From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Putting Out the Fire With Lighter Fluid
Steve Sailer

July 01, 2020

After race card driver Bubba Wallace’s NooseCAR debacle last week, it would have taken somebody truly dumb and publicity-crazed to breathe life into this week’s even more absurd hate-crime allegation: biracial 18-year-old Althea Bernstein’s assertion that four “classic Wisconsin frat boys” squirted lighter fluid on her and set her ablaze by tossing a lighter into her car in downtown Madison, Wis., during an Antifa riot.

While nobody in the national press has dared express any skepticism about this hilariously unlikely tale, it hadn’t been getting the giant push that would have been expected if anybody of any importance were convinced this whopper were true.

After all, if Bernstein’s yarn about roving racist frat boys in Hawaiian shirts randomly incinerating a Jewish-Unitarian Woman of Color actually happened, it would be gigantic news, far bigger than, as Joe Biden would say, what’s his name—Pink Floyd? Boy George?—that drugged-up bouncer who wound up dead while resisting arrest and suddenly became history’s greatest saint, or that drunk driver who got himself shot after stealing a cop’s Taser and lighting him up with it.

But, c’mon… Frat boys setting a semi-black girl on fire in super-liberal Madison is, obviously, Tawana Brawley/Jackie Coakley-level hate hoaxery, a silly teenager’s attempt to improvise an excuse for being where she shouldn’t have been.

Read the whole thing there.