Kentucky State political science professor Wilfred Reilly talks to Toby Young about his new book Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About. Professor Reilly’s last piece for Quillette was about the 1776 project.
On August 27, 2016, a Polish man named Arkadiusz Jozwik was brutally murdered in the English town of Harlow in one of the most notorious of many racist hate crimes occurring around Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union. On BBC News, experienced reporter Daniel Sandford said police thought the attack may have been racially motivated: “The fear is that this was a frenzied racist attack triggered by the Brexit referendum.” In flagging up his report for BBC’s Newsnight programme, John Sweeney, an experienced and respected investigative journalist, described the incident as “post-Brexit rage meets anti-social Britain.” Jakob Krupa, UK correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, followed up for the Guardian in an article entitled: “The killing of a Polish man exposes the reality of post-referendum racism.” The New York Times joined other publications in reporting that Jozwik was attacked by a gang because he had been speaking Polish in public. Liberal-left commentators and their readers worked themselves up into a frenzy of anger and blame, with LBC Radio’s James O’Brien saying that Brexit campaigners …
Toby Young talks to Wilfred Reilly, an assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University, about his new book documenting the prevalence of hate crime hoaxes and what that tells us about contemporary American society. Professor Reilly recently wrote an article about hate crime hoaxes for Quillette entitled The Hate-Crime Epidemic That Never Was: Seattle Case Study.
