Tag: hoax

Matthew Shepard’s Murder Was Almost Certainly Not an Anti-Gay Hate Crime

In the fall of 1998, a man named Matthew Shepard was savagely beaten, strung out on a fence like a scarecrow, and left to die as the Wyoming night temperatures plunged. Over the last two and a half decades, the killing has been called many things. But a BBC headline from 2018 perhaps captures best: It was “the murder that changed America.”

A statement from President Joe Biden helps explain why. “Twenty-five years ago today, Matthew Shepard lost his life to a brutal act of hate and violence that shocked our nation and the world,” he said this morning. “The week prior, Matthew had been viciously attacked in a horrific anti-gay hate crime and left to die – simply for being himself.”

Shepard’s murder was, without a doubt, an act of hate and violence. But the latter part of Biden’s statement—that his murder was spurred by homophobic animus—is the most important. For years, it has been repeated in the some of the largest media outlets. It has driven federal policy. It is the part that “changed America,” despite all evidence pointing to the fact that it isn’t true.

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Alabama Judge Issues Ruling in Carlee Russell Hoax Case

An Alabama judge found Carlee Russell guilty of two misdemeanor charges after she faked her own abduction in July.

Hoover Municipal Court Judge Thomas Brad Bishop on Wednesday found Russell guilty on charges of false reporting of an incident and false reporting to law enforcement, both misdemeanors, according to FOX affiliate WBRC.

The state recommended one year in jail, the maximum, which is six months for each charge. They also recommended a fine of $831 and restitution of $17,974.88.

According to the report, the case will be appealed to circuit court.

Russell, 24, dialed 911 on July 13 at around 9:34 p.m. to report a toddler walking along the southbound side of Interstate 459 near Birmingham, according to the Hoover Police Department.

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Reporter details rise of ‘white supremacy’ in US by highlighting antisemitic rhetoric from fired black high school teacher

Recently, a California Bay Area high school teacher was fired following an extensive investigation into his alleged anti-Semitic lectures, which were said to include performing Nazi salutes in class. 

Shortly after those incidents took place, a leftist reporter by the name Emily Schrader took the opportunity to blame the occurrence on ‘anti-Semitic white supremacy’ in an article titled, “Under attack: White supremacists lead antisemitic charge in U.S.” 

Nowhere in Schrader’s article does she mention that the fired teacher she references, Henry Bens, is black. 

Schrader contacted The Post Millenial to say that she did not write the article’s headline and has requested for it to be changed.

“The article’s examples are mostly not white supremacy but radical left with ethnic studies curriculum and DEI initiatives that actively exclude Jews,” she explained.

The second paragraph of Schrader’s story notably states, “American Jews are now at a crossroads as far-right antisemitism is also on the rise from white supremacist groups in the United States.”

No examples of this supposed far-right antisemitism by white supremacist organizations are provided in the story. 

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Despite Debunking, Rainbow Fentanyl Myths Continue

In 2022, fears erupted over “rainbow fentanyl,” brightly colored fentanyl pills that were said to be designed by drug traffickers to lure innocent children into taking opioids. Parents were warned to be on the watch for the pills—especially in their children’s Halloween candy stash.

A warning from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) released last August warned that the increasing presence of brightly colored pills “appears to be a new method used by drug cartels to sell highly addictive and potentially deadly fentanyl made to look like candy to children and young people.”

“Rainbow fentanyl—fentanyl pills and powder that come in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes—is a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” added DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.

However, it was startlingly easy to debunk panic over rainbow fentanyl. As it turns out, drug dealers have plenty of willing adult customers. So why would these they try to lure children, a customer base with no money of their own? And why would dealers give away valuable stock to do so?

“I’m skeptical that [dealers] would try to target children where there is not an existing market,” Sally Satel, an addiction psychiatrist and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Reason‘s Lenore Skenazy in 2022. Considering the high risk of overdose in children, Satel added that “few would survive and come back for more.”

Just as there are adult reasons for vape companies to sell flavored vape pods, which were the subject of another panic, there are adult reasons for dealers to color their fentanyl—namely, to “brand [their] stuff.”

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Texas mother who blamed son’s life-threatening injuries on ‘white couple’ arrested for lying to police

A Texas mother was arrested on Saturday for allegedly making false statements to police about her two-year-old son’s life-threatening injuries sustained in February, in which he had suffered internal injuries, burns, and a lacerated liver.

Shelby Martinez, 30, was arrested on Saturday at her apartment complex where her son was injured and has been charged with making false statements to police, according to KFDX Wichita Falls.

Authorities say Martinez and the boy’s father, Thomas Gates, tried to cover up how their child received life-threatening injuries.

Their two-year-old son was allegedly run over by Gates when he was backing out with his vehicle, but the couple blamed it on an “unknown white couple,” according to police. Martinez and Gates are both black.

Gates was arrested in February, several days after the incident, for the same charge after coming clean to the police about how the incident played out.

According to authorities, Gates told them that a car driven by an unknown white female and male had pulled out of a parking spot at the Maverick on Maurine Apartments on Ridgeway and hit his son as he and his family were getting into their car.

After Martinez was questioned by police, they claimed that the details of her account were different from Gates’. Martinez was reportedly combative at the Fort Worth hospital and refused to give an interview to police.

Forensic evidence showed that Gates had lied to police about the location of where his child had been hit. Detectives found blood in the parking lot of their apartment complex, not across the street which Gates had stated, police said.

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Former Yale student cleared to sue accuser over false allegations

A former Yale student who was kicked out of the school in 2019 after being accused and acquitted of rape in 2018 can now sue his accuser for defamation over statements she made during a school hearing on the matter after a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling over the summer.

According to the New York Post, 30-year-old Saifullah Khan has had a $110 million defamation lawsuit pending against the school since 2019, and has been fighting to bring his accuser into the suit.

In June, the state’s supreme court granted Khan’s request, and ruled that the accuser, a fellow student, shouldn’t receive “qualified immunity” from her testimony in a school hearing that Khan raped her after a 2015 Halloween party.

Qualified immunity protects people from being sued over statements they make in judicial cases, but the court ruled that the university hearing wasn’t a stand-in court proceeding, since Khan wasn’t allowed the chance to cross-examine his accuser.

“For absolute immunity to apply under Connecticut law,” the June decision states, “fundamental fairness requires meaningful cross-examination in proceedings like the one at issue.”

Khan’s team listened during the referenced hearing to the woman’s testimony from a separate room, never being able to cross-examine her. The ruling said Khan’s defense attorney was left to act as a “potted plant.”

The court said that Yale’s hearing couldn’t be considered “quasi-judicial” because the woman wasn’t made to testify under oath, and Khan wasn’t provided with a transcript of the testimony.

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Comic Hasan Minhaj Admits He Makes Up Stories About Experiencing Racism — and Doesn’t Regret Smearing Real-Life Acquaintances

Comedian Hasan Minhaj has admitted to inventing several first-person tales of facing discrimination — including a racist attack on his daughter — that undergird his standup comedy act and his politically-themed TV shows.

Minhaj, born in 1985 in the United States to Muslim Indian immigrants, made a name for himself on The Daily Show and his own Netflix comedy series, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. He won a Peabody Award in 2018 for the short-lived (2018-2020) Netflix series.

The comedian has become a favorite among left-wingers for skewering America as a hateful and inherently racist country, often with personal stories of discrimination against him and his family.

Minhaj — who joined Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Steward in 2014 — made headlines as host of the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner (WHCD), where he ripped President Donald Trump, calling him the “liar-in-chief” and “the orange man behind the Muslim ban.”

His comedy was even panned by Saudi Arabian officials, who forced Netflix to remove one of his 2019 episodes of Patriot Act that criticized the Kingdom over the Jamal Khashoggi incident.

Minhaj relays several stories during his show. To name a few, he has claimed that a white girl refused to go to a high school homecoming dance with him, tells the tale of a “brother Eric” who infiltrated a mosque for the FBI, and even told the harrowing tale of an envelope with “white powder” in it spilling all over his daughter.

He also tells the story of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner arrogantly sitting in a chair reserved for a formerly imprisoned Saudi activist at a Time 100 gala in 2019. He now admits that never happened.

At long last, Minhaj has admitted that none of these stories of discrimination ever happened, though he tells them on stage and on TV as if they are real.

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The ‘Climate Emergency’ Is A Hoax

More than 1,600 scientists, including two Nobel laureates, have signed a declaration saying that “There is no climate emergency.”

The declaration is unlikely to get any attention from the mainstream media, unfortunately, but it is important for people to know about: the mass climate hysteria and the destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change need to stop.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” states the declaration signed by the 1,609 scientists, including Nobel laureates John F. Clauser from the US and Ivar Giaever from Norway/US.

The statement adds:

“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures…

“The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

“Warming is far slower than predicted…

“The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

“Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial…

“Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2 mitigation measures are as damag­ing as they are costly.

“Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.”

Professor Steven Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration, current professor at New York University, and fellow at the Hoover Institution, authored the 2021 bestseller, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. In it, he states that what the largely unreadable (for laymen) and complicated science reports say on climate change is completely distorted by the time their contents are filtered through a long line of summary reports of the research by the media and the politicians.

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A Cop Jailed Her for 2 Years on Fake Charges. Will She Ever Get Justice?

A Minnesota woman has resuscitated her effort to sue a police officer who jailed her as a teenager for two years on false charges associated with a sham sex trafficking investigation that the FBI once billed as its largest human trafficking crackdown. The case is another example of the legal labyrinth victims are required to navigate when attempting to get recourse after the government infringes on their rights and once again raises the question: How inoculated should those government officials be from civil suits for violating the Constitution?

Hamdi Mohamud’s odyssey began over a decade ago when St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker had her arrested on witness tampering charges concerning a woman named Muna Abdulkadir, who allegedly attacked Mohamud and her friends at knifepoint. Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s sex-trafficking case, which, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit conceded, was “plagued with problems from the start.” Some of those problems included Weyker lying under oath, coercing witnesses, editing police reports, and making up evidence.

The groundless charges against Mohamud were ultimately dropped, but not until she spent about two years in federal prison, where those accused of federal crimes are typically held pretrial.

When Mohamud sued, Weyker was denied qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to sue state and local government actors unless their alleged misconduct was “clearly established” in a prior court precedent. Yet the 8th Circuit in 2020 overturned that decision, citing Weyker’s position on a federal task force. Government employees at the federal level receive an even more muscular immunity.

“Qualified immunity makes it very, very difficult to sue government officials,” Patrick Jaicomo, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.), told me in 2021. “This makes it impossible.” The U.S. Supreme Court further strengthened that protection in June 2022.

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No human remains found 2 years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada

After two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains.

Some academics and politicians say it’s further evidence that the stories are unproven.

Minegoziibe Anishinabe, a group of indigenous people also known as Pine Creek First Nation, excavated 14 sites in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba during four weeks this summer.

The so-called “anomalies” were first detected using ground-penetrating radar, but on Aug. 18, Chief Derek Nepinak of remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no remains were found.

He also referred to the effort as the “initial excavation,” leading some who were skeptical of the original claims to think even more are planned.

“I don’t like to use the word hoax because it’s too strong but there are also too many falsehoods circulating about this issue with no evidence,” Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post Wednesday.

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