For the last number of years, our nation has been awash in “hate crimes” against minorities, gays, and transgendered folk.
Or have we?
The national media went into an instant froth in early February when actor Jussie Smollett, of the TV show Empire, claimed to have been beaten by two white guys wearing “MAGA” hats and yelling that Chicago is “MAGA country,” an assertion that is about as far from the truth as it is possible to get. Smollett was able to tick two boxes on his victim card as both a black and a homosexual.
National race-baiters jumped into battle before the first pixels of the story had faded. Presidential candidates such as Kamala Harris and Cory Booker (of “Spartacus” fame) were quick to call it a “lynching,” and the rhetoric heated up from there. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “an affront to our humanity.” Socialist poster child Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blistered the media for describing the incident as a “possible” hate crime. Her anti-American, pro-Palestinian colleague Rashida Tlaib wrote hysterically that “the right wing is killing and hurting our people.”
Now, however, Smollett has turned from a victim into a perp. Chicago police are now saying the attack was staged by the actor with the help of two acquaintances from Nigeria who took five grand from Smollett for their part in the hoax. Celebrities from coast-to-coast are back-pedaling as fast as they can to get away from the mess altogether. Even Nancy Pelosi deleted her nasty Tweet.
Last November, in Mississippi, an apparently horrid hate crime involving nooses turned out to be nothing of the sort. In fact, the “perpetrators” were not racists but anti-racists. The nooses were not an expression of racism, but a protest against racism.
The nooses in question were hung in the Mississippi state capitol building the day before the election last November. Cindy-Hyde Smith, the Republican candidate, and eventual winner had told a lame joke about hanging that was clearly made in reference to the fate of horse thieves in the Old West.
The nooses had been found along with what the media called “hate signs,” which was a narrative that worked until the Mississippi Department of Public Safety released photos of the “hate signs.” Here’s what they said:
On Tuesday, November 27th thousands of Mississippians will vote for a senator. We need someone who respects the lives of lynch victims. We’re hanging nooses to remind people that times haven’t changed.
Oops. The message of the nooses was not targeted at blacks but at supposedly racist whites. The media slowly and reluctantly corrected their inflammatory headlines.
Also in Mississippi, just a week before the 2018 election that sent Donald Trump to the White House, a historic black church was burned and spray-painted with the message “Vote Trump.” It was immediately labeled a “hate crime,” and remained so until authorities discovered that the culprit was actually a member of the congregation. After the fire, while their church was being renovated, the congregation worshiped at a predominantly white church, a sign of the progress in race relations in the Deep South.
I am the co-author of Idaho’s marriage amendment, passed 63-37 in 2006 to enshrine man-woman marriage in our state constitution. The homosexual lobby spent a good part of the campaign insisting that the amendment would unleash a wave of hate and violence targeted at gays in Idaho.
Sure enough, the day after the election, a twenty-something man filed a police report that he had been jumped while walking on our city’s greenbelt by attackers yelling anti-gay slurs and swinging their fists. Ah, said the activists, there is your proof - we told you this would happen!
However, it didn’t take long for his story to unravel when he was questioned by police, and it turned out that he beat himself up because apparently there were no gay-haters in Boise willing to do it for him.
Andy Ngo is a journalist, editor (at Quillette), and photographer who started a thread on Twitter two days ago rehearsing the litany of fake hate crimes over the last several years. (I’d show you but I have been suspended - again- by Twitter for telling the truth about sexual deviancy.)
Here is his giant list of fake hate crimes, just during the Trump administration. In my judgment, we should simply abolish the “hate crime” designation altogether. Every crime is a hate crime, and we should not give more legal protections to victims of some crimes than we give to victims of other crimes. Justice indeed should be blind to color.
Peter Kirsanow, a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, points out that the facts contradict the media narrative that hate crimes are on a rapid and disturbing rise:
FBI statistics for 2015 (the most recent available at the time of the 2018 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Hate Crimes Hearing) show that there were 1,997,700 violent crimes nationally. A total of 5,850 crimes were designated hate crimes — whether violent or non-violent. There were 15,696 cases of murder or manslaughter in the U.S., of which 8, or .0005, were designated hate crimes. There were 764,449 aggravated assaults, of which 681, or .00089, were designated hate crimes. There were 124,047 rapes, of which 12, or .000096, were designated hate crimes. There were 327,374 robberies, of which 120, or .00036, were designated hate crimes.
In 2017, nearly 90 percent of reporting police departments registered zero hate crimes in their respective jurisdictions. And the most recent data show that blacks are much more likely to commit hate crimes than whites. In fact, blacks are approximately 200 percent more likely to commit hate crimes than whites.
At a Commission hearing on hate crimes, Kirsanow asked this question of the panel of criminologists, law-enforcement officials, and hate-crime experts:
“Are you aware of any data, studies, or other evidence that shows that designating a crime a hate crime deters, prevents, or reduces that crime, and second, whether designating a crime a federal hate crime reduces, deters, or prevents incidents of that crime?”
No one answered. Kirsanow poses this question to us: “If designating a crime a hate crime doesn’t deter, prevent, or resolve such crime, what’s the purpose of the designation? By now, most Americans are getting a pretty good idea.”
In other words, “hate crimes” are not about justice at all. They’re about giving regressives a cudgel to beat conservatives about the head and shoulders until everybody figures out the crimes are fabrications.
Here’s a point worth pondering. If hate crimes are so rare they have to be invented, perhaps America is not nearly as racist and homophobic as the Talking Snake Media wants us to believe. And maybe, just maybe, the hate and racism are coming from the left rather than the right.
