Friends, you'll hear a lot about hate crimes in the next, oh, few decades, because manipulating our perceptions of hate and violence is absolutely central to the Left's goal of winning and maintaining its grip on power. Very little of what the Left claims re: hate is true, however.
For one thing, as you see above, even though the number of agencies contributing data on hate crimes has consistently risen, the number of reported hate crimes has remained relatively constant. (Of course, a "reported" hate crime isn't always a hate crime either.) That should tell you something. Also, the offenders in hate crime incidents are not always white! That would shock you if you were a CNN or an MSNBC viewer, needless to say, because they present the phenomenon of "hate" as though conservative white men had a monopoly on it. Actually, whites are under-represented among (alleged) hate crime offenders, while blacks are over-represented. In truth, the prosecution of federal hate crimes is exceedingly rare...and there's no reason to believe that our country is in the grip of a massive surge in such offenses. Terrifying and misinforming the public has its rewards, though, especially if your goal is to "divide and conquer"... Asian-Americans are the latest victims of the Left's scare tactics, but they weren't the first and they won't be the last.
My latest article addresses this topic and makes clear my opposition to hate crimes legislation (by contrast, my fulsome support for laws that criminalize actual violence is a matter of record). See if you view things the same way...
Republicans Shouldn't Cave on “Hate Crimes”
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and I have one thing in common: we're effectively alone in opposing the recent “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Bill” passed by the U.S. Senate, 94-1. On one level, the bill is fairly inconsequential, since it revolves around the tracking of hate crimes, and the training of police officers, and not on the punishment of actual acts of violence. On another level, though, the bill is an affront to American justice and liberty, and it continues a dangerous trend of addressing crimes differently — sometimes wildly differently — based on their motivations.
Let me be clear: I do not support or condone acts of criminal violence against anyone, of any race or ethnic origin, for any reason. Why, then, would I waste what little political capital I possess, you may well ask, in opposing a popular and bipartisan bill aimed at deterring hate crimes?
Simple! Hate, although it is almost always senseless in its origins and repugnant in its real world effects, is not, and never should be, against the law. Every American, in fact, is free, under the First Amendment, to be as hateful and as biased as he so chooses.
Leftists make regular and copious use of this freedom, in fact — many of them are positively dripping with hate for those who think differently than they do, and often they betray unthinking bias towards groups, like men, white people, and Christians, who offend them, for one reason or another. Such feelings, however, and such beliefs, are not illegal. They are a permissible, if ill-advised, exercise of every American's constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of conscience. I will defend with every fiber of my being the right of leftists to hate and to deride anyone and anything they please, including me, because that is the essence of American freedom.
For this reason, all “hate crimes” legislation is a terrible mistake. When we weigh a person's guilt or innocence of, say, assault or murder, their actions, and their actions alone, are what should determine our final verdict. Their thoughts and beliefs, and our opinion of those thoughts and beliefs, are irrelevant.
Thus, whether or not a wave of “Asian hate” is washing over this country — based on the actual incidence of violent crime, it seems much more accurate and relevant to say that there is a surge in offenses, especially in our biggest cities where police forces are most cowed, in which black Americans are both the victims and the perpetrators — the fact is that every time that Republicans and conservatives surrender to the fashion for labeling “hate crimes” as such and punishing them with special severity, they reinforce the threat that such laws pose to our liberties. They also increase the danger that, in future, violent acts will become secondary to the phenomenon of “hate crimes”, and thus legislators will make haste to punish the thought crime of “hate” (selectively defined, of course) in itself. And that would be a very dangerous development indeed.
The other unfortunate aspect of Republicans' foolish endorsement of hate crimes laws is that all such efforts add fuel to the fire of Democratic/progressive efforts to popularize the idea that America is a fundamentally hateful country, and that “hate” (always correlated with conservatism — imagine that!) is a constantly escalating threat.
Whether more “hate” abides in Americans' hearts now than, say, five years ago is almost impossible to say, but that police departments have been given perverse incentives to catalog crimes motivated by “hate” as “hate crimes” is beyond questioning. Likewise, the mainstream media will stop at nothing to perpetuate the twin myths that “hate crimes” are common and that they are almost uniformly committed by conservative white men, even though neither assertion is anywhere close to the truth. “Hate”, though, has become such a key organizing principle on the Left — hating the haters is de rigueur — that the show must go on, no matter how hollow and contrived.
Lastly, consider that, for leftists, “hate” increasingly typifies all conservative and Republican activism. Moreover, most conservative rhetoric is “hate speech”. Meanwhile, the vast reservoirs of hate on the Left, symbolized by BLM and Antifa but by no means exhausted by them, are studiously ignored by leftists and their media acolytes. Their criminal violence is “mostly peaceful”.
The obsession with tarring all conservatives with the “hate” brush is so ingrained among progressives, in fact, that words themselves — not just “hate”, but “racism”, “insurrection”, “infrastructure”, etc. — must be redefined to fit the paradigm. Don't agree with leftist doublethink? Then you must be a white supremacist/climate denier/sexist/Christian fundamentalist/anti-vaxxer/redneck/transphobe/domestic terrorist! Plus, you and your spouse and your kids and your dog and your cat are probably ugly and stupid too. Might as well step on the gas when you're cruising down the highway, right?
Are these, then, the people we want defining and punishing “hate crimes”? I think not!
For all these reasons, it is disappointing that Senate Republicans took the bait and voted en masse for the recent “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Bill”. If they thought that, in doing so, they would reduce the aggregate amount of hate or violence in America, they were mistaken. If they thought that, in doing so, they could somehow put a dent in the blistering hate that leftists feel for Republican Senators and for ordinary conservatives, they were monstrously naive. Either way, they were in the wrong, and Senator Josh Hawley was alone in being right.
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred, and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480.
And here it is at American Greatness:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/24/republicans-shouldnt-have-caved-on-hate-crimes/
Dr. Waddy (and Senator Hawley - thank you Senator). It is a now time honored custom on the left to preempt certain terms and turn them into forbiddingly and certainly defined accusations
ReplyDeleteconfirming condemnation upon very expression. These terms are then freely wielded as conversation stoppers, as ridicule and, in time, as legal weapons, as we see today. In the course of this development they become mindlesslyreflexive among so many on the left. They cannot define them; they have never been challenged to do so. They are usually flummoxed when required to do so.
Dr.Waddyfrom Jack : It is fully obvious, from its behavior and that lawlessness it endorses in detached leisure, that HATE ( by definition the most intense and absolute of antipathies) is essential to the American left. But when it enters the language of our laws, it begs of authoritative legal construction and I trust today's Scotus to do that.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: I found in your exposition implied an equivalence between "hate crime" (as it were) and "thought crime", which we know to be demonstrated as a criminal offense in totalitarian regimes. The fundamentally totalitarian American left surely considers them synonymous. The subhuman prosecution of "thought crime", ALREADY, in the Soviet Union, in Maoist China murderous Cambodia and in radical Islam, gives us all we need for evidence of pure evil!
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: The first comment above is from me.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Jack: those yelling "hate!" are seldom doing so out of love. Constant yammering about "hate speech" and "hate crimes" tells us more about the yammerer than it does about America.
ReplyDeleteJack, as others have pointed out, the distinction between the struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution and the anti-whiteness seminars of today is a pretty fine one. Today's authorities already feel justified in monkeying with our innermost thoughts, and pressuring us to conform. When government takes that same leap, we're in big trouble.
Dr. Waddy from Jack: The book Fan-Shen by William Hinton ( a convinced Marxist; I heard him attest to it in person) gives great detail on early post 1949 China struggle sessions and wasconsidered credible enough to be assigned text in the modern China history course I took from a former Nationalist officer who had no love for the Commies but was honorably devoted to teachinh the truth as he knew it. The sessions , conducted by most persuasive cadre,were very localized and attempted to persuade mostly rural people that they had been unknowingly exploited. Doubts were swiftly suppressed by force and alleged perpetrators of "oppression"were punished summarily and severely. You are right, there is much similarity in the tactics of the "woke" and as they continue to gather support from decision makers and their organs of force, I say, as totalitarianism advances in our country, we bid fair to suffer the wrongs the struggle sessions visited upon China. When you seek to persuade people of wrongs all unperceived by them, you may consequently lead them down paths divorced from reality, with predictably catastrophic results, as the Chinese Communists. China realized reality again,to their prosperity, by rejecting their teachings! Must we pass through the same crucible?
ReplyDeleteJack, all delusions wear thin in time, but unfortunately it can take people decades, even generations, to realize the full extent of their wrongness. But I would point out that we have one big advantage over the Chinese, 1949-present: we have the ability to retaliate against our tyrants at the ballot box. Granted, our elections aren't pristine, but they provide a ray of hope that we would be foolish not to cling to. If we can tie the Dems/progressives in the minds of the public to "cancel culture", "wokeness", and coercion, and we're halfway there already, there's a decent chance that America will give the good guys another shot.
ReplyDelete