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Weaponizing Hate
Last Monday, the Adas Israel Synagogue in Duluth, MN, was burned down:
Investigators have no indication that the suspect, Matthew Amiot, was motivated by hate or bias, Duluth Police Chief Mike Tusken said in a Sunday news conference. He did not provide an alternative motive but said the investigation remains ongoing.
The label of “hate crime” has bothered me for years. Does anyone care, when someone commits a hateful act, whether they did it out of hate or not? When arson is committed, people can die; psyches are damaged by these actions. In researching the origin of the legislation for hate crimes, I made some intriguing and disturbing discoveries.
I learned about the origins of the hate crime model developed by the Anti-Defamation League in 1981:
A Wisconsin statute based on the ADL template was challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court in Wisconsin v. Mitchell in 1993. In the case, several black American men and teens attacked a young white man after they watched the film Mississippi Burning, which was based on the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murders of three young activists who were registering black Americans to vote in Mississippi. The Supreme Court held that ‘enhanced penalties’ did not violate the defendant’s Constitutional rights, further cementing the continued acceptance of the ‘hate crime’ designation in America.
At first glance, this type of legislation might seem relevant when we realize that people who commit crimes out of hateful attitudes and beliefs will receive “enhanced penalties.” The American Psychological Association describes the relevance of identifying hate crimes:
- The FBI reported 7,145 hate crimes in 2017; however, the majority of hate crimes are never reported, so these data underestimate the true pervasiveness.
- Reported hate crimes in 2017 were motivated by hostility based on race/ethnicity (58.1 percent), religion (22.0 percent), sexual orientation (15.9 percent), gender identity (.6 percent) and disability (1.6 percent). Hate crimes targeted Jewish, African-American and LGBT communities at high rates.
Does anyone else have a problem with how this data is explained? If the data underestimate the true pervasiveness of hate crimes, how do they know they are truly pervasive? Also, as I said earlier, a person who commits a violent crime does significant damage whether they hate the person or organization or not. I also found this comment especially fascinating:
Hate crimes are an extreme form of prejudice, made more likely in the context of social and political change. Public and political discourse may devalue members of unfamiliar groups, and offenders may feel that their livelihood or way of life is threatened by demographic changes. Offenders may not be motivated by hate, but rather by fear, ignorance or anger. These can lead to dehumanization of unfamiliar groups and to targeted aggression. (italics mine)
Please note that this article was written in 2018. I wonder whose politics they are referencing? Note too, that they are effectively saying that the offenders may not be motivated by hate, but by ignorance and fear. In a sense, it’s not their fault—it’s the public and political discourse.
But one article, in particular, grabbed my attention regarding hate crimes. It began with a summary of the present day:
There is a quiet movement of well-funded organizations and individuals working industriously to build a trove of ‘evidence’ to promote a narrative that ‘hate crimes’ and so-called ‘hate incidents’ are on the rise in America. This movement has gained traction in America in the wake of President Trump’s election in November 2016 and in England after the “Brexit” vote in June 2016.
How insidious are these activities? The author points out that the FBI has partnered with a number of organizations whose motives I would question: Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Human Right Campaign (HRC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Center for Transgender Equity and the National LGBTQ Task Force, all left-wing organizations. In particular, note this effort:
The SPLC coined the phrase ‘The Trump Effect’ to describe how President Trump’s election has allegedly contributed to a rise in bullying in elementary schools, as well as a host of other social ills based on ‘a miniscule sampling and an unscientific method of collecting data.’
The SPLC has also broadened the term “hate crime” to include “hateful incidents”; this expansion of the term allows people to report incidents that are not criminal but can contribute to the data collection of hateful acts, thereby showing an alarming increase in hate activities. The SPLC notes President Trump’s supposed “support of white nationalists”; the ADL blames Trump for an increase in anti-Semitic activities by white supremacists. Statistics are being manipulated to incriminate non-minority groups:
A report published in January 2018, lists ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer’ homicides, but does not prove that those homicides are related to their sexual identity. There are several reasons why this report is problematic, and why the reporting on the report is inaccurate and wholly misleading.
The title of their report, ‘A Crisis of Hate: A Report on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Hate Violence Homicides in 2017,’ leads readers to believe that the homicides were motivated by bias against LGBTQ groups. A cursory look at the source data indicates that most of the reported homicides took place based not due to anti-LGBTQ bias, but due to other tragic circumstances. In fact, Chad Felix Greene of The Federalist reviewed the cases individually and found that out of 52 highlighted cases, only four could be reasonably attributed to a bias motivation based on available facts of the crimes.
There was also a recent “study” that reported that Trump’s rallies could be linked to a large increase in hate crimes. Other researchers noted the extreme flaws in the data.
So, you might ask, why should you be concerned that the Left is once again distorting and misrepresenting information through the definition of the term “hate”? I suggest their motives are becoming very clear. Where once we were trying to protect minority groups from vicious attacks by outsiders of their groups by specifically describing and punishing hate crimes, the meaning of hate crime is slowly being transformed into a broader meaning of a hate incident. Who will decide what is a hate incident? Will “hate incidents” morph into the category of hate crimes? Will those who committed these acts, which may or may not have been hateful in the eyes of the perpetrator, be accused of criminality and be punishable under the law? Will hate speech and hate thought be tossed into the mix, too? Who are the true hate groups?
The walls of freedom-loving Americans are closing in.
Published in Culture
It is kind of ridiculous to define ‘hate’ soley in terms of categorizations such as race, sexual preference, etc. Some of the strongest hate in America today is the hate that many Leftists feel for Trump supporters, or indeed for anyone that doesn’t toe their party line of the moment. Is beating up someone wearing a MAGA hat not a hate crime?…if so (if it is indeed not a hate crime), then seems to me that the hate crime moniker is of limited value, to say the least.
Several years ago, at University of Delaware, a student was being badgered by a Designated Interrogator, who wanted her to specify in what ways she was oppressed. This courageous gal responded:
“I am oppressed everyday on basis of my undying and devout feelings for the opera”
…a great answer, which the Interrogator didn’t like at all. But aren’t one’s personal tastes, whether for opera or for sailing, as much or more part of one’s identity than one’s skin color?
See my post A Reductio Ad Absurdum of the “Progressive” Categorization Obsession:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58159.html
@davidfoster, I also liked this comment: “This sort of thing may have started in odd corners of American universities, but has now become one of the defining characteristics of those universities, and has substantially spilled out with toxic effects for the entire society.”
We are all being slowly poisoned and I’m not sure there’s any antidote. Thanks for the link; a very nice piece!
Someone should point this out to Trump so he can issue a “cease and desist relations” executive order . . . (include CAIR)
Re the Left’s obsession with the categorization of people: the writer Rose Wilder Lane has argued that such categorization must be inherent to any scheme for centralized economic management:
Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes. But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings. The most slavish multitude of men that was ever called “demos” or “labor” or “capital” or”agriculture” or “the masses,” actually are men; they are not sheep. Naturally, by their human nature, they escape in all directions from regulations applying to non-existent classes. It is necessary to increase the number of men who supervise their actions. Then (for officials are human, too) it is necessary that more men supervise the supervisors.
and
If he wants to do good (as he sees good) to the citizens, he needs more power. If he wants to be re-elected, he needs more power to use for his party. If he wants money, he needs more power; he can always sell it to some eager buyer. If he wants publicity, flattery, more self-importance, he needs more power, to satisfy clamoring reformers who can give him flattering publicity.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/35432.html
Speaking of hate crimes in MN:
It all comes down to power and grabbing as much as you can. And then getting more to sustain it. And as a result, we all lose and are imprisoned through the process .
Even if they approve more cops, it will take time to staff up, @dong. Scary prospect to plan a visit there!
When the police commented that there was no accelerant, typical of arson, I started wondering and poking around. Sure enough:
So, we likely have a mentally disordered man, living on the streets, who caused harm to the community.
Tragic for all involved. I suspected it wasn’t a hate crime. Thanks for the update, @cliffordbrown.
Except the footnote shows they retrieved the data from a table discussing 2015 crimes. This is evidence that we actually have a pre-crime division and time travel.
It’s always bothered me too, and it’s nothing but liberal moral exhibitionism. It’s already against the law to assault or murder someone. Why is it a worse crime to murder someone in some protected group than it would be to murder me? Or my child?
“Hate” is a thought and therefore a “hate crime” is a thought crime. If Mr. Cain kills Mr. Abel, Abel is not more dead if he’s of a different race or sexual orientation than Cain.
What magic is suddenly given to people in the judicial system – judges, prosecutors and juries – that they can divine a person’s state of mind weeks, months and even years after the fact?
It makes a mockery of equal justice. There should be no room in our juris prudence for “thought crimes.”
Its purpose is pour encourager les autres
It seems to me that hate crime is a close cousin to thought crime. Does it matter that I killed someone because she was black or I killed someone because I wanted her purse? Either way, the law sets the boundary that I transgressed and it is my behavior that is judged and the punishment should be equally harsh. I think pre-meditated vs. crime of passion is a valid distinction. But is it less of a crime if I really liked the person I killed?
Of course not. Hate crimes laws are an attempt to lable certain kinds of thought illegal, as E.J. points out. Whether Frank beat Steve to death because he hated his guts for being Polish or because Steve cheated him at a high-stakes poker game, Steve is still dead. We already have categories that take the depravity or cruelty of a crime into account, but classifying motivations as “hate” aimed at favored groups only creates a caste system of the violently dead or injured. The concept of hate crimes has no place in a liberal democracy. They do however make great recruiting tools for “hate groups” like White Aryan Resistance, as that group’s leader Tom Metzger said in a television interview some years ago.
Well said. Dead right on all points. I don’t know how to reverse the nonsense.
Hate Crime prosecution essentially seems to be the prosecution of ‘motive’. Are there any other charges for crimes like that? There’s “pre-meditated” and all but this is the only ‘crime’ where this is a factor to that degree. If we’re going to have to live with this, I’d like to force congress to put pen & priority, for all to see – with their sentencing guidelines. A table of sorts, where you can follow the perp’s race, sex (“gender”)… and crime on one axis to where it intersects with the victim’s race, “gender”… – just so we can see where we all stand. It could even assist me & others even gauge if punching “Corn Pop” in the face vs. tagging his garage with the “N-word” works better for me punishment-wise.
FYI – I’m being sarcastic (just in case I’m selected to host the Oscar’s at some time).
Good catch, @instugator! Thanks!
As a Jew, I had to think through whether it made sense to make acts against Jews hate crimes. It doesn’t–for the reasons that many of you state. I think people are permitted to think anything they wish–including hating me because I’m a Jew. What matters is what they do, and a murder is a murder is a murder.
It’s the thought crime aspect of it that has always bothered me the most.
Except…we have always had aggravating and mitigating factors in criminal law. Consider that killing, or even assaulting a police officer, possibly even a fire or emergency medical responder, is going to get a stiffer sentence than if J. Q. Public was the victim. We do that for policy reasons.Should a jury be able to take account of a victim being infirm, due to age, prior injury, or disability? That is, if a punk pistol whips a 90 year old woman to make her give her safe combination, should we have the right to punish him more harshly than if his victim is a healthy, strong 25 year old man?
If you are on board so far, may there be other categories for various good reasons? Then, what are the limiting principles?
I don’t think we are in conflict, @cliffordbrown. All the offenses you list can certainly be considered for more severe punishments. I’m saying that to decide there is a hate crime should be illegitimate. Remember, hate crimes are:
any of various crimes (such as assault or defacement of property) when motivated by hostility to the victim as a member of a group (such as one based on color, creed, gender, or sexual orientation). I have no problem giving a cop killer the maximum penalty according to the law, or someone who rapes and kills an elderly woman a similar punishment. We are punishing them for what they have done, not how they think or feel. A key is that there are a range of punishments that can be applied, and for horrendous acts, the maximum should be applied. But for what they’ve done, not what they think.