Why the Pittsburgh attack had hoax written all over it

Nora Brinker explains why the recent incident in Pittsburgh, in which a female McCain volunteer told police that that a black man after mugging her at an ATM “carved” the letter B. into her face, should have been seen from the start as a likely hoax, despite the extreme rarity, or rather the previous total non-existence, of hoaxes by Republican women manufacturing crimes by blacks.

Nora Brinker (the Editrix) writes from Germany:

I am not at all amazed that the Pittsburgh attack was a canard. It had “hoax” written over it right from the start. I realize that I, speaking post factum, sound like a prat now, but I would like to add a few aspects nevertheless.

We had several similar cases in Germany and I think there is a pattern. For example, last year a 17-year-old girl claimed that some “neo-Nazis” cut a swastika into her hip after she tried to save a 6-year-old girl from harassment. In the East German town of Mittweida, that was. It turned out that the little girl hadn’t been in town at the time of the alleged incident and that its valiant defender had injured herself. The “civil courage” award for which she was nominated she got … nevertheless. Now a court case against her has been opened to the chagrin of all the do-gooders who are still supporting her. Will it lead anywhere? I doubt it.

In December 2002 the 14-year-old daughter of a Cuban immigrant reported to the police in the town of Guben that “neo-Nazis” had cut a swastika into her cheek. She was first believed, then she admitted that she had invented the incident and injured herself.

In 1994 in Halle a wheelchair-bound girl reported a similar incident. 10,000 rallied the next day against “right wing extremist violence.” This girl, too, admitted that she had made the attack up and injured herself.

What did NOT fit that pattern in the Pittsburgh case was the choice of perpetrator. My advice for attention seekers would be to choose a politically correct perpetrator group that guarantees maximum credibility and interest. That works a treat with neo-Nazis in Germany but not (are we surprised?) with blacks in America.

Generally speaking, when society is dealing with a politically accepted perpetrator, the role of the media—and increasingly that of the legal system as well—is not a matter of clarifying what happened anymore, but of the correct reaction. So we are supposed to fight whatever is on the table, right-wing extremism or racism, even in cases where it wasn’t even there. We are safely removing ourselves from the necessity of clarifying facts and into a space where nothing but the correct outlook matters.

My message to those involved in similar cases and to the Republican Party in this case would be: Please do us a favour and wait until there is a reasonable amount of rock-hard evidence before you seek media-attention. Young women who turn up with letters and symbols carved into their body parts are rarely what you may wish them to be.

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LA replies:

First you write:

I am not at all amazed that the Pittsburgh attack was a canard. It had “hoax” written over it right from the start.

Then you write:

What did NOT fit that pattern was, in the Pittsburgh case, the choice of perpetrator.

Well, did the Pittsburgh attack have hoax written all over it, despite the race of the perpetrator? That’s what threw me off (that is, until, shortly after I posted the entry, several VFR readers pointed out it was likely a hoax). A Republican female activist making up a story about a black man attacking her is simply unheard of.

Nora Brinker replies:

“Well, did the Pittsburgh attack have hoax written all over it despite the race of the perpetrator?”

I think it had. People tend to behave within patterns. Here, we have two conflicting, but by no means mutually exclusive, ones. The stronger pattern wins. Pattern I: Some girls and young woman mutilate themselves for various reasons, one of them being attention seeking. Pattern II: Blacks tend to accuse whites falsely of “hate crimes,” whereas whites (and specifically white Republican activists) tend not to accuse blacks in that way. However, when a young woman turns up with a story like Ashley Todd’s, all alarm bells ought to ring, no matter the other circumstances. The attention seeking female will always get the better of all other personality traits a woman might possess. (I wonder whether she has a history relevant to this case.)

What specifically baffles me is that such a simple truth was neglected in psychology-conscious America, but then, psychology isn’t used to reveal unsavory personality traits but to conceal and excuse them, again in the name of political correctness. After all, we have done away with “good” and “evil” long ago, and isn’t self-mutilation nothing but an outlet for strong negative emotions, which the person is afraid to express in words? No doubt Ashley Todd will get bags of empathy and attention now while she is taught “how to talk about her inner pain” so that she doesn’t need to express it “nonverbal” anymore.

When I am searching the Internet now (“Another Moment In The “Black Kid Did It!” History”) and see what this unspeakable girl did to the cause of revealing the truth about black-on-white crime (and to THE truth generally), I could weep.

The best armor against such lies is to check a story twice carefully if one WANTS it to be true.

LA replies:

I find persuasive and fascinating your argument that the disfigurement claim is such a strong indication that the claim is a hoax, that it trumps the extreme unlikelihood of its being a hoax based on the races of the parties.

David B. writes:

These incidents where something is supposedly carved on someone are usually self-inflicted, which occurred to me when I gave second thought to the Pittsburgh incident. In 1978, a South African tennis team was playing in a tournament at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Richard Lapchick, son of the former St. Johns basketball coach, came to Nashville to “protest apartheid.” This brought heavy publicity.

A few days later, Lapchick went back to his base in Virginia. He called the police and claimed that a gang of white men had invaded his office and carved “KKK” on his chest. Upon inspection, the authorities determined that the wounds were self-inflicted.

This has never slowed down Richard Lapchick. To this day, he is a favorite media commentator, and heads his own organization. He sometimes brags about the incident, as an illustration of American Racism. “They didn’t believe me even though I was telling the truth,” he says. Lapchick’s solution to every problem is “more diversity,” and he blames “white racism” for all of society’s ills.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

I just read the very interesting account that Nora Brinker gave of the Pittsburgh hoax. It is true that there is a strange epidemic going on with girls and young women “cutting themselves” as a form of attention-seeking, or more insidiously, as a way of “feeling more alive”—through the pain, I presume.

But, with all due respect to Nora’s psychological analysis, one of the things that struck me about the story, and your readers’ further posts, was that the woman was using the current situation of the country to enhance her story.

In the U.S., and certainly in Canada too, where race is a the big elephant in the room, I think that the “cutting” and the race would go hand in hand.

So, I got the feeling that this young woman was going against the grain in making up this story, perhaps frustrated by all the undue PC empathy given to blacks (and the black Obama’s whirlwind of a campaign). That besides her attention-seeking behavior, she is frustrated with her environment and finding her own way to express it….

Then she added the politically charged element of race in the American elections—she being a supporter of a white candidate, the black man naturally (stereotypically) supporting Obama and attacking at her for displaying the white McCain’s sticker.

I think that is going to be the “Brave New World” of the whole outcome of these upcoming elections. Strange behaviors releasing these racial tensions, each person in his own idiosyncratic way (just like this woman).

Kidist continues:

Here is information that Ashly Todd behaved in a similar manner while working for a Ron Paul group:

Mr Costine [leader of a Ron Paul group] said … “We had to remove her because of the tactics she displayed.”

… Ms. Todd sent an email to the Ron Paul group saying her tires were slashed and that campaign paraphernalia had been stolen from her car because she supported Mr. Paul.

“She’s the type of person who wants to be recognized,” Mr. Costine said.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2008 06:01 AM | Send