Another of the “wave of hate crimes” sweeping the nation following the election of Donald Trump has run into some trouble. Out at the University of Michigan, one student claimed that she had been attacked by an “unknown white man” who had cut her face open with a safety pin. As the Daily Caller reports this week, that story turned out to have a few holes in it. (Pardon the pun.) She was in fact slashed open with a pin, but she has now confessed in court that she was very easily able to identify the assailant by looking in a mirror.

A 21-year-old Michigan woman pleaded guilty Monday to fabricating a “hate crime” in which an unknown white male approached her and slashed her face with a safety-pin, local news outlets are reporting.

University of Michigan student Halley Bass admitted she scratched her own face with a pin after becoming frightened by a classroom discussion in her women’s literature class.

“I had been in a discussion in my women’s lit weirdly and there were a few people in my class that sort of said some things that scared me,” Bass said. She claims she was “suffering from depression at the time.”

Right off the bat, there’s something very wrong going on here which appears to run much deeper than any political divisiveness on college campuses. We have seen far too many so-called “hate crimes” debunked in the recent past, but most of them involve graffiti or the placement of offensive objects in sensitive locations. Self-mutilation takes this to an entire new level. If you are willing to go to the extremes of cutting yourself (particularly your face) that seems to be a symptom of a much deeper problem, admittedly coming from the perspective of a layman. Her defense in court relies heavily on the fact that she is suffering from depression or some other mental ailment so one might expect that she will be getting off fairly lightly.

As I mentioned above, the fact that these fake crimes are showing up so often should be a worrying trend for everyone. Yes, conservatives might be upset about the bad press that this generates and the duplicity of Donald Trump’s detractors, but it seems to me as if liberals should be even more outraged. For every one of these hoaxes which is uncovered, public perception undoubtedly slips further and further away from any position of sympathy. People doing this obviously run a very high risk of being caught because law enforcement takes these charges seriously and investigates them thoroughly. The perpetrators are seriously undermining their own cause and it would be in everyone’s best interest if progressives could police their own ranks a bit better.

I find it difficult to believe that these are not orchestrated efforts. How many people are there out there who are seriously sick enough to come up with these ideas on their own? If this is your battle plan, you really need to take a second look at it. (For additional reading, see The Worst Hoax ‘Hate Crimes’ Of 2016.)