Tag: hate crimes

HATE HOAX: Author of Social Media Threat Proclaiming White Power And Threatening Murder Spree Against Blacks at County Fair Identified As Black Teen

Another day, another race hoax.

In September, Alabama police began investigating a social media post that threatened violence against Black people attending the Lee County Fair in Opelika, AL.

The poster, whose Facebook page included a Confederate battle flag,  said he and friends, “Are coming to [the] Opelika Alabama fair to kill every NEGRO that we lay eye contact on so be prepared. WHITE POWER.”

The Opelika PD announced they have identified the poster as a Black teenager from Lafayette, AL.

AL.com reports:

A Black Louisiana teenager has been identified as the person who posted a social media message late last month that threatened to kill Black people at an Alabama fair and used white supremacist imagery, police said Thursday.

Pharrell Smith, 18, of Lafayette, La., was arrested by Lafayette police Thursday on unrelated charges and is expected to be extradited to Alabama to face a felony charge of making a terroristic threat once he is released from custody in Louisiana, Opelika police said.

Opelika police began investigating the Facebook post Sept. 19 where the poster, later identified as Smith, said he and his friends “are coming to [the] Opelika Alabama fair to kill every NEGRO that we lay eye contact on so be prepared. WHITE POWER.”

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Oh, So Here’s the ‘White Supremacist’ Accused of Vandalizing a Gay Pride Crosswalk With Swastikas

A black male suspect has been identified as the repeat vandalism suspect accused of defacing the Rainbow Crosswalk in Atlanta, Georgia, last month with swastikas after leftists online blamed white supremacy for the spray paint across the LGBTQ street art, a cultural landmark known as the city’s emblem of gay pride.

30-year-old Jonah Jade Sampson is charged with criminal trespass, felony interference with government property, and three counts of second-degree criminal damage to property for allegedly vandalizing the rainbow stripes painted at the intersection of 10th St and Piedmont Ave in mid-town Atlanta on two separate occasions.

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Hate Hoax In Germany: Green Politician Resigns After Inventing Nazi Death-Threats Against Himself

The alleged death threats from neo-Nazis against Green politician Manoj Subramaniam have made headlines across Germany and led to tension in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest state by population. However, the councilor from Erkelenz staged the various threats in an elaborate scheme, according to the result of an investigation published by the public prosecutor’s office.

The 33-year-old, whose parents immigrated from Sri Lanka, had submitted numerous complaints.

First, his car windows were smashed, and swastikas sprayed on the vehicle.

Another time, he claimed SS runes and a swastika were drawn on the doorbell of his house.

Then, he revealed that a swastika was scrawled on the sidewalk in front of his apartment and that he found razor blades in the mail.

The politician also received death threats signed by NSU 2.0, referring to the National Socialist Underground (NSU) group that committed a number of murders across Germany for years.

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Black man made fake threat against black people in Buffalo to see if racists would ‘agree with him’

Federal agents have arrested a black man in Buffalo, New York, for making a false threat against black people to see whether racists on social media would support him.

According to WIVB-TV in Buffalo, Rolik Walker, 24, of Buffalo, was arrested for a tweet he supposedly published on May 16 from an anonymous account. In the tweet, he reportedly threatened that he and his “associates” would be “targeting” Buffalo-area grocery stores and that they were “only looking to kill blacks.”

Walker, who is black, allegedly issued the tweet under the Twitter handle @ConklinHero just two days after white man Payton Gendron, 18, from Conklin, New York, allegedly shot and killed 10 black people and injured three others at a Tops Friendly Markets grocery store in Buffalo. The violent crime has been deemed a “racially motivated hate crime.”

An FBI affidavit claims that Walker “stated that the purpose of the post was to see what everyone would say and if anyone would agree with him.”

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Court Rules Man Faked Hate Crime, Carved Swastika on his Own Face

A Swiss court has found a 28-year-old man guilty of inventing a hate crime after the man had falsely claimed to have been attacked but actually carved a swastika into his own face.

The 28-year-old mixed-race man had claimed in January to have been attacked by a group of German-speaking individuals who approached him in the city of Neuchâtel, pushed him to the ground, beat him and carved a swastika into the side of his cheek and made monkey noises toward him in an apparent hate crime.

The man posted a picture of the alleged result of the attack on social media along with his story, prompting police to investigate the alleged assault.

However, according to a report from 20Minutes, the investigators found that there had been no attack on the man, a French national living in Switzerland, and that the man had invented the entire ordeal. The court ruled he had carved the swastika into his own cheek, with investigators noting that the carving had been done before the alleged attack reportedly took place.

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Man Told Officers He Set Satanic Temple on Fire as ‘Hate Crime

A fire was set at the Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts, late Friday night, and a man from Chelsea was arrested on charges including arson, police said.

The suspected arsonist described his own actions as a “hate crime,” according to the Salem Police Department.

Daniel Damien Lucey, 42, was arrested at the scene of the fire, Salem police confirmed Saturday. Lucey faces multiple charges in connection with the fire at the Satanic Temple on Bridge Street.

Several people called 911 about the fire around 10 p.m. Friday. Police found the front porch up in flames when they arrived and tried to put it out with fire extinguishers, but were unsuccessful.

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Jewish woman busted for scrawling swastikas in Brooklyn’s Borough Park

A Jewish woman charged with spray-painting two swastikas on a Brooklyn bus stop took to Facebook after the hate crime and posted “maybe the anti-semites have a point,” the Daily News has learned.

Farnoush Hakakian, 45, was arrested Wednesday and charged with criminal mischief as a hate crime for the May 5 broad-daylight incident in Borough Park.

“I am Jewish. This is my art, this is how I express myself. I don’t agree with Judaism and how the Jewish people are,” Hakakian told investigators when she was arrested, according to a law enforcement source.

She also admitted to drawing the swastikas, the source said.

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New ‘Antilynching’ Federal Law Could Let Prosecutors Imprison You For A Crime You Never Committed

Touted as an overdue (if duplicative) law that no one could disagree with, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act signed by President Biden last week includes a subtle provision that could boost the Biden administration’s war on wrongthink.

The bill sailed through the U.S. Senate and the House with ease. The tactful naming made the bill radioactive to oppose, which is why 422 congressmen voted in favor while only three opposed.

Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the three who voted against the bill, expressed a handful of concerns, including that there are a limited number of constitutionally specified federal crimes, that lynching is already criminalized, and that “Adding enhanced penalties for ‘hate’ [on top of existing criminal punishments] tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech.”

He also highlighted another potential pitfall of the legislation: “The bill creates another federal crime of ‘conspiracy,’ which I’m concerned could be enforced overbroadly on people who are not perpetrators of a crime.” Here’s the section Massie is referring to:

Whoever conspires to commit any offense under paragraph (1), (2), or (3) shall, if death or serious bodily injury (as defined in section 2246 of this title) results from the offense, or if the offense includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, be imprisoned for not more than 30 years, fined in accordance with this title, or both.

The bill amends the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed in 2009, which defines and criminalizes hate crimes. The minimum qualification is an attempt “to cause bodily injury” due to the victim’s race, sexual orientation, nationality, gender, religion, or disability. 

Bodily injury can be defined as “physical pain” or “any other injury to the body, no matter how temporary.” Sensibly, the 2009 law requires an attempt at violence to be made, which is a crime itself regardless of prejudiced motives. The new “antilynching” law takes this a step further by criminalizing “conspiracy” to commit certain hate crimes.

I’m sure someone will retort: conspiracy to commit a federal crime is already a federal crime. This is not a universally accepted interpretation of conspiracy law, nor does the law’s language or historical precedent justify such a broad interpretation — hence the ostensible necessity for the new antilynching law. Criminalized conspiracies are those plotting “against the United States” – like the Volkswagen executives who attempted to defraud the Environmental Protection Agency by faking emission results and, more recently, the leader of the Oath Keepers who plead guilty to seditious conspiracy for his part in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot. 

So as of last Tuesday, it is illegal to simply “agree” to participate in an act if it falls under the categories highlighted above. One can imagine dark political humor venturing into these categories (a comment such as “I hate so-and-so so much I could kill him,” for example) being interpreted as “conspiring to lynch.”

The key issue here is that intent should not be the sole subject of a court case. The purpose of courts is for a neutral arbiter to determine whether someone’s rights were violated during an encounter between two parties. Conspiracy, if no action is taken in pursuit of it, involves only one party: the conspirators. Therefore, it alone constitutes no crime as it couldn’t have possibly violated someone else’s rights. 

With this new law, the U.S. government has further expanded into the realm of policing thought crimes. Ominously, this law comes on the heels of the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to broaden the “domestic terrorism” category and expand methods for identifying “threats.”

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Student of color reportedly behind racist graffiti at a Rochester girls’ school

A student of color is reportedly behind racist graffiti found Monday morning in a bathroom at a private Catholic all-girls school in Brighton, New York.

Our Lady of Mercy School for Young Women, a grade 6 through grade 12 school located within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester, announced Thursday that its investigation into the graffiti containing a racial slur has ended with a student coming forward and taking responsibility for writing the offensive message.

“This school is filled with a bunch of n*ggers. Get out or else!!” the graffiti said.

Mercy said it will not disclose the name of the student who confessed to vandalizing the school bathroom with the N-word graffiti because of its confidentiality practices, WHEC reported. However, the school said that “maximum disciplinary action” has been taken against the student.

“For legal reasons, and in accordance with Mercy’s confidentiality practices, the student will not be identified. Mercy has zero tolerance for this kind of behavior; appropriate and maximum disciplinary action has been taken,” Mercy stated.

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Senate Unanimously Passes Anti-Lynching Bill Inspired by Jussie Smollett Hate Hoax

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate came together unanimously on Monday to expand federal hate crime laws by passing an “anti-lynching” bill inspired by the “attempted modern day lynching” of Jussie Smollett three years ago in MAGA country.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who co-sponsored the Senate version of the anti-lynching bill with Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), argued for the legislation on the floor of the Senate in 2019 by citing the alleged attack on Smollett and insisting “lynching is not a relic of the past.”

Senator Kamala Harris at the time described the supposed attack on Smollett as “an attempted modern day lynching.”

Sen. Rand Paul blocked the bill in the Senate for over two years after pointing out how it would allow the feds to throw Americans in prison for 10 years for slapping someone and uttering a racial slur. Nonetheless, Paul gave in this week after some unspecified changes were made to it.

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