The Erica Thomas story was a hoax, but it never should have mattered outside Georgia anyway

The original story went like this: The innocent, affable Thomas was just minding her own business in a line at the grocery store, when an evil, racist white man confronted her and told her to “go back” to her country where she came from. Seeing as Thomas is a native-born African American citizen, this was a racist attack and the perfect example of how Trump’s divisive “they should go back” comments directed to minority congresswomen are fueling a national rise in hate.

At least, that’s the narrative many media outlets went with, from the local television station to the New York Times. They made a national story out of this random, one-off incident.

The only problem? The man in question was actually an anti-Trump Hispanic Democrat, and Thomas has since admitted that she isn’t sure he told her to “go back” at all. Plus, he could have meant to “go back” to the regular checkout lane at the grocery store, as she was in the express lane with more items than posted signs said are allowed.

But while these inconvenient facts certainly call into question the liberal media’s fact-checking standards, it doesn’t actually matter that the incident turned out to be a hoax. Let me explain.

I’m a publicly gay man working in conservative media, so it’s possible for me to envision a similar scenario happening to myself one day. But if I was in a grocery store and some angry Democrat came up and said something homophobic to me, I’d flip them the middle finger and carry on with my day. I wouldn’t throw a fit and try to stir up outrage, I’d move on to something productive. Plus, something tells me that the New York Times wouldn’t be nearly as interested in using my story to paint a negative narrative about homophobic Democrats and they’d be right not to.

A random person being rude to someone in a grocery store somewhere is not news. It’s disgraceful to use it to advance a fake narrative that all Trump supporters are evil, racist bigots, or any narrative for that matter.

Seriously, what is the significance of a one-off event? It doesn’t tell us anything about how racist our society is, as isolated incidents will happen in any country no matter its politics. In fact, stories like this serve no real purpose beyond harvesting clicks, confirming people’s biases, and further dividing the country.

As Robby Soave wrote for Reason, “a minor, trivial encounter between two stressed shoppers—a story so old that it is not actually a story—was transformed into a viral social media moment, and then served up to outrage-hungry readers by national news media.” Soave accurately diagnoses the problem posed by outrage culture, and goes on to tie this incident to similar examples of media malpractice such as the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax and misleading coverage of the “MAGA hat” Covington Catholic students and native American protester Nathan Phillips. It’s clear that the manufactured outrage over the Erica Thomas incident is part of a larger, disturbing pattern.

We must be much more diligent when reporting on and reading these viral outrage incidents. But more importantly, the real lesson here is that we shouldn’t be paying much attention to these kinds of one-off stories at all.