Thread by @shellenberger

Governments worldwide claim that "hate incidents" are rising, but they're not. Tolerance of racial, sexual, and religious minorities has never been higher. Elites are manufacturing a fake "hate" crisis as a pretext for mass spying, blacklists, and censorship.

The public’s hatred of racial, sexual, and religious minorities is so out of control that it imperils our democracy. At least, that’s what influential leaders from Joe Biden and Barack Obama to former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden and California Governor Gavin Newsom… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Last week Newsom announced a state initiative for citizens to report disfavored speech (non-criminal “hate incidents”) they see online:

California’s “Civil Rights Department” (CRD) invites citizens to speculate about the motive of the “perpetrator.”

In a statement, Newsom’s office said the legislation was “in direct response to the rise in reported hate crimes in California, which in recent years, reached their highest levels since 2001 – jumping almost 33% from 2020 to 2021.”

Indeed, criminal complaints of hate crimes rose significantly, by 80% from 2012 to 2021, according to California state data.

But convictions of hate crimes have been flat. In 2012 there were 107 hate crime convictions in California. In 2021, there were 109, according to the same data. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

It’s possible that hate crimes really did rise by 80%, and juries decided not to give prosecutors convictions. In San Fransicko, I assemble a large body of evidence to show California residents have become more tolerant of crime.

amazon.com/gp/product/006… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

But it’s also possible that convictions stayed the same because there was no increase in prosecutable hate crimes. And it may be that Californian prosecutors simply labeled more crimes as “hate” crimes because they were primed to do so by the media’s 700% - 1,000% increased focus… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Whatever the case, California's total number of hate crime complaints is trivial. There were just 285 hate crime complaints in California, a state with 39 million people, in 2021. There was an order of magnitude more homicides in California, 2,361, in 2021.

Prejudice still exists in the United States. The California church shooting from May 2022 was motivated by political hatred. And the recent mall shooter in Texas may have been motivated by racist ideology.

But the ideologies don’t line up neatly politically. The California… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

And in many instances, the political ideology is plainly secondary to mental illness. That was certainly the case with the psychotic and drug-addicted homeless man from Berkeley who attacked the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco last year. And it may… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

In truth, acceptance of racial, religious, and sexual differences has never been higher in recorded human history. Never before have same-sex and mixed-race couples have been more accepted across all Western nations, which are far more tolerant than most other nations worldwide. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Trans people are celebrated, with an entire reality show dedicated to documenting in celebratory fashion the sexual reassignment surgery and hormone use of a trans girl named Jazz Jennings. And few places are more celebratory of transgenderism than California.

All of which… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…