Another hate-crime hoax?
Dan Calabrese , Bio and Archives--November 6, 2017
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I have no evidence one way or the other. It could be the work of real racists. But I have my suspicions. Usually when these things happen, the question I'm asking is: Does this sound like the way real white supremacists think? Or does it sound like the way liberals imagine that they think?
My intuition is telling me this is a fraud:Residents of a New Jersey township made a disturbing find in their mailboxes this week — campaign mailers that proclaim “Make Edison Great Again” and call for the deportation of two Asian school board candidates. One side of the mailers, received on Wednesday, includes the photos of the candidates, one Chinese-American and the other Indian-American — with the word “Deport” stamped under their faces. “Stop Jerry Shi and Falguni Patel from taking over our school board,” the mailer says. “The Chinese and Indians are taking over our town!” it continues. “Chinese school! Indian school! Cricket fields! Enough is enough!” “Stop the overcrowding!” the reverse side of the mailer declares. “Stop taking over our sports fields! Stop the McMansions! Stop multiple families living in the same house! Stop wasting school holidays! Stop the outsiders!” “Let’s take back Edison and our schools,” a bolded line at the bottom of the mailer reads. The mailers include no information on who paid for them — a state law requirement for campaign literature, according to New Jersey 101.5.
'Racist' flyers all the rage in Jersey school board race; so who do you think really made them?
First of all: "Make Edison Great Again"? I suppose there could be white supremacists in Edison who just love the whole MAGA thing and figure it would be persuasive to rip it off for the purposes of something like this, along with the cute little "DEPORT" stamps over the photos of Shi and Patel.
But it's far more likely than a left-wing hoax perpetrator wanted to create an association between Donald Trump and the people who would actually harbor such attitudes. Shi and Patel are both American citizens, after all, so you'd have to be pretty ignorant to advocate their deportation. Are real white supremacists ignorant? Absolutely, but that doesn't mean they're completely unaware of how immigration laws work. If anything they're obsessed with them.
But in the imaginations of many liberals, Donald Trump is trying to deport people who are either citizens or who otherwise live here legally. So you tell me: Which type of mind is more likely to have had the thoughts that led to this flyer being produced?
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