'Racist Hoax' Dismantled After Suspect Reveals Where Notes Really Came From
It’s becoming a bit of a trend: A series of racist notes has been revealed as a hoax, after a student at Drake University in Iowa admitted that the allegedly hateful messages had been written by her own hand.
According to The Des Moines Register, an 18-year-old student who is not being publicly identified claimed to find four racist notes in residence halls at the college. After police investigated the potential hate crimes, they realized that the incident had been entirely created by the female student.
Now, she may face criminal charges, Des Moines police Sgt. Paul Parizek told the newspaper.
“The student will also be subject to the disciplinary process outlined in Drake’s Code of Student Conduct, which may result in actions up to and including expulsion,” The Register explained.
A fifth racist note is still under investigation. Back in November, a student named Keith Walker claimed to have been sent a hateful message and wrote an emotional Facebook post about his ordeal.
Officials believe that it was written by a different person than the other four notes, and was later emulated by the female suspect. However, they have not ruled out that this earlier message may have also been a hoax. Walker is not cooperating with police investigators, putting his story into doubt.
The notes, almost all of which have been revealed as fakes, were used to spark a large protest and much hand-wringing by students on campus.
“On Nov. 14, about 3,000 students and others held a rally at Drake to celebrate diversity and call for unity among students. At the rally, a student speaker said she felt her life was in danger at Drake,” The Register reported.
How dramatic.
Bizarrely, the college doubled down on its alarmed rhetoric even after the four racist notes turned out to be hoaxes.
“The fact that the actions of the student who has admitted guilt were propelled by motives other than hate does not minimize the worry and emotional harm they caused, but should temper fears,” Drake University President Marty Martin said.
It would be one thing if fake hate crime scares were few and far between, but the fact is that these incidents turn out to be fake more often than not. We have covered some of those hoaxes, while many others have been reported in different media outlets.
It’s worth thinking about the implications of these “fake hate” trends. What this means is that America is largely so accepting in 2018 that college students must invent things to be offended by, in order to get attention.
Make no mistake, attention seeking behavior is almost certainly the motive behind these incidents. That’s cute for kids, but absolutely appalling when adult students at a university are the ones acting out.
Colleges — and certainly four-year universities like Drake — are supposed to be places of higher learning, where attendees have at least of modicum of maturity and seriousness.
More and more, America’s universities are instead becoming playgrounds of perpetual childishness. Intent on being part of the “social justice” movement and one-upping each other with badges of imagined victimhood, students are now lying in order to pretend to fight for truth.
Hopefully, real-life consequences of these hoaxes and deceptions will send a strong message: Honesty matters, even when it doesn’t fit a convenient social justice agenda.
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