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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, ‘This Is America, 2019' |
| 2019-02-25 |
| h/t Instapundit [AmGreatness] There have been so far about three general reactions to the concocted Jussie Smollett psychodrama. One, and the most common, has been apprehension that Smollett’s lies will discredit future real incidents of hate crimes against gays and minorities. This could be a legitimate concern, given the tensions within a multiracial society. Yet, in fact, there is no evidence in the past that false reports (some lists of such fake hate crimes put the number at around 400) have had such an effect‐either on spiking real hate crimes, suppressing reporting, discouraging police investigations, or preventing even more race-crime hoaxes. As Heather Mac Donald has recently once again noted, the 2017 upswing in reported hate crimes from the prior year may well be largely because an additional 1,000 police agencies were for the first time reporting such crimes. Mac Donald also notes that a "hate crime"‐a micro percentage of reported violent crime‐is narrowly defined not to include general interracial violent victimization, a category in which African-Americans on average commit 85 percent of such crimes. ...A second reaction was the far more legitimate worry that thousands of hours of careful police work were squandered, as resources were diverted from real crime investigations. Although so far, the overburdened Chicago police have been careful in downplaying this redirection in limited resources, it was no doubt gargantuan.Yet Smollett’s supporters almost immediately questioned the police department’s ethics when authorities ever so cautiously hinted that the facts and Smollett’s own behavior did not line up with a racist attack. ...Yet the third, most important, and most ignored reaction was that in some sense Smollett himself was a racist and had committed a hate crime. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #3 "Of similar crimes, why oh why must Some victimisations be primest Cuz... race, predilections, And wedding cake captions?" Inquired a hate crime hating crimist. |
| Posted by: Chunky Sleating6286 2019-02-25 23:31 |
| #2 I think we already have enough laws to cover assault, battery, arson, etc. "Hate crime" definitions only increase the tensions without a multiracial society. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2019-02-25 12:13 |
| #1 He is of the 'entitlement tribe'. All must be forgiven. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2019-02-25 11:48 |