Thread by @DavidNeiwert

1) Portland, OR, has a problem with hate crimes in its greater metropolitan area. But to hear the New York Post’s @MrAndyNgo tell it, their real problem is people faking hate crimes. Thread follows.

nypost.com/2019/03/30/ins…

2) I’ve been writing about hate crimes since the 1980s, including a book published in 2004 about a notorious incident in Ocean Shores, WA. I also tracked them as part of my work for the SPLC, 2013-2018.

amazon.com/Death-Fourth-J…

3) Ngo’s methodology for tracking down these potential fake hate crimes is, shall we say, unusual: The primary evidence he presents that the incidents might be faked is that the people involved refused to speak or correspond with him.

4) I’m sure their refusals had nothing to do with Ngo’s rep as a right-wing gadfly who writes for a publication that attacks hate crimes as hoaxes. Why would people he’s likely to be accusing of being liars (as he eventually indeed did) avoid contact with him? Hm. It’s a mystery.

5) In the meantime, anyone who’s been paying even the slightest attention in Portland is aware that the city has a problem with hate crimes, as does the state overall. There was a 40 percent increase in 2018.

kgw.com/article/news/l…

6) And that almost certainly didn’t come close to counting them all.

opb.org/news/article/h…

7) More to the point, there’s a problem with Oregon’s laws, particularly their toothlessness. @alex_zee explored this in some depth, in a piece focused on one of the same incidents that Ngo apparently finds dubious.

portlandmercury.com/news/2018/07/1…

8) After all, Ngo has a whole menu of hate crimes he could question as potential hoaxes. A lot of them have been in the news in Portland the past year or two. One was just resolved in court last week.

kgw.com/article/news/c…

9) Perhaps Ngo should try contacting the attorneys in this case. I bet they wouldn’t talk to him either. That, by Andy’s lights, would make the whole thing suspicious and a potential hoax.

portlandmercury.com/news/2016/08/3…

10) Maybe Ngo should try talking to the people involved with this case, in which a Puyallup, WA, man tried running down an immigrant family with children at a seaside town. Then again, the victim lost a part of his leg. That’s hard to fake.

oregonlive.com/portland/2018/…

11) That case is noteworthy because police weren’t even going to add a hate-crime charge until CAIR contacted them and requested action. But, you know, hoaxes are the REAL problem, not underenforcement.

cair.com/cair_oregon_ca…

12) Here’s another one, out in McMinnville, involving a knife and verbal slurs. Oh, but this one is pretty hard to fake since there’s a video.

oregonlive.com/news/2018/12/o…

13) Another recent hate-crime arrest involved a security guard who harassed a Muslim family with a baton and pepper spray on the Willamette River dock.

portlandoregon.gov/police/news/re…

14) The most notorious hate crime in Portland in decades, however, was of course Jeremy Christian’s attack on three men, two fatally, on a Portland MAX train who came to the defense of two Muslim women Christian was harassing. That was not faked either.

oregonlive.com/portland/2017/…

15) I bring this case especially to Ngo’s attention because Christian had previously been associated with Patriot Prayer, which ended up ejecting him from their event in Vancouver in May 2017, just a month before the stabbing, for sieg-heiling.

portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2017/…

16) Here’s Christian at his arraignment, shouting at his captors. It’s practically a straight-up Joey Gibson imitation: Same rhetoric, same incoherence. “Free speech!”

17) I bring that up because Ngo has a history of siding with Patriot Prayer and other Patriot/militia groups when he covers their events, depicting them as harmless “right-wing activists” being attacked by evil violent antifascists.

spectator.us/matter-portlan…

18) Mind you, in addition to rude and threatening leftists, this is the kind of activity I see when I cover these events.

19) This is the rhetoric I mostly hear, because I tend to hang out on the PP side of things.

20) And then there’s Tiny Toese. I imagine Andy has conversed with Tiny from time to time, since he has played a leading role in all these street brawls, especially the brawling part.

21) He’s currently one of two Patriot Prayer members under indictment for attacking a man on a Portland street.

kgw.com/article/news/l…

22) Tiny recently quit PP and is now a full-time Proud Boy. He also announced that he was planning to take an "anti-faggot movement" to the streets in Portland.

It's rather odd that Ngo doesn't mention these threats, don't you think?

23) So then, sure enough, reports of assaults on LGBTQ folk start popping up in Portland, and the community is on edge.

portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2019/…

24) Ngo wants to put all this down to the reports actually being hoaxes – even though he utterly fails to establish that any of the reports are in fact unquestionable hoaxes. The victims and other media just refuse to speak with him, and that’s proof enough.

25) Except that it’s not, especially when it comes to the ethics of the situation. Journalists are usually obliged to behave in ways that don’t take someone who may or may not be a crime victim and potentially victimize them all over again.

mediacrimevictimguide.com/journalistguid…

26) It’s entirely possible that Ngo is right, that all of these incidents are actually hoaxes. But he only needs to be wrong about one of them—and he likely is wrong about more—to have committed a serious ethical breach. This is part of why other journos don’t speak with him.

27) Hate-crime hoaxes are a real thing, but according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism’s Brian Levin, they are not as common as critics like to claim.

ottawacitizen.com/news/toronto/u…

nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/…

28) When you accuse people of lying—as Ngo essentially does—the burden of proof is on you. This reportage doesn’t even come close. It revictimizes victims. Most of all, it minimizes and trivializes a very real and serious problem that Portland in fact is being forced to confront.

@threadreaderapp unroll please