Tag: hoax

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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German Newspaper Debunks Fake Ukrainian Story of ‘Russian Torture’

A pile of gold teeth, which Ukraine alleged had been pulled from civilians by Russian troops to torture them, actually belonged to a local dentist, Bild reported on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry posted a picture on Twitter of what it called “a torture chamber” in Peski Radkovskiye, a town in Kharkov Region. The photo depicted a gas mask, which, according to the ministry, was used to torture the local population, and a box of gold dental crowns lying on the grass.

“How many more will be found in occupied Ukraine?” it asked, hinting that it was Russian troops who had committed the atrocities.

However, according to Bild, the teeth apparently belonged to patients of a local dentist, not to Ukrainian torture victims.

“These teeth look like those stolen from my collection,” Sergey, 60, told the outlet when he was shown the photo distributed by the Ukrainian authorities. “I’m the only dentist here. So if they were found here, they must have come from me.”

When asked if the teeth could have come from dead people, the dentist categorically dismissed the notion. “Oh God, no! They belonged to the people I’ve treated all these years. I pulled out these teeth because they were bad,” he explained.

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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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HATE HOAX: Claims of racial slurs yelled at college volleyball star debunked

Last week, Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson, a black woman, claimed she was called a racial slur from the bleachers of an opposing team, BYU, during an August 26 game. As days pass, evidence is mounting that her claim is a fabrication.

On Monday, BYU alum and podcast Backseat Directors host André Hutchens, compiled a timeline of the events, writing, “What I’d like to do is map out these events and put together a timeline of the story, and then compare the allegations of what happened vs what actually happened based on available evidence. My only reason for doing this is to hopefully arrive at the TRUTH”

The controversy started with Richardson’s godmother, Lesa Pamplin, posting the allegation on social media. Pamplin, whose Twitter is now private, is a current political candidate running for Judge for Tarrant County Criminal Court in Fort Worth, Texas. Hutchens posted a screen cap of her original allegation which read, “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Duke’s volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a n*gger every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

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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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Wagging the moondoggie…

If the Moon landings were faked, then one question that naturally arises is: why would any government go to such extreme lengths to mount such an elaborate hoax?

The most obvious answer (and the one most frequently cited by skeptics) is to reclaim a sense of national pride that had been stripped away by America’s having played follow-the-leader with the Soviets for an entire decade. While this undoubtedly played a large role, there are other factors as well – factors that haven’t been as fully explored. But before we look at those, we must first deal with the question of whether it would have even been possible to pull off such an enormous hoax.

Could so many people have really been duped into believing such an outrageous lie, if that in fact was what it was? To answer that question, we have to keep in mind that we are talking about the summer of 1969 here. Those old enough to have been there will recall that they – along with the vast majority of politically active people in the country – spent that particular period of time primarily engaged in tripping on some really good acid (most likely from the lab of Mr. Owsley).

How hard then would it really have been to fool most of you? I probably could have stuck a fish bowl on my head, wrapped myself in aluminum foil, and then filmed myself high-stepping across my backyard and most of you would have believed that I was Moonwalking. Some of you couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that everyone was walking on the Moon.

In truth, not everyone was fooled by the alleged Moon landings. Though it is rarely discussed these days, a significant number of people gave NASA’s television productions a thumbs-down. As Wired magazine has reported, “when Knight Newspapers polled 1,721 US residents one year after the first moon landing, it found that more than 30 percent of respondents were suspicious of NASA’s trips to the moon.” Given that overall trust in government was considerably higher in those pre-Watergate days, the fact that nearly a third of Americans doubted what they were ‘witnessing’ through their television sets is rather remarkable.

When Fox ran a special on the Moon landings some years back and reported that 1-in-5 Americans had doubts about the Apollo missions, various ‘debunking’ websites cried foul and claimed that the actual percentage was much lower. BadAstronomy.com, for example, claims that the actual figure is about 6%, and that roughly that many people will agree “with almost any question that is asked of them.” Hence, there are only a relative handful of kooks who don’t believe that we’ve ever been to the Moon.

All of those websites fail to mention, of course, that among the people who experienced the events as they were occurring, nearly 1-in-3 had doubts, a number considerably higher than the number that Fox used. And, needless to say, the ‘debunkers’ also failed to mention that 1-in-4 young Americans, a number also higher than the figure Fox used, have doubts about the Moon landings.

Returning then to the question of why such a ruse would be perpetrated, we must transport ourselves back to the year 1969. Richard Nixon has just been inaugurated as our brand new president, and his ascension to the throne is in part due to his promises to the American people that he will disengage from the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. But Tricky Dick has a bit of a problem on his hands in that he has absolutely no intention of ending the war. In fact, he would really, really like to escalate the conflict as much as possible. But to do so, he needs to set up a diversion – some means of stoking the patriotic fervor of the American people so that they will blindly rally behind him.

In short, he needs to wag the dog.

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How a Fake Anonymous Diary Helped Launch the 1980s Satanic Panic

In 1971, the YA book Go Ask Alice hit shelves and almost immediately set off a firestorm. Purportedly the real-life diary of a straitlaced teen girl who lost her life to drugs, it was an instant hit, touted by critics across the country as a must-read for parents and teenagers alike. Over the ensuing decades, it sold tens of millions of copies — beloved by teens for its frenetic entries about taboo subjects, and by adults because it was a text they could point to as proof of the ills of drugs. But by the early 21st century, questions had arisen about the book’s veracity, as well as the true identity of its “anonymous” author — something only known by the book’s editor, a supposed child psychologist named Beatrice Sparks.

It was Sparks who captured Rick Emerson’s imagination one day back in 2015. Driving home from lunch, Emerson — who wasn’t born when the book came out, but lived through the Reagan-Era D.A.R.E. classes and War on Drugs it helped to fuel — began wondering about the mysterious author. Who was she, really? Where could he find out more about her? When he got home, he realized that the book he wanted to read didn’t exist, so he set out to write it himself. What he discovered was more shocking than he could have imagined. “Go Ask Alice was the bright, shiny object that started the story,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But then it got much bigger, much faster.” 

In short, Emerson found something that one of her follow-up YA books, Jay’s Journal, an equally suspicious “diary” of a teen boy’s descent into occultism and suicide, may have helped ignite that other late-20th-century moral freak-out: the Satanic Panic, a two-decade span of Americans blaming the devil and occultists for everything from depression to suicide and murder. “As I worked my way from the outside in, [I realized] the shadow and the scope and the scale that these books had, especially combined,” he says. “It went literally from Hollywood to the Oval Office to Quantico, and then into high schools in small towns throughout America.”

Seven years since that idea popped into his head, Emerson has finally published Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, out this month from BenBella Books. Based on intensive research — scouring Sparks’ personal letters; conducting dozens of interviews with those who knew the real families who lost children, and with the families themselves; meticulously picking through Sparks’ other books, as well as their source material — he’s created a portrait of a fabulist so intent on spinning her legend that she stole the stories of others for her own gain. But in telling the real stories, he also brings a sort of justice for the kids and their families whose experiences had been exploited for profit.

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