Hate Crimes Hoaxes

We're probably living in what are the least hate-crimey times in the least hate-crimey country in the world, but some people's lives just don't have meaning unless there are so-called hate crimes occurring with rabid frequency, and since they're not occurring with rabid frequency, they make them up:

Mr. Reilly is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University, and his interest in hate crimes dates to his graduate-school days, when he became aware of several widely reported incidents in the vicinity of his hometown that turned out to be fake...

Mr. Reilly eventually compiled a database of 346 hate-crime allegations and determined that less than a third were genuine. Turning his attention to the hoaxes, he put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He allows that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large,” he writes. “We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.”

I'm not a big fan of the "hate crime" designation--someone who is attacked or harmed is a victim, and should be no more or less so because of the attitude of the culprit.  But if we're going to make some attacks more "important" than others, which is what the hate crime designation does, we need to accept the logical and entirely predictable consequences--that if you "subsidize" something, you get more of it.  Given this fact, it makes perfect sense that Reilly would find significantly more fake than real crimes.

Update, 7/21/19:  What should be celebrated as a great achievement is instead subverted and perverted:

As racial and sexual bigotry continues to recede in the United States, the strange alchemy of egalitarian despotism takes over. This was something that Tocqueville noticed about democratic regimes. The more equal society became, the more trifling differences among people would be seized upon and held up as evidence of iniquity. Similarly, the less real racial bigotry and anti-homosexual animus there is in the United States, the more must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.