The Left discovers the value of fake hate crimes. When tyranny arrives on these shores, it isn’t going to start off looking like something out of George Orwell — it’s going to look a lot like college, which is why the sort of people who twice made Barack Obama president of these United States will welcome it. George Washington University (“the Harvard of safety schools,” as alumnus Dan Foster calls it) has a swastika problem. This goes back a ways. In 2007, a Jewish student, Sarah Marshak, reported that her dorm-room door had been defaced with swastikas, and she complained that the university was doing too little to investigate. But the university was in fact investigating thoroughly — it had, ridiculously enough, gone as far as consulting the FBI — and its sneakily hidden surveillance cameras recorded the vandal in action. No points for guessing that the malefactor was Sarah Marshak.
Recently, somebody drew swastikas on the wall of a GWU dormitory. Whether that is the work of another hoax artist or a genuine free-range national-socialist graffitist is unknown, but the school’s students have an unproud history of faking hate crimes. A group of left-wing students some years back drew up a phony anti-Muslim flier that was falsely attributed to a conservative group, the Young America’s Foundation, in an attempt to smear the organization as racist. (If you’re wondering what these jackasses grow up to become, consider that Matthew Bruenig of The American Prospect and Salon similarly manufactured out of whole cloth a quotation he attributed to me, expressing sympathy for Donald Sterling during the controversy over his racist comments. I’d never even heard of Sterling at the time and assumed everybody was talking about a character on Mad Men. Purportedly respectable institutions still publish Bruenig.)