When confronted with an immediate question in the wake of the news about Jussie Smollett having fabricated the hate crime he allegedly suffered, Cory Booker was calmly reserved with his comments, saying he would "withhold [judgment] until all the information actually comes out."

It was certainly a curious response, because he initially had no such reservations or skepticism regarding Smollett's farcical story about two MAGA-hatted white guys carrying bleach and a noose at 2 A.M. in sub-zero temperatures, waiting to violently remind any passing black guy that the streets of Chicago are somehow "MAGA country."  But what's even more curious is that Booker continued defending the predetermined narrative of white racism by saying that "we actually know, in this country, since 9/11, that the majority of terrorist attacks on our soil have been right-wing terrorist attacks, and the majority of them have been white supremacist attacks."

Like you, I'd never before heard anyone refer to Jussie Smollett's alleged attack as a "terrorist attack" until Cory Booker invoked those words.  Why did he?

What Cory Booker was referencing, and the "since 9/11" statement seems to be a dead giveaway, is likely the data collected in a well known study conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggesting that "right-wing" terrorist attacks occur more frequently than Islamic ones.

Though that study has its own issues, which I've highlighted before, comparing right-wing terrorism to Islamic terrorism is nothing more than a red herring in this case.  The narrative that Jussie Smollett's hoax attack was meant to prove is that Trump's presidency has led to a massive increase in white Americans committing hate crimes against minorities unlike anything we've seen in decades.

Hate crime data don't actually support that narrative, however, and that's likely why Cory Booker, when put on the spot, decided to cite an altogether unrelated study about terrorism.  The raw data on hate crimes, as compiled by the FBI, simply don't suggest that white hate crimes are uniquely on the rise, despite the illusion being presented to the American people that they are.

In 2009, for example, the FBI statistics show that there were 2,724 "anti-black" hate crimes committed, 1,503 of which were committed at the hands of white offenders.  In 2017, which year contains the latest data provided by the FBI, that number decreased by roughly 13.5% to 2,358 at the hands of 1,241 white offenders.

Inversely, in 2009, anti-white hate crimes were at 652 and saw an increase to 844 in 2017 — nearly a 30% increase, which includes a 26% increase in anti-white hate crimes by black offenders. 

This general point should be simple enough.  From the year after Obama's election to the year after Trump's election, the number of anti-black hate crimes decreased, while the number of anti-white hate crimes increased.

It's important to note that all hate crime had dropped by 2014, but that year signified a stunning reversal of a declining trend going back to at least 2006.  In 2006, there were 9,080 total hate crimes tallied by the FBI.  In 2009, there were 7,789, and by 2014, there were 6,418. 

Something happened at that moment, however, that reversed that trend across the board, in nearly every measurable category.

In 2015, there were 6,885 hate crimes recorded by the FBI.  In 2017, that number indeed spiked to 8,437.  But while there was an 11% increase in anti-black hate crimes recorded during that timeframe, it also coincided with a 15% increase in anti-white hate crimes. 

Interestingly, between 2015 and 2017, there was only a 1% increase in known white offenders committing anti-black hate crimes, despite there being a clearly correlating ~13% increase in known black offenders committing anti-white hate crimes.

A significant driver of that curious discrepancy is that the number of offenses where the race was "unknown" in anti-black hate crime had jumped by ~33% between 2015 and 2017.

We like to look at these hate crime data and assume that these are proven or solved crimes we are talking about.  They are not.  According to the FBI methodology, "the term known offender does not imply that the suspect's identity is known"; rather, it implies that "some aspect of the suspect was identified."

In other words, if Jussie Smollett had not been caught fabricating his attack, the incident would have likely been recorded by the Chicago police and provided to the FBI as an anti-black hate crime at the hands of "known white offenders." 

How thin must the evidence of all these additional crimes be, we might ask, if the race of the offender is altogether "unknown"?    

To say fabricated hate crimes can occur is a gross understatement, and to say hate crimes are far more often fabricated by individuals in minority demographics, where victimhood often amounts to social currency in the media, is just simple logic.

Andy Ngo has done the yeoman's work of compiling a large list of recent hate crime hoaxes, all of which involve "victims" who fit neatly in the intersectional hierarchy of victimhood having fabricated a hate crime.  Rarely, if ever, is it the inverse of those circumstances. 

If this many hate crime hoaxes can be identified, how many undetected hoaxes make it into FBI hate crime statistics?  A few hundred?  A thousand or more?  It's impossible to know.

In short, hate crime data are incredibly unreliable, and they certainly present more animosity toward minorities than actually exists in America.  The only question is how much more.

Hate crime law is all ridiculous nonsense on its face.  Crimes are crimes, and hate crime laws arbitrarily suggest that some crimes are worse than others based upon the rationale leading to the crime rather than judgment based upon the severity of the crime itself.  Buried within these cited statistics above are examples of intimidation, vandalism, rape, arson, theft, assault, and murder.  The distinctions among those actual crimes should mean everything, but for mass consumption, they're all just labeled "hate crimes," with the supposed impetus of bigotry as the primary feature worthy of note.  These crimes are sculpted into broad, misleading statistics that leftists can use to signify that America is a hateful place where demographic minorities are unfairly targeted as victims of crimes.

And even with the benefit of their subjective data constructs and media support, leftists still cannot present an intelligent argument to defend their narrative, because their own data and reality completely destroy it. 

So instead, you can just expect them to continue calling white people terrorists.

William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.

Image: YouTube screen shot.