Hate Crimes, Hoaxes, and Hyperbole

The bottom line is that when it comes to physical aggression inspired by this election, we are looking at a little more than a dozen incidents reported, over a 10 day period, in a country of roughly 318.9 million people—none of which resulted in serious injuries. And these incidents vary widely in how much they can be attributed to politics, prejudice, and hate versus tempers, egos, and mental-health issues flaring along with the election results and our collective heightened emotional state.

Regarding the rash of hateful graffiti and signs popping up this week: while some was certainly meant to offend or inspire terror, other times it has turned out to be the work of anti-Trump forces who intended it as commentary on how they perceive "Trump's America." For instance, the message scrawled on an Elon University whiteboard post-election—"Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista"—was actually "written by a Latino student who was upset about the results of the election and wrote the message as a satirical commentary," according the school's vice president for student life. The same for a Nazi flag that went up over a house in San Francisco last week.

In Pittsburg, California, a sign reading "You can hang a n****r from a tree / Equal rights he will never see!" was posted aside a house, and shared in a photo on Twitter November 12 by a man who wrote: "My sister texted this to me 10 minutes ago. Our democracy is being tested even in California." This post was retweeted more than 4,200 times. But it turns out the sign was posted by a black man, on his own house, long before last week in protest of a grievance the man has with the court system. "Police said they planned to cite the man for the banner's message," reported the East Bay Times, "but upon further review Monday discovered that they already did so last week."

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TheGoverness said:

https://www.google.com/amp/reason.com/blog/2016/11/18/election-hate-crimes-hoaxes-hyperbole/amp



It's a few weeks old, but I thought this was a pretty neat article nonetheless. It's concerning the alleged wave of post-election violence due to Trump's victory. I think the article does a good job of showing how both sides sometimes tend to blow things way out of proportion than they really are.

And as this makes very clear; there really isn't this vast wave of Trump racists attacking minorities that some people are trying to make it out to be.

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