Quote:Democrats find themselves in the odd position of simultaneously suggesting 1. that Donald Trump is a closet anti-Semite and 2. that his son-in-law and close adviser, Jared Kushner, is a nefarious Jewish agent of Israel hoping to turn Washington into the Jewish state’s “Santa Claus.”

But first, a detour.

Juan Thompson, a left-wing journalist fired from his position at The Intercept for falsifying stories, is once again accused of falsifying a story: He has been arrested for making a string of threats to Jewish community centers in what police say was a plot to frame his ex-girlfriend. Thompson, who is black, said on Twitter he was himself being framed by a “racist white girl.”

Fake hate crimes committed by progressives are by this point so familiar that they are practically a cliché. When a Muslim woman at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette was attacked and had her hijab ripped off, two things happened: One, the Left insisted that this announced the coming wave of pogroms against Muslims in the Age of Trump; two, people who follow this sort of thing began betting how quickly she’d be exposed as a fraud. It did not take long. Incidentally, her name has been kept out of media reports, even though she faces potential charges herself for filing a false report. These hoaxers should be publicly named, as there is no legitimate reason to protect their identities.

There were other fake hate crimes attributed to Trump enthusiasts: Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani of Cary, N.C., says that he planned to leave the United States after an Islamophobic assault on his son following harassment by neighbors who named-checked Trump. School officials say there is no evidence that attack ever happened. A gay man in Santa Monica claimed to have been assaulted by Trump partisans, but the attack seems not to have happened. The San Francisco homeowner who raised a swastika flag was not a Trump supporter but a Trump opponent. A catalogue of similarly false, exaggerated, or distorted hate crimes has been assembled by Reason.