The hate crime hoax is an underappreciated genre of performance art. There have been well over a hundred in the past decade—from Muslims setting fire to their own mosques, to LGBTQ-types baking their own hate cakes, and the black actor Jussie Smollett duping the entire news media with his fake MAGA-hat beat down. Yet half the country pretends these hoaxes don’t exist.

Recently we saw what appears to be a new, anti-tech variation of this art form with the arrest of Jason Duhaime. On Sept. 13, the Northeastern University virtual reality lab director allegedly called in a fake bomb threat to police. Authorities shut down half the school while response teams investigated.

Had a disciple of Ted Kaczynski resumed the attack on industrial society? Not quite.

At the time, Duhaime told Boston police and federal agents a remarkably stupid story about an exploding hard-shell case—without even bothering to fake the explosion. He also provided a frantic letter, supposedly contained in the case, which called for the university’s virtual reality lab to be closed. Unsurprisingly, federal authorities found digital copies of the letter on Duhaime’s personal computer, leading to his arrest on Oct. 4.

In a stroke of demented genius, Duhaime allegedly combined that ruse with another underappreciated genre—the crazy uncle email. Typically forwarded from an anonymous source, it is marked by hysterical capitalization, amusing typos, and an apocalyptic sense of urgency. Duhaime’s apparently phony letter is a decent satire of this style.

“It has come to our attention that this VR lab is trying to change us as a world!” it read. “Trying to get us to live in a world that we only communicate through headsets and live in a called the METAVERSE! … You are trying to change the fabric of the ideology of a peoplee [sic].”

“You are not the creator!!!!!!!! You think you are!!!” it continues. “We know you are the anti-christ sent to this world to change everything!!! We will stop you!!!”

Maintaining this quirky literary form, the letter writer accused the lab director of colluding with “Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and the US government” to surveil the world, build robots, and treat the entire population as “human test subjects” in a twisted experiment. He charged this axis with plotting to “destroy US all AS A SOCIETY,” and warned that they had “2 months to take operations down or else!!!!!”

It’s possible that Duhaime actually received emails of this sort and just snapped. Or maybe, after 25 years as an IT guy, he really needed a day off. In any case, he’s now facing two federal charges, each carrying up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Why would a person do something like this? Perhaps to discredit genuine concerns about the dark reality described in the hoaxer’s letter. For instance, in 2016 Facebook hired former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) director Regina Dugan—a vocal advocate of digital tattoos for kids and swallowable digital pills—to oversee their secretive operations at Building 8. DARPA is aptly known as the Pentagon’s brain.

Just last year, Facebook’s Project Steno funded the implantation of an advanced brain-computer interface (BCI) at the University of California, San Francisco. The implant allows a stroke victim to translate his thoughts into text onscreen. This study was used to advance Facebook’s own BCI ambitions. The team was led by Edward Chang, a DARPA-funded neuroscientist.

The Northeastern University operation that Duhaime oversaw is on a similar wavelength. According to the Experimental Technologies Lab webpage, their projects include “using modalities such as eye tracking and biometric tools for capturing user data including electrodermal activity, heart rate, EEG, and facial expression analysis.” In other words, digital surveillance is going under the skin.

The lab is also developing AR/VR (augmented and virtual reality) to propagandize issues like “climate change” and “social justice.” By using 3D sensory simulation to impose a synthetic model of the world onto a subject’s brain, virtual reality may be the most effective mind-control system yet devised. It’s basically TV plus LSD.

“Students are going through an experience teaching them about Islamophobia,” Duhaime wrote in an Instagram post. “We’ve had people crying. It becomes an emotional response because they’ve never had that sort of experience.” Imagine a distant future, circa 2025, where an entire generation is turned into left-wing droids by way of VR “education” technologies.

The threatening letter found at Northeastern University seemed to have been inspired by the real “Unabomber Manifesto”—properly titled Industrial Society and Its Future—given its anti-tech stance and signature capitalization. In his tract, the murderous Kaczynski put forward two legitimate insights which were unfortunately obscured by his actual mail-bomb campaign.

First, he argued technology is creating a digital cage that threatens all organic freedom on the planet. Second, the self-hatred, virtue-signaling, and repellent weakness exhibited by “leftists” is driving the acceptance of this digital cage.

“It is a mistake to argue for powerlessness and passivity, because people NEED power,” Kaczynski wrote. “Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and that this will greatly INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS.” No one remembers this insight, though. They only remember the bombs.

Regardless of which identity group stages them, all hate hoaxes serve one purpose: to vilify “evil white conservatives” as the single greatest threat of our time. It is the genre’s defining feature. The caricature written into the bomb hoax letter is indistinguishable from the MAGA hat-wearing attackers described by Jussie Smollett. And because these hoaxes are never thoroughly debunked—and liberals need to believe in a white villain—these fictions are used to justify the digital panopticon being erected all around us.

This perpetual hate hoax hysteria is a form of virtual reality—illusions in a digital cage where powerless people can simulate a sense of control. Meanwhile, actual power accumulates in the hands of those who develop and deploy these technologies of surveillance and suppression.

Kaczynski warned about this reality. Duhaime’s alleged hoax was a poor attempt to make us forget it.