Faking Hate

The hate crime had everything that makes generous, good-hearted citizens recoil in horror and brim with sympathy: a noose, violence, antigay and anti-African-American slurs, and some “this is MAGA country!” thrown in. But did it really happen?

Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s alleged attack grabbed the hearts of many Americans, especially those who know that such crimes have gone up starkly since our hater-in-chief’s 2016 election. For example, earlier this year, a group of political scientists wrote in The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post that counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally witnessed a 226 percent increase in hate crimes in the years since. As they wrote, “it is hard to discount a ‘Trump effect’ when a considerable number of these reported hate crimes reference Trump.”

While it’s true that the number of hate crimes—reported and unreported—vastly outnumber the hoaxes, a handful of people still do fake them for a variety of reasons. And for those