Hate Crime Hysteria in Georgia

Since the shutdown apologists seem to be losing their argument—because the vast majority of us are in little to no more danger from the Wuhan virus than we are from other such illnesses, because the number of Wuhan virus infections is a near-useless metric, because “social-distancing” is pseudo-science quackery, because more and more of us are getting the proper context on Wuhan virus numbers, and because the hand-shake police really are out there—democrats are now resorting to their favorite political fallback: “Racism!”

No doubt you’ve probably heard of the death of Ahmaud Arbery that took place recently in a small South Georgia town near Brunswick. Mr. Arbery, a black man, was shot and killed after suspicious behavior in a neighborhood and a 911 call led two armed citizens—Gregory and Travis McMichael, both white—to give chase. According to multiple reports and video evidence, at the time of the shooting, Arbery was not armed and was in possession of no stolen property.

After a brief investigation, the McMichaels were initially not charged. Several weeks after the shooting, video of the event went viral and charges of vigilante murder, an unjust cover up, and racism ensued. The McMichaels have since been arrested. I’m not going to argue here the guilt or innocence of anyone involved in this ugly incident. I’m praying and hoping for truth and justice for all those involved.

However, as is often the case when someone white (or “white Hispanic”) kills someone of color, many others are not content with mere justice. Some folks want to make political hay out of such events. And, as often happens when we go down this foolish road, truth and justice get set aside for ugly politics.

A few days after the McMichaels were arrested, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms—whose jurisdiction lies about 300 miles north of the Arbery, McMichael incident—called the shooting “a lynching” and laid blame at the feet of President Trump. On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Bottoms said, “With the rhetoric we hear coming out of the White House in so many ways, I think that many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that we otherwise would not see in 2020.” Left-wing pundits galore have been using similar ignorant, inflammatory, and deceptive rhetoric.

In addition to such foolishness, Arbery’s death has led to rampant calls for hate crime legislation in Georgia. Of course, this is unsurprising from the left, but many on the right in Georgia have signaled that they are at least open to the possibility of such legislation, and some have even directly called for it.

The most notable individual in the latter group is no less than Georgia’s Speaker of the House, republican David Ralston. Just days ago, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), Ralston said that once Georgia’s legislative session resumes in June, he would “challenge and implore” the Georgia Senate to pass the hate crimes bill already adopted by his chamber, House Bill 426, “with no delay and no amendments.” Ralston added,

The time for being silent ended last week. It’s time to do what’s right. It’s going to take some leadership and some courage, but I think it’s time to act…It’s a shame that it took a video of this to engage many leaders, but our responsibility is threefold: to demonstrate that Georgia and Glynn County will not be tarnished by this act of evil. It’s time that we bring our law into the 21st century and make it more just, and it’s time to do what’s right.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has indicated that he’s open to signing a hate crime law. Georgia is one of four U.S. states that don’t have hate crime legislation, and for good reason. Hate crime laws are unnecessary, and they do nothing to deter hate.

According to FBI data, in 2018, there were only 7,120 hate crime incidents involving 8,496 offenses in all of the U.S. More than half of the offenses (52.2%) involved property damage or “intimidation.” About two-thirds of the offenses (5,566) were crimes against persons. Of these, 80% were crimes of intimidation or simple assault. In 2018, there were 24 murders that were classified as a hate crime.

One murder is too many, but if you take just three U.S. cities—say Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis—there’s around 24 murders nearly every week of the year. Most of these murder victims are black Americans. Shockingly, the CDC reveals that for U.S. black males, from birth to the age of 44, the leading cause of death is homicide. As has been often reported (but also often ignored), the vast majority (over 90%) of these homicides are the result of black-on-black violence.

Using the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of criminal victimization (2018), Manhattan Institute researcher Heather MacDonald reveals: “There were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations…between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.”

MacDonald adds that, “Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes – by 50 percent – according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.” In other words, in spite of the narrative so often perpetuated by hate crime apologists, America does not have a problem with white on black hate crime.

Of course, in spite of its lack of hate crime legislation, this is true for the state of Georgia as well. North Carolina and Michigan both have a total population that’s almost exactly equal to Georgia’s—about 10 million. In addition, both North Carolina and Michigan have hate crime laws. According to the FBI, in 2018, North Carolina had 142 hate crime incidents. Michigan had 431. Georgia had 35. And despite having half the number of black Americans as does Georgia, Michigan had 10 times more incidents of racially-based hate crimes than Georgia. North Carolina has two-thirds the number of black Americans as does Georgia yet had three times the number of racially-based hate crimes.

What’s more, hate crime laws are predicated upon someone’s idea of what is “hate.” As they have done with most everything else they have had their hands in, the modern left has even perverted hate. Sadly, in today’s America, a “hate crime” is often nothing more than the “heinous” act of disagreeing with a leftist.

This is especially true when it comes to anything or anyone that runs afoul of the evil LGBT agenda. For example, many on the left today consider it an act of “hate” to declare that marriage is only the union of one man and one woman, to note that biology determines sex, or to refer to acts of homosexuality as sin. More than half of democrats want to criminalize such “hate speech.” Last year, The Washington Post ran an editorial (from the former editor of Time magazine!) that declared “Why America needs a hate speech law.”

America doesn’t need a “hate speech” law. America doesn’t need hate crime laws, and neither does Georgia. Most violent crime is motivated by some sort-of “hate.” The effort to get hate crime legislation passed in Georgia is nothing more than the Georgia left trying to elevate themselves politically. E.g. “Because we support ‘hate’ crime legislation, we ‘hate’ crime like this more than those who don’t support ‘hate’ crime legislation, thus vote for us!” Shame on Georgia conservatives for not realizing such.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2020, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Fake Hate, Fake Collusion: All in the Name of Destroying the Trump Presidency

In more ways than one, hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollet is far from alone. He’s simply the latest in a long line of unhinged leftists with evil intent who are bent on destroying Donald Trump’s presidency. Be it fake hate or fake collusion, for nearly three years now, Donald Trump has been the target of an unprecedented campaign meant to end his candidacy and later, after his election as the 45th President of the United States, his presidency.

After the recent revelations of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, there should now be no doubt as to the existence of a nefarious “Deep State.” As revealed by McCabe himself in his soon-to-be-published book, in May of 2017, angered by President Trump’s firing of his boss, then FBI director James Comey, McCabe and his like-minded cronies at the FBI and the Justice Department foolishly plotted as to how they might invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the duly elected President from office.

As former Clinton pollster and chief strategist Mark Penn recently put it,

The most egregious anti-democratic actions ever taken by the what can now fairly be called the Deep State are confirmed with the publication of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book detailing how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to remove President Trump from office for firing FBI Director James Comey.

Justice Department and FBI officials spied on U.S. citizens with false warrants, gave a pass to one presidential campaign with a predetermined investigation, investigated another political campaign on the basis of no verified evidence, and illegally leaked information on investigations. They discussed wiretapping and using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove President Trump, and appointed a special counsel as a retaliatory move for Comey’s firing.

The Manhattan Institute’s Roger Kimball is right, “this plot to destroy a presidency is the most serious political scandal in our history.” Kimball notes,

[P]eople in the FBI (aided and abetted by elements in the CIA and the Obama administration) decided that they didn’t like the person who had been elected President of the United States. Their anger and frustration boiled over when the President had the temerity to fire their man, James Comey. So they plotted to get rid of him.

The FBI didn’t like the President, so they plotted to remove him from office. That is the irreducible minimum, class, that you should take away from this whole sordid lesson. Top figures in the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not approve of the President. Therefore, they took steps to destroy him. Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General, several times offered to wear a wire to entrap the President.

“The most serious political scandal in our history” and, at best, most of the media yawns. At its worst, the left-wing media—of course, the vast majority of print and TV media—aided and abetted this despicable, deceitful plot. The ever-elusive Trump-Russia election collusion unicorn—like the always looming but never present global warming apocalypse—has led the left-wing media into dozens of significant falsehoods, which has led to thousands of fake media reports.

The left isn’t content merely to smother the airwaves and the internet with “Trump stole the election!” People are getting indicted, and more often than not, they are “indictments in search of a crime” as Alan Dershowitz recently put it upon the arrest of Roger Stone. As many have pointed out for nearly two years now, you need a crime to appoint a special counsel. You don’t appoint a special counsel and then hope that certain individuals will commit crimes for which they can be indicted, fined, bankrupted, or even jailed.

Yet almost every crime that has resulted in a Mueller indictment has come as the result of his investigation. Lying to investigators, tampering with witnesses, obstruction of justice—virtually all such crimes occurred after Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Of course, this doesn’t bother men like McCabe.

As Byron York reports, “after the Comey firing, McCabe was determined to cement in place a Trump-Russia investigation that could not be stopped by the president.” What investigation—or, as York notes, “investigations”—can be stopped when the investigator is creating his own crimes? As York also points out, an excerpt from McCabe’s book declares that he wanted an “overall review” of the FBI’s Trump-Russia work.

McCabe wrote, “I want to protect the Russia investigation in such a way that whoever came after me could not just make it go away.” The ongoing Trump-Russia-collusion “investigation” proves, getting Rod Rosenstein to appoint Mueller makes McCabe look very successful in this regard.

Of course, long prior to Mueller’s appointment, Trump-haters within the FBI, such as lying McCabe, and the adulterous Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, were scheming of ways to end Trump’s presidency. As Business Insider reminds us,

• Peter Strzok, the second-highest ranking counterintelligence agent at the FBI, was involved at key junctures in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia probe.
• Strzok was reportedly the official responsible for changing language in former FBI director James Comey's statement describing Clinton's private email server use from “grossly negligent” — which could carry criminal penalties — to “extremely careless.”
• Strzok was also the FBI agent who officially signed off on the bureau's decision to launch its Russia investigation in July 2016.

Most now well know that in order to justify his investigation into the Trump campaign, Strzok relied on the infamous Steele “dossier.” As The Federalist recently noted,

[T]he so-called Steele dossier was always the impetus for the Russia investigation. But calling this a “dossier” is too generous. This is a Word document that was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, written using paid, shady, and unknown Russians. This Word document was used to spy on the opposing party’s presidential campaign, despite the fact that nothing in the document that wasn’t public information checked out. McCabe and company wanted to believe the dossier. But that’s all they ever had.

Anyone who has read the House Intelligence memo released just over a year ago now knows that:

• Christopher Steele “was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, via the law firm Perkins Coie and research firm Fusion GPS, to obtain derogatory information on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
• Steele “maintained contact with DOJ via then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who worked closely with Deputy Attorneys General Yates and later Rosenstein.”
• Steele admitted to Ohr that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.”
• “During this same time period, Ohr’s wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump…” and Ohr’s wife’s research was “paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS.”
• McCabe testified before the House Intelligence Committee that “no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.” Yet the initial FISA application ignored or concealed Steele’s anti-trump motivations.

Of course, Strzok and others in the FBI/DOJ shared Steele’s desperation and deceit. This led to the so-called “insurance policy” that was and is the Trump-Russia-collusion investigation.

This unprecedented attempt at a political coup to unseat a U.S. President goes far beyond rogue elements in the FBI and the DOJ. As much of the above reveals, Hillary Clinton’s and the DNC’s fingerprints are all over this political travesty. But very little of the above—including what we’ve heard from McCabe these last few days—is new information. Andrew McCabe is trying to sell books, and CBS was after ratings.

Along with the collusion-deluded, impeachment-obsessed political hacks in the FBI, DOJ, DNC, and the Clinton campaign, we have the collusion-deluded, impeachment-obsessed hacks in the mainstream media. What is most telling in McCabe’s friendly 60 Minutes interview is the gross media malpractice that continues to plague us, especially with everything Trump.

As Jussie Smollet, Jim Carrey, Kathy Griffin, Ashley Judd, Amy Schumer, Madonna, Eminem, Meryl Streep, Robert de Niro, Jimmy Kimmel, Nathan Phillips, Facebook fools, Twitter trolls, and the like daily demonstrate: gross media malpractice in the name of destroying President Trump goes far beyond the left-wing news media.

Not content with making millions by merely entertaining us, and deluded by the notion that their fame has made their political opinions important, hate-filled—and hate-hoaxing—entertainers have used their celebrity to regularly attack the President and his supporters. Because of their fame, these hate merchants gain the attention of like-minded people and organizations who have control of television cameras, websites, and newspapers.

The Smollet hoax and the Covington Catholic defamation well demonstrate that these hate merchants will take nearly any opportunity—no matter how flimsy the accusations—to impugn President Trump. Thus, instead of focusing on the real unparalleled story here, the hate is further amplified, and the efforts to overthrow the results of the 2016 presidential election continue. Yet President Trump remains, and support seems steadfast. In other words, thus far, the coup has failed. Victor Davis Hanson is right, “Shame on all these failed conspirators and their abettors, and may these immoral people finally earn a long deserved legal [political] and moral reckoning.”

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2019, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com