Tag: hoax

Inside the very sinister world of Lil Tay: Influencer and rapper faced fury over vulgar N-word videos at age NINE – before mysteriously VANISHING amid claims she’d been ABUSED by her dad and ‘exploited’ by brother Jason Tian

14-year-old influencer Lil Tay was involved in a bizarre fake death scandal this week – which marked a wild twist to an already tragic story that was filled with rumors of exploitation and allegations of abuse.

Lil Tay, whose real name is Tay Tian, was skyrocketed into the spotlight when she was just nine years old, after she began posting a series of vulgar videos online, which showed her using the N-word and getting into fights with strangers. 

She was hailed as one of the internet’s biggest rising stars in 2017, and quickly racked up millions of followers – but her bizarre clips left some people on the web concerned for her wellbeing. 

Soon, rumors began to swirl that she was being forced to partake in the videos by her family, which were only fueled when footage that seemingly showed her then-16-year-old brother, Jason Tian, coaching her on what to say made its way around the web. 

Lil Tay sparked more concern in July 2018, when she shared a chilling message asking for help to her Instagram Stories, only to suddenly erase all of her videos hours later.

Four months later, an anonymous person started sharing harrowing posts to her account in which they claimed that her ‘abusive’ dad, Chris Hope, was trying to take her away from her mother. 

Chris denied the allegations, claiming that he was actually protecting her. He insisted that he was trying to ‘stop things that he felt were dangerous to her physical and mental health and to her future’ and separate her from people who were motivated by ‘the possibility of making money off of her.’

Then, three years later, her brother issued a desperate plea for help through a GoFundMe page, in which he claimed that Lil Tay was ‘fighting for her life, future and freedom’ after being ‘physically and mentally’ abused by her ‘absentee’ father, who wanted to ‘gain control’ of her and her earnings.

He alleged that Chris had stolen millions of dollars from his sister, took control of her career, forced her into silence, and was now trying to gain full custody over her.

Then, on Wednesday, someone shared a post to Lil Tay’s Instagram claiming that both she and Jason had passed away, explaining that the ‘circumstances surrounding’ their deaths are ‘still under investigation.’

Hours later, however, Lil Tay told TMZ that she was still alive and that her account had been ‘hacked.’ 

As the young star is shrouded in controversy once again, FEMAIL went ahead and rounded up everything we know about her – from her scandalous rise to fame and why she suddenly disappeared from the spotlight five years ago to what she said about her father and what we know about her recent fake death.

Keep reading

Claims that ‘Global Boiling’ Led to “Shocking” Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet are Nonsense – the Ice Sheet is Currently Bigger Than Normal

The new era of ‘global boiling’ has brought a return of the much loved climate scare story featuring the imminent demise of the Greenland ice sheet. The Daily Mail recently ran a headline noting the ‘Impact of Global Boiling‘, saying it has “shocking” photos showing how much the ice sheet has melted during the “hottest month ever recorded on Earth”. Snow melt is said to be higher than the 1981-2010 average.

But, alas, those who strive for accuracy in these matters are likely to quibble. The Earth is not “boiling” – that is the unhinged raving of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – the claim about July comes from a computer model, while “ever” refers to data of varying quality going back barely 150 years. Furthermore, the surface balance of ice on the Greenland ice sheet is higher than the 1981-2010 average, and could improve on last’s year performance, when there was little or no loss of the surface mass after the brief summer melting season.

If the Mail is “shocked” by how much the Greenland ice sheet has melted this year, it probably didn’t consult the polar portal site run by Danish meteorologists, which updates an accurate record on a daily basis. Both graphs above show the effect of a cold June where the ice loss was considerably lower than the previous year. Warmer weather arrived from the south in late June in time for the peak summer melt season.

As the second graph shows, the accumulation of surface ice on Greenland is more than the 1981-2010 average, and a big improvement on a decade ago. But as the Daily Sceptic noted recently, the current improvement can be seen in an even better light. A number of scientific institutions still use a decadal 1981-2010 average for comparison purposes, despite data to 2020 being available. The cynical might note that the ice sheet lost just 51 gigatonnes a year in the 1980s, compared to an annual loss of 244 gts in the 2010s. Updating the average figure would greatly amplify the recent, and continuing, recovery in the surface ice mass.

Keep reading

Southwest Airlines Falsely Accuses Mom of Trafficking Biracial Daughter

A woman is suing Southwest Airlines after flight staff accused her of trafficking her child. Mary MacCarthy was flying with her 10-year-old daughter, “MM,” in 2021 when Southwest Airlines staff called the Denver Police Department and reported her as a suspected child trafficker.

MacCarthy is white, and her daughter is biracial. In a lawsuit against Southwest, MacCarthy alleges that she was suspected of trafficking her own daughter “for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own.”

“There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter,” states the complaint, filed August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, “and the only basis for the Southwest employee’s call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy’s
daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child.”

MacCarthy and her daughter wouldn’t be the first multiracial family to find themselves facing human trafficking allegations at the airport. We keep hearing about flying families or couples falsely accused of being involved in trafficking because they don’t appear to be the same race or ethnicity.

It’s happened with interracial couples and with parents of mixed-race or adopted children. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, infamously fabricated catching a child trafficker when she reported to police a woman traveling with a child who was “a different ethnicity” from her.

This situation isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It comes amidst a decades-long moral panic about sex trafficking generally and child sex trafficking in particular. The panic has taken many forms, including the Department of Homeland Security encouraging War on Terror–style citizen surveillance campaigns (“if you see something, say something”) to stop trafficking; states requiring airports to post human trafficking hotline numbers and awareness signs; and government-sponsored programs to train airline and airport staff to spot alleged signs of trafficking.

Most of the “signs” these people are trained to spot are nonsense—impossibly vague or broad. For instance, Airline Ambassadors International trains airline and airport staff (using a training program approved by Homeland Security) to keep an eye on “children, those who accompany them, and young women traveling alone” and people who seem “nervous.” Training materials also tend to tell people to go with their gut instincts. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lot of racial profiling, with ill-informed instincts about what a family “should” look like coming into play.

The wider campaign to “stop sex trafficking” via vigilance on airplanes and at airports is itself based on the faulty idea that human trafficking (a category that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking) is mostly done by brazen cabals of international traffickers ushering victims into the U.S. and Americans victims out, or shipping victims around the country. But in the U.S., labor trafficking tends to be concentrated in specific industries and to involve various forms of worker exploitation more than the covert importation of human beings. And in the sex trades, exploitation tends to take place at a much smaller scale, with individuals or small groups—often people the victim knows—perpetuating it. It also tends to take place in the communities people live in or with victims and traffickers traveling by car, not using commercial airlines.

Keep reading

A US soldier may have falsely reported a US raid in Afghanistan while attempting to secure the adoption of a baby he found in the rubble

The Afghan villager was afraid the American soldiers might come. And one cool night in fall, as his children lay asleep, helicopters roared overhead.

At the first sound of gunshots, he yelled for his wife and 10 children to take cover. His young daughter grabbed her sleeping infant sister off the bed. Their mud compound exploded, and a blast sent a huge shock through the home.

“My small sister fell away from my arms,” the girl, now a teenager, whispered, so quietly she could barely be heard above the breeze. “The wind blew her out of my hands.”

Today, what exactly happened that night is at the center of a bitter international custody dispute over an orphaned baby found amid the rubble. The high-profile legal battle pits an Afghan family against an American one, and has drawn responses from the White House and the Taliban.

The Afghan government and the International Committee of the Red Cross determined that the baby belonged to this Afghan villager. Friends and family say he was a farmer, not a militant. The Red Cross found surviving relatives and united her with them.

However, a US Marine attorney, Maj. Joshua Mast, believed he should get the girl instead. He insists that the child is the stateless orphan of foreign fighters who were living in an Al Qaeda compound, and convinced a rural Virginia judge to grant him an adoption from 7,000 miles away.

Were it not for this little girl, now 4 years old, the events that began on the night of September 5, 2019, in this remote, impoverished region might have remained locked away among clandestine stories of the thousands of raids the American and Afghan militaries carried out during the long war.

But once-secret documents, now filed in court records, reveal details that thrust this raid into an ongoing controversy over who the military killed when they blew down walls in the middle of the night in Afghanistan, if those people were fighters or civilians, and whether the military ever tried to find out.

The Mast family has submitted a summary of the raid in a federal court case, an account Mast helped create after he said he “personally read every page of the 150+ classified documents” on the operation. The summary describes how as many as six enemy fighters were killed and possibly one civilian. The only child the document mentions is the injured baby.

Keep reading

Race Hoax: Florida State U. Fires Prof for Faking Data on ‘Systemic Racism’ as Multiple Papers Are Retracted

A Florida State University professor has been fired for “faking data” to prove that the legacy of lynching “makes whites want longer sentences for blacks” as part of his long-running work on “systemic racism.” Six of the professor’s studies have since been retracted.

Florida State criminology professor Eric Stewart, who claimed that “systemic racism” infests America’s police and American society, is now out of a job after nearly 20 years of his data was called into question, according to a report by the New York Post.

So far, six of the professor’s articles published in major academic journals — such as Criminology and Law and Society Review — between 2003 and 2019 have been fully retracted following allegations that Stewart’s data was fake or extremely flawed.

One of Stewart’s retracted studies from 2019 had suggested that the history of lynching’s in the United States has made it so that white Americans perceive black people as criminals, and that the problem is worse among conservatives.

Another retracted 2018 study had claimed that white Americans view black and Latino people as “criminal threats,” and even suggested that perceived threat could lead to “state-sponsored social control.”

A third retracted study had claimed that white Americans want tougher sentences for Latinos due to their community getting larger in America and them finding economic success.

Keep reading

Black Woman Who Claimed She Was Kidnapped By White Man With ‘Orange Hair’ Admits She Made It All Up

A black woman who sparked a nationwide manhunt by claiming she was kidnapped in Alabama by a white man with “orange hair” admitted through her lawyer on Monday that she made it all up.

From The Independent, “Carlee Russell claimed she was kidnapped by a man with orange hair. It was all a lie”:

Carlethia “Carlee” Nichole Russell seemed to vanish on 13 July after calling 911 to report she had seen a toddler walking on the side of Interstate 459 in Alabama.

The 25-year-old told dispatch she stopped her car to check on the child, and called a family member before losing contact, according to the Hoover Police Department.

By the time officers arrived five minutes later, Ms Russell had seemingly disappeared, with her car engine still running, and the toddler was nowhere to be found.

Law enforcement and family members mounted a desperate search for the missing woman and pleaded with the public for help.

Then just over 48 hours later, police were notified that Ms Russell had returned home on foot.

She told detectives that she had been kidnapped by a white man with “orange hair”, and held captive in a semi-truck trailer and house before escaping.

However, less than two weeks after making headlines for a harrowing tale of disappearance, child neglect, and kidnapping, the Alabama woman admitted on 24 July it was all a lie.

NBC News reported that police said “Russell told them she was forced into an 18-wheeler truck and taken to a home where a man and a woman told her to get undressed and then took photos of her.”

Keep reading

Carlee Russell fired from spa job, co-workers ‘pissed’ about increasingly suspicious kidnapping story

Carlee Russell has officially disappeared — from the payroll of her Alabama job.

The owner of the Woodhouse spa in Birmingham told The Post that she’s been canned, and that her steaming co-workers are “pissed” about their former colleague’s increasingly suspect kidnapping account.

Owner Stuart Rome said his staffers were stunned after hearing of Russell’s purported disappearance and did everything in their power to help bring her home.

“It was really devastating for them thinking a co-worker was abducted,” he said. “The following day, Saturday, it was the busiest day of the week, and they had to plug along and work and in the off times pass out flyers and other things.”

But since Russell abruptly resurfaced police have revealed she had searched for bus ticket prices and movies about kidnapping on the day she disappeared, drawing mounting skepticism over her account.

Her co-workers’ concern also started to turn to anger.

Keep reading

UFO DISINFO: Four times the US military hoaxed alien contact through the decades

In June 2021, if you were to new to ‘UFO Twitter’ or other social media and websites discussing the UFO topic, you might quite reasonably conclude that this is the year of upper-case D ‘Disclosure’ – finally, the long-awaited revelation from the U.S. government about the existence of alien craft visiting the Earth. From the last four years of revelations in major newspaper and television features regarding military pilots sighting UFOs, through the regular release in recent months of new UFO videos ‘leaked’ from military sources, to this month’s upcoming official report from the Pentagon on what they know about UAPs/UFOs, there has been an accumulation of new information that has led to a growing anticipation of ‘something big’ around the corner.

Many older heads in the UFO scene, though, have been more circumspect. While they have been dismissed by the ‘noobs’ in the scene as being bitter, overly cynical, living in the past and/or not being able to keep up with the recent deluge of information, there is a reason for their skepticism: they know that, for many decades now, certain elements of the U.S. military have worked to seed fake UFO and alien contact information into the public consciousness for their own purposes.

Whatsmore, as Adam Gorightly points out in his book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, a number of these cases involved supposedly rogue US military and intelligence employees revealing secret UFO/alien information to ambitious film-makers and researchers covering UFO and paranormal topics. Sound familiar?

Keep reading

Cop Fabricated Story About Being ‘Carjacked by Two Black Men’ — After He Accidentally Shot Himself

Earlier this month, a sheriff’s office in Florida announced the termination of a former officer who faked a racist carjacking and subsequent shooting to camouflage his own inability to handle a firearm responsibly.

Dakotah Wood, 21, previously employed with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO), has been hit with a plethora of charges, including tampering with physical evidence, false reports of crimes, and discharging a firearm in public or residential property.

On June 30, 2023, deputies responded to an alleged carjacking and shooting in Weeki Wachee Gardens, where they found Wood nursing a gunshot wound to the leg. He initially spun a tale of unknown men, who he claimed were Black, attempting to steal his vehicle. According to Wood, they threatened his life and shot him in the thigh before fleeing the scene.

As the narrative unfolded, however, inconsistencies became evident. Wood later admitted to detectives that the elaborate story was a fabrication, crafted in a desperate attempt to avoid repercussions for his own reckless behavior. He confessed to shooting himself accidentally while “playing” with his gun, alone in the park, distraught over relationship issues with his girlfriend.

Despite Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis describing such situations as “relatively rare,” it’s important to underline the frequency with which such occurrences truly happen. It’s not an isolated incident or a one-off mistake by an errant officer. It speaks volumes about a systemic issue, showing a disturbing trend within law enforcement: the fabrication of crimes to cover up their own inadequacies.

A 2016 study by the National Registry of Exonerations found that police officers and prosecutors often contribute to wrongful convictions by manufacturing crimes. The fabricated story of Wood falls into the same troubling pattern, marking another instance of the gross misuse of power within law enforcement.

What’s more concerning is the damaging impact such false narratives have on community relations and the perception of marginalized racial groups. When a figure of authority, such as a law enforcement officer, propagates false stereotypes, it fuels the fire of racial bias and reinforces the cycle of prejudice and injustice.

Keep reading

There Were At Least 13 Campus Hate-Crime Hoaxes This School Year

The 2022-23 school year saw 13 hate crime hoaxes and six questionable claims, according to a College Fix analysis.

Sports competitions continue to oddly be a source for race hoaxes, despite the omnipresence of phones that can capture alleged racial slurs.

Pennsylvania State University fans found themselves falsely accused of using racial slurs against Rutgers University’s men’s basketball team. “Further investigation into reported fan behavior at the Penn State versus Rutgers basketball game on [Feb. 26] has found that no apparent racial slurs were used by Penn State fans,” the university announced.

By now, it should be clear that claims of racial slurs at sports games are likely not true.

The hoax that attracted the most attention of them all began in August, when Duke University volleyball player Rachel Richardson claimed that someone at a game against Brigham Young University kept yelling the n-word at her. This is actually two hate crime hoaxes, because her godmother also claimed that someone yelled the word every single time the black volleyball player went to serve.

The hoax led the University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach to cancel a game against BYU, even after the hoax had been debunked. The University of Pacific canceled its game against BYU after the debunked hoax as well.

August was a busy time for hate crime hoaxes, as that is when a black female in a “head scarf” named Zaynab Bintabdul-Hadijakien was charged for an attack on the Black Cultural Center. UVA officials would not identify the suspect, and even a police report redacted her race, but The Fix dug around and found out she is a black female.

Even when a black Democrat at Harvard University stood accused of yelling a “homophobic slur” at a peer, LGBT students on campus blamed the pro-life club. This did not appear to be part of a rhetorical exercise, like when the president of MIT’s student government perpetrated two campus hate-crime hoaxes, hanging posters and chalking slurs against LGBTQ people, Latinos and other “marginalized communities,” to protest free speech.

He was not the only LGBT person who left slurs for others in his tribe. For example, a “non-binary” University of Connecticut student found “homophobic language” on a dorm room door – but the culprits were other LGBTQ students.

Other race hoaxes this school year include: the juvenile allegedly behind the bomb threats against historically black colleges and universities, a black man who trashed the University of Florida’s Institute for Black Culture sign, and the claim that white students surrounded a black female student at Sam Houston State University and poured water on her.

The university told The Fix in September 2022 that police were “unable to verify” the claim.

Keep reading