they were never fact checked (something every legitimate reporter should do). Instead, they are promulgated as actual incidents. The intent is to inflame the left and to frighten minorities and others.

Nolan Brown recounts other phony anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican claims and them summarizes:

Pushers of this "rampant racist crimewave" in Trump's America story will dismiss posts like this one, and anyone who challenges their narrative, as naive, enabling of racists, or unconscionably non-empathetic to non-straight, white, Christian Americans. But I'm not the one trying to stoke false terror in vulnerable people or over-hype America's levels of hate for pageviews and Twitter faves.

The trained hamsters (with teeth) will never give up the narrative ... never. Because if they did, it would be admission that their work is often garbage and their ethics are often bankrupt. Before looking for "levels of hate" among Trump's supporters, they would do well to reflect on the "levels of hate" within their own ranks and among their ideological clones on the left.

UPDATE:
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It looks like every left-leaning media outlet is calling on Donald Trump to "denounce" the "hate crimes" that exist in their fevered imagination, but didn't actually happen in the real world. He did denounce any hate speech, but that never stops the trained hamsters from beating a dead horse. Sean Davis writes:

In an editorial published just two days after Trump was elected to be the 45th president of the United States, The New York Times demanded that Trump “denounce the hate”... The Boston Globe followed up with an editorial the next day demanding the same thing using the exact same words. “Trump must denounce the outbreak of hate,” the paper’s editorialists declared.

Twitter is chock full of blue-checkmarked celebrities, journalists, and politicos calling on Trump to denounce. Denounce this. Denounce that. Denounce Trump for hiring this person. Denounce Trump for not hiring that person. Denounce, denounce, denounce.

What’s curiously missing among this deluge of denouncement demands, however, is a single demand that Hillary Clinton denounce the violent, anti-Trump protests that are being waged in her name. After all, it’s not Trump’s supporters who are tipping over cop cars, torching businesses, or beating up Trump voters. The rioters won’t listen to Trump, but they might listen to Hillary or Obama. Did Hillary Clinton make a big, public show of denouncing the violent protests raging in cities like Portland, and I just missed it? That seems to me to be the only innocent explanation for the refusal of so many of her most prominent acolytes to call on her to denounce the violence.

Here's the thing. Only those who disagree with the Left can commit "hate crimes" or do bad or distasteful things. The anti-Trump rioters are "full of passion" or are experiencing "fear" or "disappointment" or "dismay." There's nothing for Clinton to denounce because blocking traffic, starting fires, trashing cars, breaking windows, and attacking Trump supporters are all okay—as long as the people doing it are on the Left.