On Tuesday, the greatest political upset in American history took place. Donald Trump defied nearly all of the recent polling data and defeated Hillary Clinton, becoming the President-elect of the Unites States.

Almost immediately, protests broke out across America. UCLA college students went into the streets to protest Trump’s victory by blocking traffic (which doesn’t really make much sense, considering the fact that California is a blue state, so most of the people in the cars that the students were blocking probably voted for Hillary Clinton) and committing acts of vandalism. Protests in Portland, Oregon included lighting dumpsters on fire, smashing windows, and damaging cars (I guess when a democratic election doesn’t go your way, just start breaking things). Police officers were also attacked. Of course, it is almost hard to blame these protesters for being angry. After all, the media has distorted nearly everything about Donald Trump and his supporters for the past 18 months via fear mongering. They have created an entirely false image of the future President which these protesters have bought into. Many people are under the impression that the country just elected a racist, sexist, xenophobe, who’s about to start oppressing all non-white people. This belief has been reinforced by stories of Trump supporters, now emboldened by their supposed free license to be racist deplorables, committing hate crimes across the country following the election. However, these stories have been largely debunked.

There was one story of a Muslim woman who claimed she had been attacked by two Trump supporters who knocked her down, ripped off her headscarf and stole her wallet. She later admitted she had lied in order to smear Trump supporters. Another example is a story of a gay man getting beaten up by Trump supporters on election night in Santa Monica and being taken to the ER. The Santa Monica Police Department stated through their Facebook page that no such incident is on record. Most of what is actually confirmed pertaining to all of this amounts to graffiti, much of which simple says “Trump 2016”.

If you followed the Brexit vote in England, all of this may sound familiar. After Britain voted to leave the EU, there were stories of a rise in hate crimes throughout the country, which was explained as being a result of Brexit supporters feeling so emboldened by the vote that they felt they could now show their true racist colors against all immigrants. However, the rise in hate crimes that circulated in British media was actually due to an increase in hate crimes being self-reported to the Police hate crime reporting website, right after Remainer groups online told people to do just that. Self-reported hate crimes have no merit, because it is up to the victim to determine whether the crime that was committed against them was a hate crime with racial motivations (if any crime was even committed against them at all). We are now seeing the same thing happen in America with Trump.

Many of the supposed hate crimes have been debunked, and the rest have very weak evidence supporting them. But the anti-Trump protests are very real, and are causing real physical destruction, as well as further dividing the American people. Now I have heard some people say that if Hillary had been elected on Tuesday, we would be seeing hordes of angry Trump supporters doing the exact same thing. Well, I don’t know, let’s look at the evidence. People have been angrily protesting Trump since he first announced his candidacy. They have been disrupting and causing chaos and violence at his rallies and attacking Trump supporters at the rallies for the past year. We saw almost none of that violence coming from Trump’s side. So I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on that one.