The recent killing of eight Asian women in Atlanta raised the customary hue and cry about prosecuting so-called hate crimes.  Since 1968, there has been federal legislation making it a separate crime, above and beyond the underlying criminal act, to threaten to use or use force based, in the initial legislation, on the victim's race, color, religion, or national origin and because the victim is engaged in federally protected activity such as public education, employment, jury duty, travel, using public accommodations or exercising housing rights.  In 1988, protections were added based on a person's familial status and disability.  Religious worship was added to the protected categories in 1996.  In 2009, additional protections were added for crimes based on sex, disability, gender identity and sexual orientation.  The 2009 legislation eliminated the requirement that the victim be engaged in federally protected activity.

Virtually all states have their own version of hate crime legislation.  In addition to the categories covered under federal law, several states have added transgender, homelessness, and political affiliation to the category of persons against whom hate crimes can be committed.

The key difference between hate crimes and other crimes is that they punish motive.  With all of these legislative amendments, the litany of protected categories now covers virtually every conceivable basis of a person's identity. Ironically, however, the one category excluded, at least from federal law, is the category which more than any other has during recent years increasingly become the motivating factor — the victim's age. A 2019 report by AARP shows that nonfatal assaults against men over sixty increased by just over seventy-five percent between 2002 and 2016.

Age aside, every victim of a violent crime falls into at least one of the protected categories under federal hate crime law.  If the crime was against a woman, it likely was, at least to some degree, motivated by the victim's sex, or at least her perceived vulnerability as a member — God forgive me — of the weaker sex.  A violent crime committed in New York City against Caucasians by Blacks who, while representing twenty-three percent of the population, commit two thirds of all violent crime in the city, could easily be viewed as a crime based on racial animus.  The same argument could be made about violent crime perpetrated against Orthodox Jews (particularly since it would be near impossible to find a perpetrator within the sect, thus making religious antipathy always a possible motive) or any other person with discernible characteristics, since all such characteristics apart from age are covered under federal hate crime law.

The point is that all violent crime could be viewed as a hate crime, given the ridiculously broad list of protected categories.  At the end of the day, however, proving motive in a criminal trial can be a difficult matter.  Unless the perpetrator has ranted on social media or written his own version of Mein Kampf, how can motive be shown?  And, given that often overwhelming difficulty, especially in mixed motive cases, why even try?  Is there evidence that hate crime legislation reduces the incidence of hate crimes — even accepting the all-embracing nature of the term?  Recent data compiled by the FBI indicates that "hate-motivated killings" are on the rise.  Data from New York City and Los Angeles police departments suggest that anti-Asian hate crimes increased by nearly 150 percent in 2020.  That certainly suggests that the legislation is not having a prophylactic effect.  That is hardly surprising.  How many criminals are willing to commit a violent crime but pause and reconsider if they conclude that it may constitute a hate crime?

In reality, as Michael Bronski, Harvard professor and co-author of Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics wrote, "they essentially come down to feel-good laws. ... I think part of what they do is that they actually misdirect us from looking at much deeper issues.  Racism is a problem, homophobia is a problem, violence against immigrants is a problem ...  so we end up passing these laws and saying 'look at this, we're actually doing something.'"

While communities are understandably up in arms over the spike in crime, the answer isn't to legislate further to ensure that all possible categories of human beings are protected by hate crime legislation.  Nor is the answer to overcharge and prosecute both the crime itself and, if committed against a person in a protected category, particularly a racial minority, prosecute the case as a hate crime as well.  No — the answer is "undefund" the police, ensure that the bail system doesn't work like border checks on illegals, and make certain that violent criminals actually serve their sentences irrespective of the criminal justice system's disparate impact on minorities.

Moreover, if we obsess about motivation, we can easily characterize every violent crime as a hate crime for another obvious reason.  No violent crime, at least as far as I understand it, is motivated by friendship, altruism, love, or similar feelings.  It doesn't take Sigmund Freud to recognize that a violent assault is an act of hate.

Our obsession with hate crimes is part and parcel of the far left (another tautology)'s effort to dismantle our social cohesion.  We are like free floating atoms that aren't part of a structural whole.  If we do not see ourselves as part of that whole but only as disconnected parts, we then look to validate our separateness and lose sight of the fact that any violent crime against a person is both a per se hateful act and a crime against society as a whole, of which we are all integral parts.

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