The Daily Princetonian reports:
Francisco Nava '09 has admitted to fabricating an alleged assault on him that he said occurred Friday evening and also to sending threatening emails to himself, other members of the Anscombe Society and prominent conservative politics professor Robert George, Princeton Township Police said today.
"He fabricated the story," Det. Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said.
Nava was released to Public Safety and charges "have not been filed pending further investigation," according to a statement from Township Police.
So you lie to the police. You spread unjustified fear and anger. You slander the Left. You make your friends on the Right (and elsewhere) who came to your defense look like dupes. And you further undermine others on the Right, some of whom might face real threats or attacks in the future but who will have a harder time being believed because of you. Lovely.
Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.
I hope this little punk goes to jail for staging a fake assault and reporting something.
Have times really become so partisan that we need to stage garbage like this to get sympathy? How sad...
Conservatives had--used to have--the high ground on this issue.
What a bozo.
Still, Princeton was extraordinarily swift on this. If they'd believed it even for a moment, they'd have been having speeches and teach-ins and vigils and ramping up sensitivity training for all and sundry.
Wouldn't they?
I'd gone to Princeton too long ago to have much feeling for the present times, but my sense is that the campus as a whole is extremely tolerant, though the administration is plainly left slanted.
rarango: Can you point me, please, to the incidents you're referring to?
Why do people keep talking about The Left and The Right when, in context, those titles rarely make any sense.
In addition to the attacks on conservative campus speakers, this occurred earlier in the year.
The two events you mention seem quite different; they are off campus speakers who were made the subject of campus protest, and the entire point of the "assault" was to get it on camera and into the news. Can you think of off-camera assaults or hate crimes against conservatives? A commenter links to another hoax report by a conservative, but that's all I know of (and obviously another hoax doesn't help establish the threat).
In this context, the lineup is left-right. There may be other contexts where that is irrelevant, but in this case, or in the case of fake hate crimes generally, it's the way it is, and, for that matter, the only reason.
Can you cite any unprovoked attacks on leftists? I agree that unprovoked physical attacks on conservatives are rare, but I think they are equally rare against the left. Rare, despite the fact that leftists are much more annoying than conservatives (no, I don't have a cite for that).
actually in this case it is more of a right-right lineup.
It just always annoys me (and typically nonsense follows) when somebody tries to make broad pronouncements about "The Left" or "The Right."
Don't we on the right EVER get our own Tawana Brawley?
I mean, did he just send them from the same e-mail, or did he go somewhere and send them or did he send them to another e-mail address of his and then forward them? The amount of thought this poor bastard had to put into this hoax makes me think that Princeton must not be that difficult a school if he had time to do all this work.
I'll never forget how the class and the Professor treated me. Of course, no one acknowledged it when I was proven correct.
I think my favorite thing about threads like these are the just-so stories about eeeeeeevil libruls.
Colin
As in the Philadelphia FD case, even when it's clearly a hoax, calling attention to a situation is the excuse.
First, shouldn't a hate-crime hoax be considered a hate crime? If this is not clear from the language of hate-crime legislation, perhaps it should be.
Second, there have been a number of incidents involving Black students--one, I believe, was about a year ago in Chicago (although, possibly, it was two years ago). A student claimed to have received email death threats to herself and to other black students. The college immediately moved to protect the students, but discovered within a day or two that the student sent messages to herself (apparently in an effort to avoid exams). I don't have a link handy, but the student was near Chicago in a private college with multiple campuses. That should be easy to verify. Another thing that came up in that context was that this was the second such hoax in about a month.
Now, here's the rub--the hoaxes of this kind are interspersed among actual threats and actual attacks. This is what makes them credible. On the other hand, for each Tawana Brawley, we have a Chuck Stewart, a Susan Smith and a Francisco Nava. The three cases are not similar in their details, but they are similar in their intent--to direct law enforcement attention at the "other" group (minorities for Steward and Smith, the "Left" for Nava). As was the case with Brawley and the other three, these are always poorly planned (if planned at all) and quickly fall apart.
But I don't think Nava was acting in isolation. He's been reading Horowitz and Malkin claiming just that sort of threats--Horowitz against himself, although he's never been threatened by anyone, and Malkin in broader terms. Consider,
Malkin is simply not credible on this issue. The "attacks" on conservative speakers tend to be inane annoyances, like not letting them speak. Other anti-Right "attacks" involve idiotic vandalism of a different sort--like stealing a bunch of free publication from distribution boxes (something that the Right-wing campus groups also have been known to do). But, Nava's claims are directly mirroring quite a different kind of threats--ones that are personal and that involve physical manifestations, not just damage to property or interference with free speech. There are no credible reports of this kind of threats to campus conservatives other than a couple of hoaxes. This is why they are so easy to investigate. But, as the incidents with nooses in NYC have shown, for other kinds of cases it is incredibly difficult to identify hoaxes or find the perpetrators. Most hoaxes eventually come to light, but the perpetrators behind the real "hate crimes" or threats of them are often not found.
Did you read the article or did you just see that the link went to Michelle Malkin's website and decide, based on your on prejudices, that it wasn't credible?
If you read the article, can you explain why you didn't find the first person account of a politically motivated hate crime credible? How about the two different local news organizations that Malkin linked to? What about their stories did you find not credible? What about the police who investigated the crime? What about their investigation was not credible?
That was an example of a real politically motivated assault against right wing students. If you want to explain it away, you need to assert some facts rather than attack the source.
Heh. Is that all? Well, that's okay then.
Qwinn
Does anyone seriously think, "media reports that I recall," is a remotely rational way to determining the frequency of a type of event?
Yes, as a matter of general discussion. I'd question its use in an academic paper, but to establish the general zeitgeist it strikes me as perfectly reasonable -- as is the retort, "I haven't seen anything like that".
I'm a conservative Princeton grad and this Nava clown has royally pissed me off.
Throw his ass under the bus as a lesson to anyone else who might be thinking of doing something similar.
Liberals praise their miscreants and have pep rallies for them on the White House lawn. Conservatives should take out their trash and not look back.
Because for them, it si not about facts, it is about their feelings. "Yes, it was faked, but it was still accurate"
Stop Rathering!