Some sources seem to take it for granted that hate crimes are increasing after Trump’s election. But are they really?
Perhaps I’m inclined to skepticism because of personal experience. During my senior year in college, activists lead by a professor named Kerri Dunn were trying hard to convince the campus community that we were under attack by white supremacists. One day Prof. Dunn found her car with windows shattered, tires slashed, and swastikas spray-painted on. The Claremont colleges cancelled classes and scheduled rallies, teach-ins and so forth to show off how much they were determined to protect us against the tide of white supremacist hate overwhelming our campus. Then it turned out that Dunn had vandalized her own car, with the intention of proving how totally real the white supremacists were. Ever since then, I’ve found it’s useful to be wary of hate crime reports, especially when the “hate crime” in question happens to perfectly validate the narrative of a certain political movement.
After Trump was elected, there were many reports of violent hate crimes. The general narrative being like this: one or more white men, either wear Trump paraphernalia or shouting Trump slogans, descend on a Muslim women/black person/gay person and beat them up, or threaten to do so.
Now I live in a state (North Dakota) that voted Trump by almost 40% and is overwhelmingly white. If white male Trump supporters were actually roaming the country and turning randomly violent against everyone else, I would expect that such reports would emerge commonly from North Dakota or other such states. But I’ve heard of no such claims in North Dakota. Instead they seemed to come from liberal strongholds like New York, or enclaves such as college campuses. I also noted that in all the cases I encountered, there was never a corroborating witness to the event other than the one reported victim. And somehow, even in our age of ubiquitous smart phones, there was never a video of any of these assaults.
For example, the day after the elction, a Muslim student in Louisiana claimed to Police that she’d been attacked and had her head scarf torn off by two white men, one wearing a Trump hat. That fits the narrative promoted by certain people rather nicely. It was a hoax. Likewise, Yasmin Seweid, who made a similar claim in New York. And another Muslim woman in Michigan. But no need to focus just on Muslim women making fake claims of attacks by white men. Plenty of other people have been making phony claims of hate crimes. In other cases, there may have been actual crimes, but they had nothing to do with politics.
But what about the numerical evidence? Well, I have not seen any reports confirming increased hate crimes since the election from the FBI, or from any law enforcement office. Instead, media outlets such as the New Yorker article I linked to above all point to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), supposedly documenting thousands of post-election hate crimes. However, there are many reasons to be skeptical of that as well. SPLC is a left-wing organization with a clear bias. Their fundraising pitches depend on repeatedly terrifying people with tales of the surge in hate crimes, hate groups, etc… The particular “study” being widely circulated as proof of surging hate crimes probably doesn’t deserve to be called a study. The SPLC merely circulated an email to a list of teachers, asking them to report “hate incidents”. Their definition is so broad that almost anything could be a hate incident, and according to the First Amendment, most of those incidents were not crimes. Further, SPLC did not investigation of whether any of the actual reported incidents took place. Given the parade of hoaxes, that would seem to be an important thing to do. And lastly, they carefully removed any mention of many reported incidents in which Trump supporters were the victims.
There’s been much talk about how public trust in the media hovers near all-time lows, while people are being suckered by fake news. But if mainstream media outlets want to be perceived as the real news that’s better than the fake news, perhaps they should do some more careful checking of their own sources.
Why would you expect that white-supremacist/white-nationalist-perpetrated hate crimes against non-whites would be concentrated in states that are overwhelmingly white? It seems logical to me that they’d occur in places where there actually are significant numbers of non-whites.