Debunked: Leftist professors claim that Trump rallies led to hate crimes

A group of professors from University of North Texas and Texas A&M claimed that Trump's anti illegal immigration position led to a 226% increase in white nationalist propaganda and hate crimes in counties where Trump spoke.

The obvious problem is that one man's white nationalist propaganda is another man's constitutionally protected opinion.  For example does anyone doubt that a leftist professor would count support for Trump's temporary travel ban as being "white nationalist" given that these days "white nationalist" is a Democrat term for anyone who disagrees with them; including conservative Blacks?

Hate crime is also a very politicized term.  A bunch of Black teens attack a white guy and it's rarely considered to be a hate crime but a bunch of whites attack a Black guy and it's always a hate crime.

But it turns out we don't need to look at the details of the "study" to see its wrong.  Two Harvard, yes Harvard, graduate students took a look at the study and showed that using the exact same methodology counties where Hillary talked experienced an even larger increase in white nationalist propaganda and hate crimes than that experienced by counties where Trump spoke.

It turns out that correlation isn't causality.  The Harvard researchers figured that if the increased violence was due to the politicians rhetoric and given that Hillary apparently created a much larger effect that would mean that Hillary was a greater inciter of right wing hate which is odd given her support for illegal immigration and Trump's opposition to it.

So they looked around at the data and discovered that if they took into account how many people lived in the counties in question they could eliminate the supposed impact of both Trump and Hillary.

Essentially counties with large populations have more crime and politicians tend to speak in counties with more crime.  After correcting for population size the effect claimed by the professors disappeared.

Another factor not mentioned in the report on the study is that the number of incidents are small so that statistically speaking very large percentage changes are to be expected. For example Trump held two rallies in Orange County California which had 5 reported hate incidents.  With or without Trump showing up when the number of incidents are so small large variations, 0 or 10, are likely to occur whereas if there had been say 1000 hate incidents you wouldn't expect to see a 226% variation.

This is one more reason to not trust anything leftist academics and the #FakeNews media say.