A 41-year-old woman was arrested for defacing the property of a black-owned gym by carving “white pride” into a sidewalk outside the gym in Johnson City, Tennessee last week.
Local reports said the community was outraged and rallied around in support of the business, DC Fitness.
The business owner told local reporters that when he first saw the words “white pride” carved into the sidewalk, “It hit me in the heart more than anything.”
“I had to get an accounting degree for people to trust me, and I have a cardiopulmonary science degree so they trust me medically with their health,” Derrick Carson told the Johnson City Press. “I’ve been through a lot, so to walk through my front doors and see that crap, it hit me in the heart this time.
“To put this here — at my front door — everybody has to see that when they walk in,” Carson added. “It basically says, ‘The person that’s opened this business ain’t worthy.’ It hit me bad today.”
Surveillance footage showed the alleged hate crime perpetrator wasn’t white.
Following a police investigation, Mahagany Teague was arrested and charged with vandalism under $1,000 after authorities say she used a rock to carve “white pride” into the sidewalk, WCYB reported. Teague was booked into the Washington County Detention Center and was being held on a $1,000 bond.
The incident was only the latest report in a series of possible “hate crime” hoaxes, reports say.
The most widely-publicized case, of course, was that of actor Jussie Smollett, who had claimed in January 2019 that two men put a noose around his neck and poured chemicals on him on a Chicago street while yelling racist and homophobic slurs and expressing support for President Donald Trump.
Police arrested Smollett, who is black and openly gay, a month later, accusing the actor of paying two brothers $3,500 to stage the attack.
He was subsequently charged in a 16-count indictment, but the Cook County state’s attorney’s office dropped the charges three weeks later.
Smollett was re-indicted on Feb. 11 on six counts of disorderly conduct, capping a five-month investigation by a court-appointed special prosecutor who overruled a decision by the state’s attorney’s office last year to dismiss the original case.
In a case near Atlanta, police arrested former NFL player Edawn Coughman, 31, in September for allegedly staging a hate crime at his own restaurant and ice cream shop.
According to Gwinnett County police, Coughman trashed his businesses and spray-painted “MAGA” as well as swastikas and slurs on the walls to make it appear he was the victim of a racially motivated burglary. He was charged with false reporting of a burglary, insurance fraud and concealing a license plate.
The Moonbattery website compiled a list of what it said were other hate crime hoaxes. The list includes:
- In late February, a black man said he found his family car vandalized with messages saying the n-word and “Trump.” Photos of the alleged vandalism sparked outrage, local reports said. After an investigation, police arrested the man who reported the vandalism, Trumaine Foster, and charged him with insurance fraud.
- CBSN Philly reported last month that residents in North Philadelphia were outraged when it was discovered a vandal had spray-painted the N-word and F-word on a mural of civil rights leader and former Philadelphia city council member Cecil B. Moore. “The timing, it’s Black History Month. It’s a nice, black area. It’s just not adding up,” CBSN quoted one local resident as saying. In a followup report, CBSN noted that "Philadelphia police have released images of the suspect wanted for spray-painting racial slurs on the Cecil B. Moore mural in North Philadelphia. Police say he was also caught spray-painting slurs at Brightside Academy and Habitat for Humanity. … The suspect is described as a black male."
- In November 2019, students at Syracuse University protested what they called a hate crime after some students reported receiving the white supremacist manifesto of the New Zealand mosques shooter. Students at a campus library said they received the document on their cellphones via an electronic file transfer service called AirDrop. The incident sparked Gov. Andrew Cuomo to called on the university’s board of trustees to hire an outside monitor to investigate the “surge of campus hate crimes.” Police said the incident was likely a hoax and never occurred. SU Chancellor Kent Syverud said: “To date, law enforcement has not been able to locate a single individual who directly received an AirDrop. Not one. It was apparent that this rumor was probably a hoax, but that reality was not communicated clearly and rapidly enough to get ahead of escalating anxiety.”
- The Washington Free Beacon noted that Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Democrat and member of the "squad," promoted four hate hoaxes in 2019. Tlaib tweeted support for Amari Allen, a black 12-year-old who said she was attacked by three white boys who had tied her hands behind her back and cut off her dreadlocks. Allen admitted that she invented her allegations. Tlaib also promoted the Covington Catholic incident and refused to acknowledge that it had been debunked; the Jussie Smollett farce; and the story of black Georgia lawmaker Erica Thomas, who made up an incident of racial oppression at a grocery store.
- In June 2019, University of Michigan police said they were investigating an incident in which a noose was reportedly found on an employee’s desk at a university hospital. CNN reported on the story and it even got the attention of the FBI. The university took "immediate action" to investigate the incident as an act of discrimination and criminal ethnic intimidation, said Dr. Marschall S. Runge, the dean of the University of Michigan Medical School. The university's Division of Public Safety and Security (DPSS) then released this bit of news which CNN and other corporate media overlooked: "Based on multiple witness interviews and other evidence, DPSS does not believe that the incident involving the rope was a hate crime. If relevant new information comes forward, the case will be reopened. During the investigation, it was learned that a spool of rope utilized for medical procedures was being used by a person on a break to practice tying a 'Uni Knot,' which is a type of knot used for fishing."
