For the past four years, the national media have anticipated an outbreak of widespread violence instigated by President Trump’s supporters. It has never materialized, but the Washington Post on Thursday printed one more story about American minorities fearing for their safety from Trump voters.
There isn’t a scintilla of evidence to suggest that the president’s supporters are anything but the most docile creatures to walk the earth. But why should that stop journalists from repeatedly claiming that every utterance out of Trump’s mouth “invokes fear of violence?”
The Washington Post report, by Griff Witte, said that in Greenville, North Carolina, Muslims and immigrants were shaken by newfound “fears” that they’re not welcome in their own neighborhoods and communities.
Samar Badwan, an American Muslim, “never had to question whether her hijab was incompatible with her Southern drawl,” the story said. “She never had to fear that her North Carolina neighbors might hold her Palestinian heritage against her.” And she “never had to think that in Greenville … her faith would mark her as an unwanted outsider.”
All of that, Witte ominously wrote, was before “the president came to town.”
It was in Greenville where Trump held his now-infamous campaign rally that inspired the “Send Her Back” chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is originally from Somalia. That apparently has something to do with El Paso, Texas, and the mass shooting perpetrated by a guy who didn’t like Hispanics and who explicitly said he wasn’t inspired by Trump.
Both episodes, according to Witte, have left such a lasting mark on the psyche of minorities in Greenville that Badwan can’t wait to leave.
Just kidding, what she said in the piece was, “I do a lot of traveling but there’s nothing like coming back here.”
Yup, that’s the quote. Nevertheless, Witte wondered whether “the “hostility on display” at the rally was “new” to Greenville or whether “it was here all along, just waiting to be activated?”
How about C: The “hostility” was nothing more than a taunt directed at a congresswoman whose short political career has been nothing but one long complaint about everything wrong with the country that was generous enough to bring her in from her war-torn home.
The Washington Post article also quoted 24-year-old Sura al-Hilali, an Iraqi refugee who said that she doesn’t “feel safe anymore” wearing her hijab in public. Ridiculous. If the past three years are any indication, then a fake hate crime is more likely to occur than a real one.
As detailed at great length in my forthcoming book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, hate crime hoaxes are shockingly common. In particular, the scenario of a Muslim woman accosted by Trump supporters who tear off her religious garb has been faked and then exposed as fake over and over again.
A day after the 2016 election, a female Muslim student at San Diego State University claimed to police that she was assaulted and robbed by two men who “made comments about President-Elect Trump and the Muslim community …” The student also said that her car was stolen, apparently as part of the attack. Two months later, police dropped the investigation because the “victim” no longer wanted to cooperate. And her car wasn’t stolen after all. She told police she had simply forgotten where she parked it. It’s totally unrelated, no doubt, that the student was a member of the Muslim Student Association, which had been planning an upcoming protest of Trump’s election.
The exact same day as that hoax attack, another Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette claimed that two white men assaulted her, robbed her, and snatched the hijab off of her head. She described one of them as wearing a white “Trump” hat. A day later, investigators said she confessed to having fabricated the entire story.
On Dec. 1, 2016, 18-year-old Yasmin Seweid told New York City police that three drunken white guys taunted her about Trump’s election victory and tried to pull the hijab off of her head on the subway as other passengers watched without intervening. “It made me really sad after when I thought about it,” she told the New York Daily News. “People were looking at me and looking at what was happening and no one said a thing. They just looked away.” She said the men called her a “terrorist” and told her to “Get the hell out of the country.”
A month later, she confessed that none of it had actually happened. “Nothing happened, and there was no victim,” New York police said. The New York Daily News thereafter reported that Seweid made up the story “because she didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking her curfew after being out late drinking with friends.” (You can take solace in one thing, though. Seweid’s parents, disappointed with her hoax, reportedly made her shave her head.)
There is no more evidence today than there was four years ago that anyone should be worried about Trump-inspired violence. It doesn’t exist.
