"There is no truth, only voices and narratives"

John Leo:

[T]he apparent wave of racist graffiti at Oberlin College was yet another campus hoax. So were the anti-Semitic and anti-gay graffiti and the reported sighting of a white-sheeted Klansman on campus. The sightings seemed unlikely at the time, yet they caused a day of class cancellations and fostered much hand-wringing about the persistence of racism and bigotry at one of the nation's left-most colleges. 

The Oberlin Police Department identified Dylan Bleier, a leftist student and former head of a voter registration drive for President Obama, and his partner in the spree, Matt Alden, as two of the principal architects of the Oberlin hoax. 

As we wrote back in March the staging of hoaxes can seem irresistible, "Fake rapes and fake attacks on minorities are no longer unusual on campuses. One reason is the post-modern theory that there is no truth, only voices and narratives. If the narrative is all-important, why bother with facts? Why not sell the narrative directly ?" Shortly after the graffiti appeared. Oberlin announced that two unidentified students, no longer on campus, were responsible. But the college released no details, leaving the implication that racists had written the graffiti. The administration should be asked when it knew it was a hoax and why it took so long to tell us the truth.

The Oberlin hoax is of course only one of many leftist hoaxes involving fake "hate-crimes". Here's a list of the spate of recent fake leftist "hate crime" allegations.

What amazes me is the utter immorality of the left. They lie shamelessly, and so often without adverse consequence to themselves. Our government does it regularly-- Clapper's lie to congress and Hillary's lies on Benghazi are only a few of the most obvious shameless lies. The global warming hoax is a clear example in the scientific community. The simple fact that there has been no global warming whatsoever for almost two decades is rarely even mentioned, let alone weighed, by warmist propagandists. 

In the Oberlin hate-crime hoax, consider that Oberlin College administrators knew early on that the whole hate crime business was a leftist hoax, yet for a long time remained silent about that fact and about the details. The Oberlin administrators, including the president of the college, were participants in the hoax, after the fact.

Leo offers an interesting explanation for the very disturbing tendency for the left to lie without shame. In the post-modernist view, it is the narrative, not the facts, that matter. 

The Trayvon Martin hoax-- that Martin was murdered by a white man for racial reasons and that such white-on-black violence is a real threat to blacks-- is a fine example of narrative eclipsing facts. It's worth pointing out that creation of fact-free narratives without shame or apology is a hallmark of totalitarians, as Orwell knew well.