Pun Salad

The University Near Here has announced its activities for Martin Luther King Day 2011. Every year I wonder: will the celebration be horribly offensive (as in 2009), a dreadful joke (2010), or just undisguised and undistinguished leftist propaganda, reflective of the University's depressing ideological monoculture (2006 and 2007)? I'm going with the latter this time, but see what you think.

This year's theme is "Combating Hate" Now, being against "hate" is to snuggle in one of the most cozy blankets of moral superiority. Who in their right mind will say no to that? Not me, friend. I'm against hate! (Ahhhhh...feels good.) And I bet you are too! (Say it with me: "I'm against hate!" Ahhhh...)

But let's look at UNH's official explanation anyway:

Pointing to grammar and spelling errors, even on a University website, is a cheap shot, sorry. [Update: the errors, present when this entry was originally posted, have been corrected.] But there's other sloppiness too: Note the "startilng" rise in hate crimes in the first paragraph. Compare with the assertion that hate crimes "have risen steadily" in the second paragraph.

So what kind of a rise is it, startling or steady?

Or maybe neither. The FBI just issued its latest report on hate crimes:

"But," you object, "maybe that's just a one year dip in an otherwise 'startling' or 'steady' rise." Well, there's nothing like checking for oneself. Let's look back, a few more years than four:

I could draw you a pretty graph, but the numbers are pretty easy to eyeball: If anything, the trend over the past 10 or so years is down.

UNH is not alone in pointing to a non-existent increase in hate crimes. Candidate B. Obama asserted in 2008: "We have seen hate crimes skyrocket in the wake of the immigration debate, as it's been conducted in Washington, and that is unacceptable." Not only was this untrue (as we've seen), this untruth was used to imply that the other side—by daring to debate immigration—was inciting violence. (Amusingly, although FactCheck deemed Obama's claim to be bogus at the time, Politifact rated it "Mostly True", maintaining their usual spot in Obama's back pocket. Unfortunately, neither was troubled by Obama's implication that his political opponents were fomenting criminal activity.)

Reasonable people will also differ on whether "hate" is an accurate or meaningful characterization of the underlying motivation for "hate crimes". Liberals and progressives love to decry their opponents as being "simplistic." But surely throwing a diverse array of unpleasant and antisocial behavior into a big pot labeled "HATE" is simplisticism on its face.

My guess, not that it matters, is that the underlying cause of "hate crimes" tends to be various forms of mental dysfunction—primarily plain old stupidity—coupled with one or more personality defects: fondness for aggression, a short temper, oversensitivity, … what have you. Also, mix in a high probability of substance abuse. (See Jacob Sullum for more on "hate crimes".)

Quibbling about statistics, hazy definitions, and sloppy language is fine, but that's not all that's going on. Blaming "hate" for crimes may not be accurate or meaningful, but it can be politically useful. As with Obama's statement in 2008, there's a political angle here too. You noticed UNH's finger-pointing at "extremism" in the blurb quoted above. That theme is continued and expanded in their description of the Commemorative Address, to be given by Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC):

Hm: "the current political climate that fosters and empowers intolerance and hate in plain view in today's political discourse." Gosh, they're pretty cute about avoiding specifics, but I think we all know what and who they're talking about.

Check Dees' SPLC website. There's one tiny blink-and-you'll-miss suggestion that "hate" is not entirely on the right: a section on black separatists. But SPLC's "Hatewatch" blog is subtitled "Keeping an Eye on the Radical Right", and their blogroll is an uniform array of lefties: Kos, Firedoglake, Crooks and Liars, etc.

The SPLC tars with a very broad brush. Their "Intelligence Report" this year deemed the Tea Party movement to be "shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism." Most people with any familiarity with Tea Partiers realized this to be bullshit; unfortunately, the assertion was widely echoed in the lefty true-believer community. And no doubt the attendees at UNH's MLK shindig will hear some version of it as well.

SPLC is also in the business of designating "hate groups". And one way to be sure that you can point with alarm to "increases in the participation in hate groups" is to be ever-increasingly, um, liberal in your demonization. Jesse Walker at Reason observed that the SPLC "would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise funds." (Walker's blog post is short, but it's well worth reading for its well-targeted criticism of the SPLC's methodology and its links to further information.)

One of the "hate groups" named by the SPLC is the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Unfortunately for the SPLC, FAIR didn't take this lying down, composing a detailed rebuttal and counteroffensive. (Summary here, full PDF here.)

FAIR notes (as Jesse Walker did, above) that the SPLC has a pretty cynical (and widely recognized) motive for all its fearmongering and tarbrushing: it allows them to raise impressive amounts of cash from their easily-spooked donor base. Well, this is America. They have a perfect right to do that.

I recommend another Jesse Walker article appearing Reason last year: "The Paranoid Center." What's going on is an attempt to generate moral panic. Walker relates the early-60s "wave of alarm" about the "radical right", egged on, then as now, by a progressive/liberal coalition.

It's unfortunate that UNH has cast its lot with the SPLC; Dees's undoubtedly well-paid appearance will almost certainly go unchallenged, and I'll wager not a contrary word will oppose his scarifying nonsense.

While UNH is (probably) less cynical about the issue than is Dees, that probably makes things worse: it puts the University firmly on the side of the "brown scare" effort to marginalize, demonize, and chill legitimate dissent from "progressive" positions on important issues.