False hate crime narratives with deeply ideological cures.
Posted by Ed Folsom, October 9, 2026.
As a young assistant district attorney in the late 80’s or early 90’s, I was introduced to the concept of the “hate” or “bias” crime. The idea was that some criminal acts should be set aside for special increased punishment because they were motivated by bias toward the victim as a member of a particular group or category. Such individual acts were said to reflect a societal epidemic of hatred toward the victim group. Targeting hate crimes for special punishment focuses attention on the hate epidemic underlying the individual act, targeting the broader social pathology for rooting out through a society-wide effort.
But, over time, it has become clear that the concept serves an even broader purpose, helping to delegitimize American society in fundamental ways by reinforcing a view of American society divided into oppressors and oppressed by inequities that are baked-in; systemic social pathologies that must be rooted-out using certain ideological prescriptions.
Maine’s approach to hate crimes and approaches elsewhere.
In many places, “hate crime” legislation was enacted that increased the punishment for individual crimes motivated by a specific animus. Maine chose not to expressly increase “hate crime” sentences, instead calling for courts to consider, in fashioning sentences that “do not diminish the gravity of offense:” …
“The selection by the person of the victim or of the property that was damaged or otherwise affected by the crime because of the race, color, religion, sex, ancestry, national origin, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or homelessness of the victim or of the owner or occupant of that property.”
Parallels between domestic violence legislation and hate crimes legislation.
In roughly the same time frame, the concept of domestic violence as a special category of crime that requires specialized punishment also caught on. But while hate crimes require that a particular motivating bias must be established before special punishment is imposed, domestic violence legislation quietly presumes the existence of the targeted animus in a certain class of offenders: males who offend against their female intimate partners. It imposes special punishment in line with this presumption, designed to root out the animus at the level of the individual offender and in society at large.
On its face, domestic violence legislation defines the targeted behavior of domestic violence in sex or gender-neutral terms. In Maine, domestic violence laws facially apply to essentially everyone who has ever had sex with or lived with the alleged victim. But the motive for categorizing certain crimes as domestic violence crimes is hardly sex or gender-neutral. The intention to specifically target male perpetrators who offend against female intimate partners is demonstrated by the title of a signature piece of federal legislation in this area, 1994’s Violence Against Women Act. Only female victims are of concern, and even then, women victimized by same-sex intimate partners are not. Men who are victimized by women or by same-sex intimate partners are definitely not of concern. As for the targeted perpetrators, men are the exclusively intended target for specialized punishment under domestic violence legislation.
The gender-specific intent underlying domestic violence legislation in Maine was highlighted by the Law Court’s (Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s) State v. Mosher case. Mosher dealt with a provision in Maine’s domestic violence statutes that allowed probation to be imposed for 2 years instead of the ordinary maximum of 1 year prescribed for Class D domestic violence assault, but only if the court ordered the defendant to complete a “certified batterers’ intervention” program during probation. Although the statute that allowed the 2-year probation term in those specific circumstances was phrased in sex or gender-neutral terms, there were, in fact, no certified batterers’ intervention programs in existence in Maine for women.
The statutory scheme called for the Department of Corrections to adopt administrative rules establishing standards and procedures for certifying batterers’ intervention programs. In the quote below, I have left out the Law Court’s citations to authority, but this is how the Law Court otherwise described the scheme:
“At this point, we understand that the Department [of Corrections] has promulgated rules that authorize CBI programs only for men, thus making two-year terms of probation available for men only. The regulation defines a batterers’ intervention program as ‘an educational program for men’ that is ‘designed specifically to intervene with court referred adult men who are abusive to their intimate women partners.’ The programs will be ‘comprised of the same sex (men).’ The rule notes that its ‘standards are specifically designed for men who abuse their intimate women partners’ and that ‘[a] different model may be developed for same sex batterers, and for women who are abusive.’”
So, the Department of Corrections decided that men all abuse their intimate women partners for reasons that are different from the reasons women abuse their male or female intimate partners, or why males abuse their same-sex intimate partners. They decided to certify only batterers’ intervention programs that address the reasons all men abuse their intimate women partners, although they allowed that someone might develop different models, at some point, for women and for male same-sex abusers, to the extent that anyone might become concerned about those matters.
This exclusive focus on heterosexual male offenders should come as no surprise, given that the battered women’s movement has driven the domestic violence bus since the outset. From day one, continuing to the present day, the Department of Corrections’ administrative rules have required certified batterers’ intervention programs, now called certified “domestic violence intervention programs,” to “publicly acknowledg[e] the contributions of the battered women’s movement to their efforts and that [Domestic Violence Intervention] Programs exist in support of the goals of the [domestic violence centers].”
In other words, feminist politics and ideology control this area of law. Having sat through mandatory training sessions in my D.A. days that were conducted by female battered women’s movement advocates, I can tell you that they trace the only type of domestic violence they are concerned with to alleged western cultural oppression of females by males, particularly patriarchy and the hetero-normative cultural institutions that support it.
How does this approach to domestic violence offenses relate to the approach to “hate” or “bias” crimes? As in the case of feminist politics in the domestic violence realm, advocates for various groups with claims to being oppressed by American social structure have used the “hate” or “bias” crime concept to steer the criminal justice system in furtherance of their cause.
Battered women’s movement feminists captured the legislative branch (domestic violence legislation), the judicial branch (sentencing in line with feminist theory), and the executive branch (prosecutions and correctional department programs in line with feminist theory), to single-out members of the purported oppressor class for special discipline and punishment. They have successfully used government as their tool to attack and undermine those aspects of American or western culture that they claim are responsible for their oppression, not the least of which are, allegedly, patriarchy and related heteronormativity. As I previously blogged about here, internationally, systemic-oppression-based feminism has also used the United Nations as its tool to promote fundamental societal restructuring in line with systemic-oppression-based feminist theory, funded in part by the U.S. Government’s USAID.
Granted, the feminists who captured the courts and criminal justice system to do their bidding had a point that domestic assaults were not always treated seriously enough. But if women and non-heterosexual men assault their intimate partners for reasons other than attitudes of privilege stemming from systemic patriarchy and misogyny, why should we believe that attitudes of privilege stemming from systemic patriarchy and misogyny explain all the assaults by males against their female intimate partners? Primarily, because treating them as if they do aligns with the feminist ideology involved, in which straight male abusers are patriarchal, misogynist oppressors while all women and non-heterosexuals are their oppressed. Ideologically, the oppressed can no more be the oppressors than the oppressors can be the oppressed. Everything flows from there.
Others groups, advancing their own claims of systemic oppression, use the hate crime concept to attack their alleged oppressors and aspects of American or western culture that they claim underpin their oppression: homophobia, now expanded to LGBTQIA++ phobia; racism; sexism; Islamophobia; antisemitism, etc. Of course, there are in fact people who commit crimes against homosexuals because they hate homosexuals, who commit crimes against blacks because they hate blacks, etc., just as there are men who attack women because they truly hate women.
But we are encouraged not to pay any special attention to trans people who attack straights because they hate straights, to blacks who attack whites because they hate whites, to Muslims who attack non-Muslims because they hate them as infidels, or to a woman who attacks her male or same-sex intimate partner for whatever reason. In the ideological model that underpins hate crimes and domestic violence legislation, those all involve members of purportedly oppressed groups attacking their oppressors, which isn’t the point of singling-out hate crimes for special attention at all. In fact, drawing special attention to those sorts of attacks will likely lead to rebukes for fomenting hate against the purportedly oppressed group that the attacker hails from.
As with domestic violence crimes, giving special treatment to hate crimes allows political activists to use the courts and criminal justice system to advance their claims of victimhood and oppression and to attack those aspects of American or western culture that they claim underpin the animus: heteronormativity; white supremacy; patriarchy; Christianity; etc. The hate-crime and domestic-violence concepts advance claims that oppression is baked-into or “systemic,” requiring deep societal restructuring in line with their ideological prescriptions.
It isn’t even necessary for hate crimes to actually happen when you have a hate crime narrative to push.
Even when not enough hate crimes occur to convincingly establish that a hate epidemic exists, groups with claims to oppression are able to use the hate crime narrative to advance their attacks on American society. Obviously, hate crimes must be a serious, pervasive problem given that legislators have had to pass special laws to deal with them. If enough hate crime prosecutions aren’t happening to keep the phenomenon in the public eye, purportedly oppressed groups can always claim that’s because the systems of oppression are covering-up hate crimes that are actually happening.
Example: The lynching epidemic false narrative.
In this vein, Congressional Representative Ayanna Pressley recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanch and FBI Director Kash Patel, signed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and roughly 50 other Democrats, declaring: “Black folks are being found hanged in America” and “We cannot stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country.” The signers claimed that federal agencies have failed for decades to adequately investigate the deaths of numerous black people who died by hanging. They demanded a “thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into every hanging death of a Black individual across the United States.” (see Fox News report here). You see, America’s systems of oppression are covering up an epidemic of black lynchings.
In case the letter’s meaning wasn’t clear, AOC followed up on her X account: “This year, there have already been 10 reported hangings of Black people in the U.S. I’m proud to have signed onto Rep. Pressley’s letter to address these widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”
But, as it turns out, only one of these 10 deaths by hanging was a homicide. According to a BBC report, here, the other 9 were suicides. In the sole homicide, three people have now been arrested. None are white. Police believe that the victim, a black woman, was murdered in a “dispute related to drugs,” and that her three black male killers staged the hanging after they killed her.
None of these 10 deaths involved the “lynching” of a Black person. This attempt at political advocacy, purportedly on behalf of Black people who are oppressed and victimized by a tradition of lynchings in systemically racist, white supremacist America, has fallen flat thanks to reality and fact checks. But the narrative of ongoing systemic victimization of blacks in a racist, white supremacist America is an article of faith for its proponents that gets big emotional traction regardless of facts.
Another example: The “Hands up, don’t shoot” false narrative.
The mythology of “Hands up, don’t shoot” provides another prime example. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” narrative followed the police shooting death of Michael Brown, Jr., in Ferguson, Missouri, in August of 2014. The narrative portrayed American police as racist hate criminals, running around the country shooting “unarmed black men” with impunity. Polling in 2021 showed that 44% of liberals surveyed and 20% of conservatives believed that American police shot between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men to death in 2019. But according to the New York Post, there was in fact a total of 27 fatal shootings of black men in 2019.
As for the actual number of unarmed black men shot by police during a broader time frame, in June of 2021, I used numbers gathered by the Washington Post in a blog piece here. From the beginning of 2015 to June of 2021, the Post reported 5,367 people fatally shot by police. Of those, 1,265 were black and the remaining 4,102 were not. When it came to police shooting and killing unarmed people during this roughly 6 ½-year period, it happened a total of 321 times. Of those, 109 were black people. The other 212 were not. And yet, for many, those facts don’t matter. Polling shows that, as an article of faith, impervious to facts, many people continue to believe that America’s racist police shoot a thousand or more unarmed black men every year. The hate crime/oppressor narrative thrives despite the facts.
Example: The “Epidemic of Violence” against trans people, fueled by racism, toxic masculinity, misogyny and transphobia, false narrative.
Another group that has promoted a false narrative of America’s purportedly deadly systemic bigotry is the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s foremost LGBTQIA++ advocacy group. For several years, they have issued annual “Epidemic of Violence” reports decrying the killing of transgender people. Here’s a passage from the 2023 report:
“Almost two-thirds of the victims were Black trans women, a tragedy that reflects an appalling trend of violence fueled by racism, toxic masculinity, misogyny and transphobia and the politicization of our lives.”
In other words, the HRC wants you to believe that America is experiencing an epidemic of hate-crime killings of the transgendered, especially of “Black trans women,” propelled by an ingrained cluster of systemic phobias and isms that must be rooted out of American society.
But, in an article in City Journal, Vincent Lundgren and Colin Wright debunk that narrative. They point out that the homicide rate for transgender people over the period they studied was about one-seventh that of the general population: 3.66 per 100,000 versus 25.8. They also found that transgender homicide risk is concentrated in a single subgroup: “young black men who identify as women (that is, black transgender women).” The HRC misleadingly categorize these killings as homicides of women, making the rate look exceptionally high. But in fact, these victims are black biological males, not females. When their homicide rate is compared to the homicide rate for young black males, it is about 1/3 that of their non-transgender peers.
As for HRC’s “white supremacy” charge, the City Journal authors found that the HRC’s own data shows black suspects make up 65.1% of identified transgender-homicide perpetrators. White suspects comprise 18%. The authors continue:
“[I]n 2020, the year the Human Rights Campaign published a statement attributing the deaths of ‘our Black trans siblings’ to ‘an epidemic of violence’ fueled by ‘systems of white supremacy,’ not a single white suspect was identified in the cases we verified.
Of the 304 victims in our dataset, 118 cases remain unsolved. Even if we assign a white perpetrator to every one of those unsolved cases, black suspects would still account for 40.5 percent of all perpetrators—about three times their percent share of the population. White suspects would rise to only 50 percent, still below their population share.
To see how the mismatch between narrative and reality is manufactured, consider the deaths of ‘four Black transgender women’ that the HRC cited in a 2021 report titled ‘Black LGBTQ People and Compounding Discrimination’ as proof that ‘white supremacy’ was driving an ‘epidemic of violence.’ One case, the drive-by shooting of Tyianna Alexander, remains unsolved, with no public evidence of anti-trans bias, a hate crime, or anything tied to white supremacy.
In the other three cases, every identified suspect was a black man. Bianca Bankz was killed by a black man named Moses Allen, who shot Bankz and then killed himself. Dominique Jackson’s killing led to the arrest of a black man named Branden McLaurin; police said there was ‘no evidence supporting a hate-crime’ in this case. Fifty Bandz was killed by boyfriend Michael Joshua Brooks, a black man, in what looks like a straightforward case of intimate partner violence…
The data we collected on motive also upset the HRC’s narrative: only 3.3 percent of cases resulted in confirmed hate-crime determinations. The leading identified circumstance of the murders…was instead intimate partner violence. Other common circumstances included sex-work encounters, disputes, robbery, and other forms of interpersonal conflict.
In other words, the dominant pattern is not hateful white men hunting down black transgender victims because of racism and transphobia. It is violence between people who know each other, sleep with each other, live around each other, or encounter each other in high-risk contexts.”
Once again, the hate crime angle advances articles of political and ideological faith that are impervious to facts, at least to those within the political/ideological flock. The HRC’s Epidemic of Violence campaign has produced the kind of results the hate crime concept is intended to produce. As the City Journal piece points out, as a result of the campaign, “In June 2021, the White House created the first Interagency Working Group on Safety, Inclusion, and Opportunity for Transgender Americans, spanning ten federal departments and producing more than 45 action items built around hate, stigma, and legislative hostility as the main causes of anti-trans violence.” This led to massive spending on “anti-hate” campaigns at the federal and state levels to promote a social narrative converting, “Complex social problems…into familiar oppressor-oppressed binaries—white versus black, cis versus trans, and men versus women.” That is all exceedingly good for more fundraising.
Again, the concept of domestic violence offenses and hate crimes is about attributing criminal activity to social pathologies, allegedly inherent in the structure of American and western societies, that cry out for a restructuring of society in line with the ideologues’ ideologies. And, of course, the ideology identifies all the causes and provides all the answers to all the systemic problems.
The hate crimes concept provides a lucrative way to weaponize government against ideological enemies. In a self-fulfilling prophesy, the personal is the political, as the ideologues have been fond of telling us for some time.
