Althea Bernstein, Jussie Smollett, and Tawana Brawley
29th June 2020
The concept of the Hate Hoax that I might have helped originate in 2004 is definitely a useful one, but it needs to be kept in mind that not every example of Hate Hysteria is a Jussie Smollett-style preplanned hoax.
Some aren’t hoaxes at all: for example, when college students reported a Ku Klux Klan dragon was in the science lab, it turned out to be a white dust cover shrouding an instrument.
Others were intentional but not pre-planned. For example, in the ur-Hate Hoax, 15-year-old Tawana Brawley in 1987 gets home late from being out with her boyfriend. Her parents are furious at her for violating their rules. So … she starts making up a story which comes to include her being gang-raped by six white cops. Soon the young Al Sharpton is promoting her story on television, as if he’d been hired by Tom Wolfe’s publishing house to prove that their new bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities was ripped from next month’s headlines.