Do Ralston and Bottoms Really Want Hate Crime Laws? Because the Atlanta Rioters Are All Hate Criminals. Including Bottoms and Ralston.

June 3, 2020 4 Comments

Certain politicians and pundits in Atlanta — Double-Dipping Mayor I’ll take two paychecks for that one job thank you very much Keisha Lance Bottoms, disgraced GOP House Speaker David Ralston, job-threatening public-radio-triple-dipper Bill Nigut, and every single Democrat and virtue-signaling Republican want to pass a hate crime law in Georgia.  Because Brunswick.  Because George Floyd.  Because “racism.”  Purportedly against all black men.  Purportedly by all police.

As of this writing, such rhetoric and the riots they birthed have resulted in serious injuries to more than 400 police and several murders of police, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and looting. ... 

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My 2000 Atlanta-Journal Constitution Op-Ed Opposing the 2000 Hate Crime Bill in Georgia

March 18, 2019 2 Comments

In 2000, I published an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution opposing a hate crimes bill that eventually passed out of the Georgia Legislature and was signed into law, but not before it was amended to exclude victim categories — in other words, it was amended so that it would apply to anyone, not just to members of certain identity groups.

A sort of ecumenical hate crimes law, like those “coexist” bumper stickers, only not like the people who have them on their cars, who, oddly, strongly prefer both exclusion of and differentiation between all peoples into bloody warring sectionalism when it comes to anyplace other than the rear bumper of their Volvo. ... 

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Another Hate Crime That Was The Wrong Kind of Hate

July 7, 2014 4 Comments

Among the many toxic effects of hate crime laws, the worst is that they destroy the ethic of equality before the law.  This ethic was the cornerstone of the civil rights movement and its most compelling argument, and for forty years — from 1955 to 1995 — appeals for equal treatment before the law for both victims and offenders swayed white Americans to understand minorities’ plight.

All of this changed when Eric Holder and Bill Clinton shoved through a highly politicized hate crimes regime in the late 1990’s.  From the beginning, this regime wasn’t about punishing hate wherever it happened; it was about weaponizing identity politics where they least belonged: in the courts.  It was about freezing America like a scared rabbit before the image of eternal imaginary Klansmen eternally burning down black churches and eternally lynching minorities. ... 

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Robert Chatigny: By Nominating Him, Obama Shows Extreme Contempt For Victims

March 10, 2010 2 Comments

Barack Obama is arguably the most offender-friendly, victim-loathing president the country has ever seen.  His judicial and political philosophies are reflexively anti-incarceration.  His political career suggests a particularly disturbing pattern of disrespect for victims of sex crime.

In the Illinois state senate, Obama was the only senator who refused to support a bill allowing victims of sexual assault to have certain court records sealed.  The bill was intended to protect victims from having their sex lives and other extremely personal information (medical and gynecological records) splayed out in the public record for all to see after a trial had ended.  The legislation was written to protect the dignity of women who had been victimized by rapists, and then re-victimized in the courtroom at the hands of sleazy defense attorneys. ... 

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Journalistic Ethics Week, Part 2: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — Why the California Gang Rape Wasn’t Called Hate.

October 30, 2009 3 Comments

In the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, more people are noticing the ways the media takes its marching orders from political activists, abetted by criminologists who use their position to promote political causes through a thin veneer of “academic” observation.  This activism-disguised-as-expertise has played a central role in enforcing the orthodoxy of hate crimes activism for more than a decade.

So when ordinary people ask, “why is this crime not a hate crime?” the media answers by turning to activist-criminologists like Jack Levin and James Allen Fox, who spool out definitions that are utterly irrational on their face but go utterly unchallenged: it is an intricate dance designed to shut down discussion, not actually explain anything. ... 

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Jack Levin, Apologists for (Certain) Brutal Murders: Hacking a Woman to Death is Just a Cry for Help (Updated 11/1/09)

October 13, 2009 1 Comment

It’s criminal apologist week, and no criminal apologist week would be complete without a deep bow to Jack Levin, the Northwestern* criminologist who has made an art form of claiming that some brutal, senseless murders are serious ethical and social problems motivated by “hate” — while others are just acting-out caused by “ouchiness,” teenage angst, and our cruel lack of interest in understanding where brutal killers are “coming from.”

You can see where this is going: when someone uses certain slur words (not all of them — not the ones about women) while victimizing somebody, it’s suddenly a much more important crime, which means other crimes are less important, in every sense.  Convincing the public that they must accept this inequality is a job for experts, and Levin is the go-to expert for insidiously psychologizing away certain offenders’ actions while demanding allegiance to the urgency of crimes he deems hate. ... 

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DNA Could Have Stopped Delmer Smith Before He Killed, But Nobody Cared Enough To Update the Federal Database

October 6, 2009 4 Comments

This is Delmer Smith, who is responsible for a recent reign of terror on Florida’s Gulf Coast that left women from Venice to Bradenton terrified of violent home invasions, murder and rape:

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How Many Women do You Need to Slaughter Before it Becomes a Hate Crime?

September 15, 2009 Leave a comment

Let’s see. According the the silence of the “experts” in the face of Walter E. Ellis’ crimes, apparently it’s some number higher than seven.  And counting.

So what constitutes a hate crime against women?  Nothing, in practice.  Not selecting and slaughtering woman after woman after woman.  Not scrawling hate words across a murdered woman’s body.  Not ritualistically destroying a woman’s breasts or sex organs.  Not spreading fear among other women through your attacks.  Not inflicting “excessive” violence, “overkill,” whatever that means. ... 

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Selective Outrage: What the Paralyzed Cop Scandal Says About Atlanta’s Politicians

May 28, 2009 Leave a comment

As elected officials in Atlanta crowd the microphone to denounce Sgt. Scott Kreher for saying something importune about Mayor Shirley Franklin, the list grows . . . of elected officials in Atlanta grandstanding on Kreher while refusing to comment on the city’s grotesque treatment of wounded police officers, the real issue.

Here is a video Kreher helped create that details the systematic abuse of the officers by the city.  And here is a petition supporting Kreher, a decent guy who lost his temper over real injustice.  Not fake injustice.  I urge you to read the text of the petition, if you want to know what really happened. ... 

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