Hate crimes laws are nothing more than censorship applied to Americans to stymie debate on controversial agenda items of the left such as Islamic terrorism and open borders.
The hardships endured by the American colonists under British rule were well remembered when it came time for the Founders to draft the Constitution as the foundation of the federal government. The Bill of Rights, comprised of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, reflected the remembrance of these hardships by explicitly guaranteeing the right of Americans to free speech, a free press, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, and protections from other abuses suffered by the colonists at the hands of the British. The freedom to criticize the government without fear of persecution is so fundamental to the establishment of a nation dedicated to maximizing the liberty of its citizens that it was enshrined in the First Amendment and is a hallowed right cherished by Americans for providing us with the freedom to speak our minds without fear of retaliation.
Over the past few years, the regressive left has worked tirelessly both promoting the acceptance of evil under the guise of First Amendment freedom of speech – think protection of exotic dance establishments to freely locate wherever they please – and the curtailing of free speech through censorship laws known as hate crimes legislation aimed at conservative speech critical of their regressive agenda. Hate crimes legislation is promoted by the left as punishment for the appearance of hatred supposed by the left to underlie crimes committed against minority groups by white offenders. White Americans make up the majority of offenders charged with hate crimes, and prominent minorities on the left have even gone so far as to declare that hate crimes can only be committed by white people.
The enactment of hate crimes legislation is unconstitutional on so many levels it is a struggle to determine where to actually begin refuting the acceptance of their existence. First, it is absolutely absurd to declare that anyone can know with certainty what is going on in the mind of a person committing a crime against anyone. Many crimes are merely crimes of opportunity committed against a victim either unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or appearing to be an easy mark to the perpetrator. Even when a crime appears to have been motivated by hate, it is still impossible to know with certainty whether a criminal’s actual motivation might have been rooted in hatred. If hatred can be punished as the motivation for a crime, then hatred can be punished as a crime itself without the need for one to commit an actual offense. It is a sobering and scary thought to imagine agenda driven individuals able to wield such power against their political enemies.
Second, the fact that the left feels only white people can commit hate crimes while ignoring the vast number of crimes committed by minorities against whites, even when those crimes are accompanied by racial slurs against the white victims, would automatically qualify the dismissal of these laws by the Supreme Court on the basis that they are not equally applied, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. While FBI statistics on hate crimes from 2015 claim 48.4% of hate crime offenders as being white, with 24.3% as black, the left continues to insist that only whites are capable of committing hate crimes with the implication that minorities are incapable of hatred. The left already protests against minorities being charged with hate crimes, and it won’t be long before law enforcement and prosecutors begin to ignore minority hate crimes for fear that the hassle just isn’t worth it.
Third, it is Orwellian to presume that one can punish the thoughts of another, and punishment of thoughts goes to the heart of the First Amendment protection of free speech. For an American to enjoy the freedom to speak freely, then an American must enjoy the ability to think freely. Criminal laws exist to punish behavior that infringes on another through violence committed against that person either physically or through the deprivation of their property. Laws exist to punish actions, not thoughts, and the presumption that thoughts can be punished is antithetical to the First Amendment protection of free speech.
Fourth, the enactment of hate crimes laws was intended to further punish already criminal acts by purporting to ascertain the thoughts of a perpetrator and piling on additional charges. The underlying acts committed by a perpetrator are already deemed criminal if they violate the criminal code, and the addition of extra charges through hate crimes laws is unnecessary to properly punish a criminal perpetrator. Other than establishing motive, it matters not what a criminal was thinking when he commits a crime, but the criminal act itself is all that should interest the courts.
Hate crimes laws were conceived by the left as a way to punish the free expression of criticism directed at the regressive agenda which slowly and inevitably leads to a more totalitarian state. These hate crimes laws were sold to Americans under the guise of the nebulous concept of social justice. Americans naturally recoil in horror at the thought of violence perpetrated against someone based on malice and hatred, and it is this fact that the left sought to co-opt in the passage of hate crimes laws. Careful consideration of the logical ends to the thread of hate crimes laws reveals that these laws can easily be used against anyone critical of leftist initiatives. It is no secret that prominent leftists have on more than a few occasions insisted that disagreement with the left amounts to a form of insanity arising from the hatred conservatives must surely harbor in their hearts. The addition of hate crimes laws allows the left to go after conservative critics of the left with the full force of the law to punish their criticism. This is a chilling concept that is intended to give critics of the left pause to freely express their criticisms, and, to a large degree, it has been successful.
America was viciously attacked by Islamic terrorists who hijacked four airliners and flew them into designated targets as guided missiles in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In the intervening years, myriad Islamic terrorist attacks have occurred in America and Europe while our leaders have insisted that Muslims are peaceful, and the media has attempted to downplay Islamic extremism as the motivation behind these attacks. Americans are not stupid and realize full well the truth behind these attacks and the apologists who downplay their significance. The Quran contains several verses that call for the killing of anyone not willing to convert to Islam yet the Muslim apologists falsely insist that most Muslims don’t believe the intention of these verses while Muslims refuse to denounce these verses despite the overwhelming number of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam.
Criticism of Islam by Americans has gone from insistence by Muslim apologist groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations that Islam is peaceful to the labeling of such criticism as hate speech by leftist front groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC merely labels criticism with which it disagrees as hate speech despite having no authority to do so. The SPLC infamously placed Dr. Ben Carson on its list of “haters” for proclaiming his belief in traditional Biblical marriage, but quickly retracted that designation after a firestorm of protest erupted against the organization. Labeling criticism of leftist agenda items as hate speech quickly crosses over to charging those critics with hate speech as the left prepares the public for such acceptance through these phony designations.
Conservative Americans are often left wondering how the country moved so far away from the Constitution upon learning of such egregious incidents as the SPLC designating Dr. Carson as a hater. The left carefully prepares for the incremental advancement of their agenda through awareness campaigns that morph into astroturf movements built around a false narrative based on selective grains of truth. These astroturf groups appear to lead massive numbers of Americans outraged at an injustice defined by the left, but are built around falsified numbers of fake social media accounts and vastly overinflated numbers of actual Americans. Politicians are led to believe these groups lead large numbers of voters insisting on legislative action to fix a nonexistent problem described in a false narrative. Legislation is enacted to redress a wrong that doesn’t actually exist or doesn’t exist on nearly the scale we’ve been led to believe, and these laws are then turned in a new direction to be used against Americans in ways not previously imagined.
Hate crimes laws were sold to Americans naturally upset over any abuse of justice, but these laws are now being turned against Americans who dare to criticize the damage being done to the country by the left through the resettlement of Muslim refugees impossible to vet for extremism, or opposition to the destruction of traditional marriage caused by the purported legalization of homosexual unions under the guise of marriage. Anyone critical of the left is now designated as a hateful extremist for merely voicing their opposition to leftist agenda items responsible for the destruction of the institutions underpinning America. Soon, those now designated as hateful extremists will be charged under hate crimes laws for continued criticism of the left. The effect of these hate crimes laws is morphing from mere social justice to the outright censorship of free speech in America.
To see the future of hate crimes laws, one only has to look to Europe where Dutch politician Geert Wilders was charged with a hate crime for asking his constituents what they wanted him to do and promising to do so when they indicated that they wanted Muslim immigration halted. Wilders was later convicted of hate speech and continues to fight back against these Orwellian crimes. French politician Marine Le Pen was also charged with a hate crime for speaking out against Islam as an ideology promoting violence and hatred. Although she was acquitted of these charges, she continues to speak out against Islam in France and Europe. While Wilders and Le Pen continue pushing back against Islam in Europe, their legal ordeals have silenced many others unwilling to risk prosecution for speaking their beliefs.
Either Americans have the freedom of speech specified in the First Amendment to the Constitution or they suffer under the censorship of hate crimes laws, but they cannot have both. Our Founding Fathers would be absolutely shocked to learn how far the left has forced America away from the protections of the Constitution. The left has led America towards the grip of totalitarianism to force upon us that which we are unwilling to voluntarily accept. The left has always been steeped in the totalitarianism of the communist doctrine which is universally hated by all people yearning to live free from government coercion. The left is well aware that Americans must eventually be forced into accepting the communist totalitarianism which they so eagerly wish to impose as necessary to adoption of their agenda. Americans won’t vote for the left’s agenda, and the left can’t quite impose their agenda through the courts, but they continue undermining our legal system to eventually use America’s laws against us Americans. We see this clearly through the censorship imposed by hate crimes laws.
We must continue to hope that President Trump will prevail against the dark forces of the deep state committed to his ouster, and we must continue to work against the imposition of laws designed by the left to be used against us. President Trump has exposed the dark forces of the left and the machinations of the deep state being employed against us to deprive us of our liberty. Freedom is not free, and we may very well be called upon soon to defend our freedom from the dark forces of the totalitarian left.
Independent Conservative 