So, the report of a racial threat at very tiny and very liberal St.Olaf College in Minnesota was a hoax. On April 29 Samantha Wells, a black student at the college, reported discovering a note on the windshield of her car with the message, “I am so glad that you are leaving soon. One less n‑‑‑‑‑ that this school must deal with. You have spoken up too much. You will change nothing. Shut up, or I will shut you up.” Wells contacted police but declined to make an official report.
A student confessed to writing the note, St. Olaf President David R. Anderson wrote in a message to students. For some reason, he declined to use the word “hoax” for the false report. The threat — an anonymous, typewritten note — was “fabricated,” he said, as an apparent “strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate We’ve confirmed that this was not a genuine threat. We’re confident that there is no ongoing threat from this incident to individuals or the community as a whole,” he said.
In a second campus-wide email sent later Wednesday, Anderson used stronger words to explain what happened, while still steering around the word “hoax.”
Anderson, citing federal student privacy laws, did not identify the person of interest. Nor did he discuss the tumult caused to the campus or to the damage of race relations by using a fake racial incident to extract concessions from the college.
For instance, one demand called for removing alumnus Arne Christenson from the advisory board of university’s Institute for Freedom and Community because of his “political views and values as a Christian Zionist.” Another demanded “visible and easily accessible gender neutral housing on all residence halls.” Anderson negotiated with the black students and set parameters for formal discussions. Anti-white posters appeared on campus during the crisis.
President Anderson has yet to address students on the wisdom and morality of fake hate crimes as a way of getting what you want.
This is so pathetic. And so increasingly predictable.
When we don’t find an evil, racist, hate-filled boogeyman under our beds (and who really believed that ultra-liberal St.Olaf is enrolling nascent Klansmen whose evil acts are nasty notes) we proceed to invent him. Why? To justify our sense of outrage, to allow us to roll about in our own self-righteous victimhood, to enable us to not just ask but demand MORE.
What is even more pathetic: the knee-jerk witch-hunt, mea culpas which ensued…the fact that the ‘leadership’ (and I use that word advisedly) embraced the lie even as they pursued the investigation. Ready, Fire, Aim! What a great way to run an organization.
Reminds me of the gang rape hoax in 2014 at the University of Virginia (UVA) with regard to the accuser named Jackie, first reported in Rolling Stone magazine by the now disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely.
After the article was discredited, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) still defended this liar, saying that would be inappropriate to spotlight her. Apologists defended this hoax as a means of highlighting the “epidemic” of sexual assault; and that punishing Jackie would discourage other “survivors” from coming forward.
Nobody cared that this hoax disparaged a fraternity and resulted in students vandalizing their frat house. Nobody cared that the frat members were involuntarily martyred at the alter of Feminism to push a holy narrative.
Of course it was. I can’t believe anybody is really surprised by this, even the moonbats who support this sort of nonsense.