There’s been a rash of hate crime hoaxes over the past year and a half. Some of them were committed by infamous celebrities such as Jussie Smollett. But three additional incidents have taken up headline space in recent days.

In Douglasville, Georgia, residents of a black neighborhood were terrorized with poison pen letters. The letters asserted they were from a (ahem) six-foot tall white man with a red beard who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which should have been the first tip-off that this was nothing but a hoax. Since when do criminals go about describing themselves at all, much less as a racist lumberjack? (No offense to lumberjacks.) The last letter was received on September 6, after which point police were able to catch the perpetrator: 30-year-old Terresha Lucas, a black woman. She was arrested for eight counts of “terroristic threats.”

At Parkway Central High School in Chesterfield, Missouri, students staged a walkout and even cursed at the school administration due to racist graffiti that contained slurs and death threats toward black people. This is the second time graffiti like this has appeared on campus. The students — about half of whom are minorities — were outraged because, from their perspective, the school was doing nothing to stop these crimes. The school did eventually catch the perpetrators — two black students.

At Emory University in Georgia, burglary and racist graffiti were found marring the Emory Autism Center. The graffiti, which included slurs and swastikas, were seemingly directed toward the two African American women and Jewish man who worked in the nearby workspace and office. The man apprehended was a former part-time employee by the name of Roy Lee Gordon Jr. The school deliberately and carefully did not state the race of the culprit in prepared statements. It was only when the arrest photo was published that people figured out he was black.

Perhaps calling these incidents fake hate crimes is a misnomer. After all, they are hate crimes of a sort that take advantage of the current cultural war against systemic racism allegedly committed by white supremacists and their institutions. They are hateful against everyone because they pit neighbor against neighbor. No one wins.

Unfortunately, black-on-black crime is nothing new. This is just a sneakier way of doing it by attempting to implicate “racist whites” in the process. The lengths to which these criminals go to agitate the anti-white climate is mind-boggling. The fact that they have to make up racism to justify their hate really is the icing on the cake.

Meanwhile, there was an actual hate crime committed recently by a white person against a black man, and it was even caught on camera. Of course, we’re speaking of Larry Elder, who, while visiting a homeless encampment in Venice, California, was assaulted by a woman in a gorilla mask who threw an egg at his head. Why wasn’t this crime circulated far and wide as proof of racism? Simple: Larry Elder was running in the hopes of replacing dictatorial California Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election. Elder is a conservative Republican. As a result, leftists dubbed him — no joke — “the black face of white supremacy” and revoked his blackness, even though, if he had won, he would have been the first black governor of California. This racist incident didn’t fit the narrative that the media wants to portray.

Real racism is alive and well, but the seriousness of it is cheapened by hate crime hoaxes and a biased media that has an ax to grind.