Believing without question

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election, social media feeds and traditional news outlets were awash with reports of hate crimes being committed across the country. A mass outbreak of racism, xenophobia, Nazism, and every other conceivable malignant social and political force was overrunning America, and obviously Trump and his supporters were to blame, or so we were told. As it turned out, however, nearly every one of these hate crimes that were reported around the time of Election Day were found to be hoaxes. The Muslim girl who claimed Trump supporters assaulted her, ripped off her hijab, and shouted insults at her? She made it up in order to have an excuse for breaking curfew. The Bowling Green student who claimed rocks were thrown at her, and the other Bowling Green student who claimed he was mugged by men shouting slurs? Also fake. The Chicago student who received hateful notes and emails from Trump supporters? He made the notes himself. The Muslim college student who said she was harassed on a subway while onlookers did nothing? All lies. The guy in Boston who said he was confronted by two white men when he got off a bus and was told that the US was now “Trump country” and then they threatened to lynch him? Total fabrication. The black church in Mississippi that was vandalized with “Vote Trump” graffiti and later set on fire? It was done by one of the church’s own members. The Texas family whose garage was spray-painted with a racial slur and whose truck and motorcycle were set on fire? The father of the family confessed to doing it himself. The various hate speech writings found on walls, stairs, and other public places? I haven’t seen one yet that wasn’t proven to be a hoax, or at the least remains uncertain.

Why did these people create these falsehoods, and perhaps more importantly, why were so many of us so willing to accept their stories without question? To answer the first question we’d have to get the individual answers from each of the perpetrators, whereas the second question we can ask ourselves. The state of social and political discourse has gotten so bad in our society that we are willing to immediately believe the worst about those whom we disagree with, even when the available data, as well as common sense, would tell us otherwise. Those of us who were anti-Trump should have been very skeptical of all the claims of hate crimes that were coming out in droves around Election Day, but instead, to our embarrassment, we bought in without a second thought. Even I, a person who is friends with Trump voters and knows better than to believe the lies that are perpetuated about them, was inclined to think that the Election Day hate crimes were real. Our minds are shutting down, our hearts are hardening, and I honestly don’t think the trend is going to stop any time soon.