Fake beat-down in context

December 19, 2007

GLS appears to think I was unfair and unbalanced when I wrote about the falsified liberal beat-down of a conservative student activist in Princeton. So let me try to add a little more context.

In LA, a Claremont professor spray-painted her own car with racist slurs and reported a hate crime:

Pomona Superior Court Judge Charles Horan said Kerri Dunn “terrorized” minority students at the college and turned the rest of the students into suspects, adding that her actions could have sparked major racial violence.

* * *

Dunn’s report of a hate crime prompted school officials to cancel classes at the five undergraduate Claremont campuses on March 10, and sparked anti- hate crime rallies that drew hundreds of students and captured national headlines. [ Former Professor Sentenced To State Prison ]

And at George Washington University, Sarah Marshak reported a series of swastikas drawn on her door — but was discovered drawing them herself:

Using footage from a hidden video camera, the University Police Department linked freshman Sarah Marshak with the vandalism. She will now appear before Student Judicial Services and could face federal and District charges, a spokesperson announced Monday afternoon. [ Freshman who reported swastikas drew them as well ]

I am sure there’s a fancy name for this sort of mental disorder, but I didn’t bother to bring my DSM-V the last time we moved. Suffice it to say that all these people are nuts. But let me point out a difference.

Hate crimes against black people, jewish people, gay people, and women still occur. In my still-relatively-short life I’ve heard blatant, undeniable racism from co-workers, security guards, even members of my extended family. I once had a Masonic brother tell me, quite seriously, that God condoned burning homosexuals alive. We know that racism and bigotry abound. The Klan still marches and there are still skinheads. Plenty of swastikas are drawn in earnest, although nooses seem to be more in fashion this year.

Dunn and Marshak’s reports were fabrications, and for fabricating these incidents they deserve criticism and possibly even jail time. but the reason Dunn’s accusations closed down a campus and sparked rallies is because the kind of racism and hatred she faked exists in earnest elsewhere, and it wasn’t that long ago that organized gangs of thugs actually were dragging black people and civil-rights sympathizers out in the street to shoot or lynch them. The accusations, while fabricated, happened in the context of very real hate crimes committed not just forty years ago but as recently as the Jena Six.

Francisco Nava’s story was that he was assaulted and members of his organization received death threats after they spoke out against condom distribution. There are violent liberals, to be sure, and liberal terrorist organizations. But this country has never, so far as I know, had a history of systematic, violent persecution of moral and fiscal conservatives. The violent liberal underground, if it exists, doesn’t exist in a widespread or organized enough fashion to cause general panic. And yet we were chided for not taking the threat of militant condom-distributors seriously:

Princeton graduate Michael Fragoso tells the Sun — “There would rightly be outrage had the student been part of some other minority on campus. I have yet to see that right now, and that’s rather disappointing.”

Nava’s story doesn’t have the same context. Conservative complaints of persecution essentially boil down to being upset at having their ideas challenged in public discourse, or — at worst — name calling. There is no existential threat post by liberal snark. Unless you buy into the tinfoil-hat theory that the Clintons have all of their critics assassinated. Dunn and Marshak aside, hate crimes still happen. But none of Stanley Fish’s colleagues have been found hanging from a tree.

Instead, the context of Nava’s fabrication is the continuing attempt by some on the right to equate criticism of conservative ideas with a mythical, much more militant agenda. I see little difference in Nava’s tale, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Facism, David Horowitz’s liberal snipe hunt, Tancredo’s extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric, the war on Christians, or even McCarthy’s reds under the beds. They all represent an attempt by conservative thinkers to equate liberalism with violent extremism — to convince people that they should fear those of us who are not like them.

And if they have to make stuff up, they will.

Posted in Politics