With the recent murder of Charlie Kirk and that of the kids at the Annunciation Catholic Church, the subject of “hate crime” has come up again. I suggest that people who can’t control the conversation by other, more logical means generally put forward the concept of hate speech. I’ll go further and suggest that we should be removing all hate crime legislation from the books because it is so very arbitrarily enforced.
Consider this question: Will Robinson be charged with a hate crime? The answer is no, he will not be so charged. Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico:
Robinson has been charged with three crimes under Utah law: murder, causing bodily injury with a firearm, and obstruction of justice.
It might seem surprising that the case is not a federal one, given the national notoriety of the crime and the FBI’s heavy involvement in the investigation. But homicides can be charged as federal crimes in only a few circumstances — such as an assassination of a federal government official, a killing on federal property, or a “hate crime” that was motivated by the victim’s race, religion, or another protected characteristic.
So far, the known details of the Kirk shooting do not appear to support a federal prosecution, legal experts say.
I would argue that a major reason for Kirk’s assassination was his Christian faith. That, by the very definition, is a hate crime based on the victim’s religion. That Robinson does not face hate crime charges goes back to the arbitrary enforcement of those laws. Given the nature of the thing, it’s easy enough to surmise that Kirk was of the wrong religion to level claims of hate crimes on account of his religion against Robinson. I will be surprised indeed if they move this to a federal court to address what is clearly a crime motivated by hate. It’s possible, I suppose, but I doubt it’s going to happen.
It’s an interesting bit of study, looking at what that legislation gets used for and what it doesn’t. I’m limited on both space and time, so I won’t get too deep into listing such, even though examples abound, but here are a few.
From August 2021 from The College Fix: “Dr. Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, is arguing that federal hate-crime protections may need to be extended to Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists ‘targeted by far-right extremism.’”
In retrospect, it’s easy now to see this was simply an appeal for what is best described as a dictatorial rule by unelected bureau-rats. (No, that’s not a typo.) Then, we have the hate crime hoaxes as documented by Jonah Goldberg back in February of 2019, when he was still writing for National Review:
Smollett’s hoax isn’t that unusual. I’m already running long, so I’ll spare you the data, but hoaxes happen all the time — and so do actual hate crimes. They’ve happened under Trump, and they were happening for decades before Trump. That’s why it’s particularly galling to see Al Sharpton opine on the Smollett case given that his entire career stemmed from the Tawana Brawley hoax and his role in a real hate crime that killed seven people.
I’ve been following this stuff ever since I witnessed such hoaxes as a college student. I think the first book I ever reviewed professionally was about student activism. The author, Paul Rogat Loeb, had a whole chapter about racism on college campuses. He focused on a hate crime at Emory. It was only after dozens of pages about all the wonderful consciousness-raising — and shakedowns of administrators — that resulted from the response to the atrocity that he acknowledged that the victim orchestrated the whole thing. But that was irrelevant, according to Loeb, because “other racial harassment has unquestionably occurred again and again, at colleges nationwide.” And besides, so much consciousness was raised! I wrote at the time, “When students are taught that the coin of the realm is race and rage, invariably some will spend that currency on self-aggrandizement and controversy.
I won’t take the time or space for a list, but be aware that Breitbart News compiled a list of some 700 hate crime hoaxes in 2019 alone. As my old friend Dale Franks of the old Q&O Blog said that same week, “When victims are lionized, victimhood becomes the coin of the realm.” I submit that hate crime laws facilitate all of that to our mutual detriment.
And of course, even when they bring hate crimes charges, they try tagging the perp with a “far right” label, much the same as they have attempted with Robinson. Case in point is from 2015 involving Craig Hicks, surrounding the murder of three Muslim males, where the left tried to disassociate themselves from the accused by painting him as some kind of demented Limbaugh or Sarah Palin. They’d have gotten by with it, too, had John Hinderacker of Power Line not stepped in, revealing by way of a screencap of Hicks’ Facebook page, that he evidently hated Ted Nugent, Rush Limbaugh, and Dick Cheney. On the other hand, he liked Rachel Maddow and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The list is far longer, but I trust that I’ve made the point. Hate crimes legislation is simply a way of enforcing virtue signaling. In a free nation, hate, of itself, is not a crime, nor should it be, unless you are trying to make thinking illegal. Even when it’s used correctly, which it all too often is not, hate crime laws are a horrible idea.
So while I’m somewhat sympathetic to the notion of hitting Robinson with Hate Crime charges (using the tools of the left against one of their own, would feel very nice about now), in the end, I’m against it, because such laws should not exist.
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