This is only about the thousandth time this happened. At this point if an obnoxious campus progressive begins receiving death threats and starts a petition about it, it’s safe to assume the whole thing is fake.
University of Chicago students who helped start a petition demanding the school address a “culture of racial intolerance” became the targets of a racially-charged threat Tuesday that is now being investigated by federal authorities. “I was very literally scared to leave my house,” said University of Chicago junior Vincente Perez. Perez became a victim of the very violence he was trying to prevent when a friend’s Facebook page was hacked and someone posted an explicit threat. The threat, which the university calls a “hateful and abhorrent attack,” read in part, “Vincente you are next. None of your profiles are safe. This is the beginning of our rape season.” Perez believes the threat stems from Halloween night, when he saw students dressed as Mexican stereotypes. Photos were later uploaded to Facebook with people in the costumes in offenses poses, he said.
And so the outrage switch was pulled. A campaign began. Condemnations of a culture of intolerance. So what violence was Perez trying to prevent?
“Everything started the night of Halloween. I was on a [campus] shuttle and I noticed a person wearing a cholo costume,” said Vincente Perez, a 20-year-old University of Chicago student, describing a derogatory term for Mexican-American men. The costumed student, whom Perez describes as being of Asian descent, was wearing a red bandanna, dark sunglasses and a plaid flannel shirt with only the top button buttoned. His pants were sagging to reveal black basketball shorts. “As we were getting off I was saying things like, ‘Thanks for the racist costume, think about what you’re doing, it’s really [bleeping] racist,’” Perez said. “[The costumed person and his friends] weren’t really responding to us. They basically scoffed at us.”
And what will it take to stop Asian students from wearing red bandanas and scoffing at idiots?
Among the petition’s demands: required courses on race and ethnicity; more effort to hire and retain diverse faculty; and disciplinary protocols to deal with students who engage in “discriminatory actions.” The racist Halloween costumes are just one example of a campus culture that does not fully include minorities, Sanchez said.
Asians apparently aren’t minorities.
A petition that began circulating last weekend now has more than 2,000 signatures. The hacking of a student’s Facebook account Tuesday evening has led to a federal investigation; a subsequent movement on Twitter resulted in 1,500 related Tweets; and a protest took place Wednesday afternoon in the middle of the Harper Reading Room. The demonstration was shared on social media via the hashtag #liabilityofthemind, which was created to highlight experiences of all marginalized students on campus. On Tuesday, the Facebook account of first-year Derek Caquelin was allegedly hacked by the UChicago Electronic Army.
So were these threats even real? Like everything social justice, it was all a scam.
A threatening message posted to a student’s Facebook page — initially thought to be the work of hackers — was actually written by the student himself, University of Chicago officials said Monday. “It became clear that nobody broke into the Facebook account in question, and that in fact the posting was not the anonymous threat against a student that it first appeared to be,” according to a statement from the university. According to a person with knowledge of the incident, it appears the student’s fake message was a misguided attempt to draw attention to the issues of race and sexual abuse. Student activist Vincente Perez told the school’s newspaper, the Chicago Maroon: “Someone felt they had to show something extreme to get people to care.”
I think they call that a racist lie.
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