About Us | - six “guys” - four reporters, one editor, one bureau chief. A news website. It just burns you that leftist provocateurs (or racists if you prefer) and the administration that went along with the hoax are exposed in Oberlin, doesn’t it?
I think the Daily Caller is full of whackos. Be that as it may, I also happened to be with several Obies around the time those incidents happened. Each of them was entirely certain (but had no evidence, of course) that it was some kind of performance art or political statement gone wrong, rather than events based on hate.
This was evident to them in the same way that if there’s a shooting at a school, most of us naturally think: “Gotta be the work of a weird loner who is a gun nut. It was?!? Well, color me shocked.”
Their source for most of their info(and the man behind the Right wing college paper Legal Insurrection) said
Really?
Minor correction: one guy with a blog and the police records from the case. That’s solid sourcing. I don’t think he’s posted the actual records but your demands don’t seem reasonable. There’s one guy because he broke the story.
Of course what this proves is kind of a mystery. Oberlin reacted, or overreacted if you like, to these racist incidents. It turns out the perpetrators weren’t “sincere” racists, they were just assholes who wanted to upset people by saying the things KKK types say. Politically, one of them was a liberal. Which proves that… something. It doesn’t sound like anybody blamed this on conservatives, so there are no innocent victims here. If you deplore racism, you deplore it whether the person putting up the posters is a liberal or a conservative, right? It sounds like that’s exactly what happened here. As to the bit about Oberlin keeping it quiet- I continue to think they may not have been able to comment about the students. I don’t know the relevant laws, but that strikes me as plausible. Could they have been embarrassed at being trolled? I guess, but even knowing the facts I’m not sure how much differently the school and the students should have reacted. They could have responded in a more low-key way, but racist trolling still sucks.
Michelle Malkin, as linked above
…tenured cultural-Marxist punks raking in beaucoup bucks…
She has a gift. But did she get the receipt?
That seems to have been the invention of the Daily Caller’s sole writer.
Despite numerous claims that the administration knew about the hoax and that they then let the “rallies” continue, he fails to provide a single relevant date to support his claims. He quotes several members of the administration who decline to offer conjectures regarding the motivation of the authors of the graffiti, usually citing an ongoing investigation, but not once does he provide evidence that the hoaxers were identified by the police on day x while the administration was refusing to comment on day X + 5 or some such.
Given the way in which the actual dates would establish the accuracy his claims, his clever avoidance of such basic reporting indicates that he is simply cobbling together a timeline that has no bearing on reality.
= = =
It would be extraordinarily odd to find an openly active racist among the Oberlin student body. Given the high costs of college and the reputation that Oberlin has established over decades, a person would have to be remarkably stupid to deliberately attend a school that would make him get cramps clenching his teeth daily for four years.
That said, it should also be noted that Oberlin is in Lorain county, a place that has quite its own share of rednecks, meth labs, and racial conflicts. The notion that a racist from the neighboring countryside might wander in to raise hell is not surprising, at all.
I would agree that the rallies were silly. Even if some yahoo from a neighboring township had been responsible for the graffiti, it is not as though he could actively recruit anyone to join him. (A few years ago, a member of the National Front plastered my exurban township with similar posters, including calls to join him. After the initial shock, (lasting a few hours while people adjusted to the idea that some nut had actually taken the time to invade out neighborhoods), the overwhelming reaction was that he was a loon who should be ticketed for posting signs illegally and then ignored.)
Klansmen are silly and old-fashioned, even to most white supremacists nowadays. But there are, still and sadly, such things as White Nationalists.
The two perpetrators were caught, “red-handed”, on Feb. 27th by the police. They confessed - to campus police. Oberlin administrators were told. So - it is established that by Feb. 27th they knew it was a hoax. The shut-down of classes and the “Day of Solidarity” declared to stop the “hate speech” incidents happened on March 5th. There is no way the administration can claim it didn’t know.
There are the actual dates. Oberlin spokesman, 5 days after the perpetrators were caught and confessed, lied to NY Times: “A college spokesman, Scott Wargo, said investigators had not determined whether the suspect or suspects were students or from off-campus.”
I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of this story before.
If what we’re hearing now is essentially correct, the people involved are clearly wrong. (How’s that for taking a bold stand?) I don’t care how good you think your cause is, there’s no excuse for running a “false flag” scam like this. If a cause is good, it should be able to stand on the truth and not need lies to prop it up. And when you needlessly use lies to prop up a good cause, you end up hurting it when the lies are exposed.
So I condemn the students who faked these incidents and I condemn the officials who supposedly allowed it to go on when they apparently knew better. All you’ve ended up doing is making it easier for the next genuine racists.
Yes, there are. The stupid will always be with us. But the idea of someone in full Klan regalia wandering around the Oberlin campus is daft.
That’s not what they were doing. They were trying to upset people, not drum up support for a good cause.
Wonder what Meg Lanker Simons was trying to do.
Maybe just get attention. Some people are crazy.
I’m eccentric, you’re crazy, she’s batshit.
True. There are so many cases where a liberal or a gay man/woman or an African-American claim a made-up hate crime. Like Kerri Dunn. Or Leah Miller. Or Allison Jackson. Jaime Alexander Saide at Northwestern U. Ed Drago, at the College of New Jersey. Alexandra Pennell at Central Connecticut State University. Khalilah Ford at UW-Parkside. Janet Upmann in a separate incident at the same school. Glenn Morgan, Junior in Detroit. Aimee Whitechurch and Christel Conklin - Parker, CO. Courtney Thomas in Birmingham, MI. Johnathan Perkins at University of Virginia. Quinn Matney at Chapel Hill. Matthew Randall Moe in St. Cloud, MN. Donald Maynard in Baltimore, MD. Sarah Marshak at George Washington University. Adam Kokesh, Yong Kwon, Brian Tierney, Ned Goodwin, Maxine Nwigwe, Lara Masri and Amal Rammah at George Washington University. Justin Lamar Kidd in O’Fallon, IL. Megan Mitchell at College of Wooster. Alicia Hardin at Trinity International University. Thomas Glander at Bethel College. Ahmad Saad Nasim at Arizona State University. etc. etc. etc.
Well, according to your linked story, they confessed to a few of the incidents while denying that they had any association with others. Since the incidents to which they admitted occurred both before and after other sightings, a reasonable conclusion would be that they were potentially copycats to another perpetrator.
Not really.
The shut down and rally occurred after the separate report of the “hooded klansman” and while several other incidents had not been admitted by the pair who had been caught. The only thing the adminstration could have “known” is that some incidents had been the result of pranksters.
Not in the original linked story.
I see no lie. In the midst of a flurry of odd events, a couple of students admitted to perpetrating some of them.
Do you have a citation where the pair admitted to having performed all the acts? (They may well have done so, but I have not seen that claim.)
Occam’s razor.
Which was a ridiculous hysterical report about someone walking around in a bathrobe.
Yet they said they didn’t know if the suspects were students at the university. Note: that was AFTER they suspended and expelled them. Clear lie.
Grasping at straws.
It seems like the victims here are the minority students at Oberlin, who have spent months wondering if some organized hate group might escalate into violence. That seems to have been why there was such an uproar when a student then supposedly saw someone in Klan garb.
Well, they commented to the FBI. It would be interesting to know what that report contained.
That’s a very impressive list of names and places you got there, Terr. Find those all by yourself, did you? Or is there a website somewhere? Sort of a clearing house for information? I’m wondering, how deep would I have dig before I run into Ms. Malkin again?
I’m thinking they are the least likely to be fooled. Seeing as they have first hand knowledge of the general “tone”…does anybody stare at them, for instance? Or are they just another college kid. Just guessing, here,but guessing they’d be the first to catch on.
Does not say what you want it to say.
A point not known at the time the rally was called.
Only in your mind. If the copycats were students, it hardly makes it a lie regarding other potentially real incidents whose perpetrators were unknown.
I realize you are, but I did not want to point that out.