No political ideology has a lock on veracity, and anyone, on either side of the aisle, can make up tall tales, only to see like-minded supporters fall for the con.
But I suspect the Francisco Nava story has embarrassed a whole lot of conservatives this week.
On Friday, Nava, a junior at Princeton who studies politics, claimed to have been beaten and rendered unconscious by two black-clad men near campus, following a series of death threats he claimed to receive about his on-campus activism. Nava was a leader of something called the Anscombe Society, a conservative student group who oppose gay rights, pre-marital sex, and student access to contraceptives. Nava and his supporters said the attack was driven by his moralistic efforts.
Over the weekend, Mr. Nava’s jaw was badly swollen, his face was covered with cuts and abrasions, and the inside of his mouth was bleeding, Mr. George, who was also a target of the death threats, said after visiting Mr. Nava in the emergency room.
[Sunday], a line of solemn-looking students, including Mr. Nava’s girlfriend, stood outside his room while a nurse allowed two police officers to enter…. [M]any conservative students at Princeton say they were being singled out for expressing unpopular views. […]
“It’s a terrible incident, but it doesn’t surprise me,” a conservative author who has campaigned against a culture of left-wing conformity on college campuses, David Horowitz, said in an interview. “The left has now become the hate group.”
Wrong. While several conservative bloggers, far-right activists, and Fox News jumped on the story, everyone else waited to see if Nava’s claims were true. As it turns out, they weren’t.
A student at Princeton University who said he was beaten unconscious by two black-clad assailants Friday has said that he fabricated the assault, and that he sent e-mail death threats to himself, three other Princeton students, and a prominent conservative professor at Princeton, Robert George, police said [Monday].
No charges have been filed against the student, Francisco Nava, pending further investigation, a spokesman for the Princeton Township Police said.
In an interview, Mr. George earlier described Mr. Nava’s wounds as “severe,” doubting that they could have been self-inflicted.
It’s quite a sad tale. The young man has an apparent history of making up bogus threats, but conservatives nevertheless embraced his story, probably because it told them what they wanted to believe — that advocates of condom distribution are willing to put a critic in the hospital.
What I found particularly striking, though, is that Fox News’ Brit Hume ran a lengthy segment on this, more than four hours after we learned the attacks were a hoax, without noting reality.
On Monday, in his “Political Grapevine” segment, Hume took up the cause of the latest conservative to be oppressed by unhinged liberals, Princeton student Francisco Nava. “Conservative students and faculty at Princeton University are questioning the absence of campus and community outrage — following the beating of a student leading a morality movement at the school,” Hume said. “The New York Sun reports Francisco Nava was attacked by two men last week and told to shut up. The beating came two days after Nava received death threats by e-mail.
“Nava — who is a Mormon — wrote in the student newspaper that a school campaign to distribute free condoms on campus was a ‘tacit sponsorship of hookup sex.’ Three other members of the morally conservative Anscombe Society also received the threats, along with a conservative professor.”
But there was a good reason for the lack of outrage. Nava — who had a history of faking threats, having done so while in high school — made the whole thing up. By Monday afternoon (we put it at no later than 1:50 p.m. Eastern, based on the time stamps at blogs covering the story), hours before Hume went on the air at 6 p.m., the campus newspaper and the conservative New York Sun were reporting that Nava had confessed to local authorities that he had faked the attack and was responsible for sending the threats.
The advantage of television news is speed, and yet, it apparently didn’t occur to Fox News producers to check on this story four hours before airtime? Or is it just that reality didn’t much matter?
What an awful embarrassment.