OK, someone—and the surveillance video shows exactly one man wearing black clothes—hung bananas by strings that resembled nooses at three locations on the campus of Washington, D.C.’s American University during the wee hours of the morning on May 1. The banana-hangings were plausibly a racial hate crime: The three bananas were marked with the letters AKA—presumably for Alpha Kappa Alpha, a black sorority on campus—and May 1 was the date that Taylor Dumpson, a member of the sorority, took office as AU’s first African-American student government president. The university has said that Dumpson was also targeted for trolling by Andrew Anglin of the anti-black and anti-Semitic (and lately, anti-Trump because of the president’s Jewish son-in-law) website the Daily Stormer.

If the noosed bananas represent something nasty directed at Dumpson and aren’t a hoax, I hope American cracks down hard on the perp or perps for defacing the campus and violating basic standards of civility. But the investigation of the incident so far hasn’t turned up any reported leads (meanwhile the university has provided Dumpson with security personnel). What’s distressing is this: Even though American’s response to the banana incident has been outrage and concern from the initial discovery of the nooses, campus leftists have used the incident to mount a massive protest against the university’s supposed inaction—and to issue a list of demands to the administration that mostly center around the desires of the protesters themselves. Just to make their point, the activists blocked roads and a tunnel in the center of the American University campus on May 5, shutting down both ingress and egress.