Showing posts with label hate crimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hate crimes. Show all posts

Thursday, May 11, 2017

Speaking Of Fake Hate Crimes

Another story of fake hate crimes, this one a convergence of two of my favorite topics, bogus "hate crimes" and the state of the university system. This one occurred at tiny St. Olaf College in Minnesota. I had never heard of it before but it was all over the news because of reports of "hate crimes" on campus. At the time the reports came out, I instinctively figured it was bogus, in part because so many of these claims are bogus but also because it just seemed so clumsy and ridiculous. A type-written note on a full sheet of paper stuck under a windshield? Yeah, that is how modern "White supremacists" and the alt-right operate, they never use that new fangled internet or anything.

As soon as the "hate crimes" came out, so did the protests which coincidently included a whole list of demands to the administration of St. Olaf, demands that they of course acquiesced to. You can read the demands at the very comprehensive web page the protesters put up, A Collective For Change On The Hill. It is pretty boilerplate SJW nonsense: "Our mission is to hold the administration and students of St. Olaf College accountable for the institutionalized racism that is embedded within the structures of this campus." Holding them accountable is code for "making them give us stuff we want". Here is a sampling, as a side note the word "demand" appears 54 times in their manifesto:
A. We demand the removal of Arne Christenson from the Advisory Board of The Institute for Freedom & Community. Given Mr. Christenson’s political views and values as a Christian Zionist, St. Olaf College risks his influence upon the speakers brought to the school, the educational offerings, faculty development workshops, and scholarships sanctioned by the Institute through financial means.
Mr. Arneson's crime is that he is a Christian, a White guy and supports Israel a little too much. So he must be removed!
A. We demand that the College composes and commits to a strategic 10-year plan by the end of the Fall of 2017, that will recruit, train, and retain, new hires to increase the percentage of Indigenous, Black/African-American, Latinx-American, Asian-American, Multiracial, Queer, Female, and international faculty and staff members that adequately represent the student body, especially considering the rising population of black and brown students both domestic and international at this institution.
St. Olaf is allegedly a school in the "Lutheran tradition" with tuition north of $44,000 grand a year. Clearly what every Lutheran school needs is more "Queer" faculty and staff.
A. We demand that St. Olaf College hire persons of color as a counselor and nutritionists for the Boe House Counseling Center, and health professional for the Health Center immediately for the wellbeing and mental health of marginalized students. This counselor will be hired additional to the current staff. We demand a plan for the hiring process to be established by Fall 2017, as part of Article II, Section A.
How can "persons of color" be expected to learn without PoC as nutritionists?! There are lots of other similarly silly demands, many of which are nothing more than demands for more scholarships for only students with the right skin color or sexual preferences and more diversity hires based on the same "qualifications". One was a little more troubling:
A. We demand that if a student is requesting to be reassigned a new roommate due to discrimination against their race, religion, gender and sexuality, such requests must be dealt with and responded to immediately. The perpetrator must then be removed from the room/house to not inconvenience the victim further.
So if you don't like your White, Christian and/or sexually normal room-mate, they are to be removed "immediately" to avoid "inconvenience" to the "victim". This is similar to the presumption of guilt we see in the campus "sexual assault" system.

Of course the "hate crime" was shown to be a hoax, the fake hate crime somewhat surprisingly making the pages of the Washington Post, A racist note sparked protests at a Minnesota college. The school now says the message was fake.
In an email sent to the campus community Wednesday, St. Olaf College President David R. Anderson revealed that investigators “confronted a person of interest” and confirmed that the threatening note was “not a genuine threat.”...Anderson went on to say that federal privacy laws prohibit the college from disclosing the identity of the note’s author.
You can absolutely be sure that if they had found a White student that they believed was responsible, they would have identified them. From what I can gather, nothing is going to be done from a disciplinary standpoint nor from a legal one. I also am pretty sure that the ridiculous demands cooked up by the "protestors" will still be met. I found it interesting that these demands were based at least in part on the demands from another Lutheran school, which if nothing else gives the impression that these boilerplate demands coupled with the apparent lack of consequences for the perpetrator of this hoax is part of an intentional process to use false charges to push through ever more extreme measures that benefit only a small number of radical activists.

I (only partly joking) posed this question on Facebook: "Is it too late to burn the entire public education system from kindergarten to the post-graduate university level to the ground, salt the earth and start all over?" Our educational system is irreparably broken. We have too many kids going to college that have no business being there, getting too many meaningless degrees that water down the value a college degree should carry and far too often not even getting a degree at all; our educational system from top to bottom is bloated and far too expensive, leaving communities with huge bills for K-12 and getting marginal returns, and college students left with a trillion dollars in student loan debt; and worst of all these "educational" institutions have devolved into very expensive re-education camps pushing the worst sorts of radical nonsense, sexual perversion and ironically discouraging any sort of critical thinking. Still we hear over and over again that we need to "invest" in education but we are absolutely not allowed to critique  the results we get. No matter how much we spend, we need to spend more. The beneficiaries of this mindset are the activists and the educational establishment who get cushy, high paid jobs (not talking about the run of the mill public school teacher here, heaven forbid we even appear to criticize them). The victims are the kids, kids who get a mediocre education, who are inundated with harmful nonsense in place of actual learning and who get to foot the bill of the debt they personally will incur and that is incurred on their behalf in our national debt. Of course society as a whole is also victimized by being forced to pay for this garbage with the threat that not agreeing to participate is to shut the door on any chance for a prosperous life for your kids.

The bogus "hate crime" incident at St. Olaf is just the latest peek behind the curtain of the educational establishment, a world many adults see little of but are told that they are duty bound to put their children into and to of course pay whatever is demanded of them. Under the cover of "it's for the good of the children" we have collectively allowed a small group of radicals to fleece this nation for decades without check and without much scrutiny. A fraternity at The University of Chicago was called racist because of an ironic construction themed party that sort of and intentionally coincided with Cinco de Mayo. We even have kids being suspended from school for "liking", on their own computer, on their own time, off school grounds, a social media post deemed "racist". I am glad that people are starting to wake up but a lot more of us need to wake up and soon because we cannot afford what it costs to feed the education beast and our society cannot afford another generation of kids who come out on the other end intellectually disfigured.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Hate Crimes Spike! Terror in the streets! Roving gangs of vigilantes spotted!

Or maybe not. You certainly would get that impression from the title and tone of this article from the Detroit Free Press. Titled Antigay, religious-motivated hate crimes rise, the impression you get from the title is that there is a wave of new hate crimes being committed by religious people and people who don’t like homosexuals (probably because they are religious). Here are the first two paragraphs:

Reports of hate crimes against gays and religious groups increased sharply in 2008, according to new FBI data released today.

Overall, the number of reported hate crimes increased about 2%. These same figures show a nearly 11% increase in hate crimes based on sexual orientation, and a nearly 9% increase in hate crimes based on religion.


The message: people who are really religious or who think homosexuality is wrong are a violent hate crime waiting to happen. The problem is that the numbers don’t show anything of the sort. This is, at best, editorializing by giving a deceptive title to an non-issue report.

These are just rough numbers:

Total "Hate Crimes" in 2008: 7783

Attributable to Religious Discrimination: 1556.6

Attributable to Sexual Orientation: 1291.98

Total Hate Crimes Involved in Categories: 2848

What comes next in the article seems to imply that perhaps this spike in “hate crimes” is not really happening at all.

The FBI does not compare year-to-year trends in hate crimes, saying the number of agencies reporting changes too much. And in fact, the bureau cautioned that the increase reported today might well be due to more agencies tracking such incidents.

In 2008, 2,145 different agencies reported hate crimes incidents, while the year before 2,025 agencies did this reporting.

In total, there were 7,783 hate crimes reported to the FBI last year, and seven murders were categorized as hate crimes.


The FBI recognizes that this is hard it measure and therefore difficult to draw conclusions from. So what do we really see? We are looking at maybe 300 new “hate crimes” out of a population of 300,000,000. So your chance of being a victim of a “hate crime” is 1/1,000,000. To the people who are victims of these crimes, it is no doubt horrifying just as it is for anyone who is the victim of a crime. These numbers are statistically irrelevant. We see a very small increase in actual numbers of crimes (crimes that are criminal acts regardless of motivation I might add) that is quite possibly attributable in large part to an increase in the number of agencies reporting “hate crimes” (about 6% more agencies reporting) and an ever expanding definition of what constitutes a “hate crime”. Based on this sort of reporting, we can expect an article that highlights “Arrests for false reports of children drifting away in homemade hot air balloons spikes 100% in 2009!”

Even the FBI who compiles the data is cautious to not draw any real conclusions here. No such restraint is shown by the Associated Press. Why is this newsworthy? Not because it is inherently newsworthy but because it advances a particular agenda. That agenda is one that whispers that all devout religious people are inherently harboring violent tendencies. This is a “news” report aimed not at reporting news but influencing public opinion.

I think we all know where this is leading. It can only be a short leap from preaching repentance from sin to accusations of inciting “hate crimes”. This is coming and anyone with their head not in the sand can see it. The question really is not if, it is not even when, it is what. When this time comes, what do we do about it? What do you or I do when being a Christian stops being socially acceptable, when preaching the Gospel leads to real persecution and perhaps prosecution? I know this, men and women who are disciples of Christ will preach Christ crucified in season and out of season, no matter the cost. I actually look forward in some ways to those days; days when being a disciple is going to cost you something. It is way too easy to be a churchy person, to be a “member” of a church and convince yourself that you are right with God. When real persecution arises, I am convinced we will see genuine revival in America.




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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The disconnect between the headline and the real news

I read this headline on the Detroit Free Press webpage:

Group: Hate crimes against gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered people up 133%

Sounds horrifying, right? But when you dig into the story and get beyond the headlines, here is what you find.

The Triangle Foundation said Tuesday that the number of violent crimes against Michiganders because of their sexual orientation that was reported to the Detroit-based group jumped 133% last year over 2006.

There were 226 reported incidents during 2007 involving violence or violent threats against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered people, according to the report, which was released in conjunction with the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. By comparison, the foundation said, there were 97 reported incidents in 2006.

Among the 226 reports last year were two homicides, 21 cases of vandalism, 46 assaults and 101 incidents of intimidation or harassment, the report said. In addition to the violent incidents, the foundation reported 72 cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation.

So how many homicides did we have in Michigan last year total versus the 2 that were labelled as "hate crimes" How many cars and homes were vandalized? How many people were "intimidated" in one way or another? This is a prime example of a news story that seeks to push an agenda. We have something as amorphous as "intimidation" labeled a "hate crime" and with probably inflated numbers from the Triangle Foundation. The entire story is based on suspect numbers and vague definitions. But to read the headline, you would come to the conclusion that Michigan is in the midst of a crime wave against homosexuals.

Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people turn to mainstream newspapers and news programs to get their news? I long ago stopped giving an credence to what is peddled as news by the mainstream, left-leaning media. Maybe that makes me a right wing kook. I guess I am OK with that, unless of course that qualifies as "intimidation".