![https://spectator.us/topic/stop-white-lies-about-anti-asian-hate-crime](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/leguna/EqooTAj1MAUQ88SpL8689dWocPPb7rtC3UgrPu7pbLdxpyjsc2UJvhthutCXujY9PXJ.png)

When the concept of the hate crime emerged three decades ago it was observed then to be a self-immolating idea, mainly because it directed attention away from criminal motivations to hateful motivations, making thought crimes a more serious matter than every day garden variety crimes. Thought crimes are difficult to prove, especially when one considers how little actual thought goes into crime. As it turns out crime tends strongly towards being committed by criminals, while hate doesn't nearly so often engender crime. In other words, being hateful doesn't so much incline a person towards crime as does being criminal. 

We've now been keeping federally required stats on hate crimes for three decades and those stats look a lot like the rest of the stats we have on crime. Despite protracted efforts to prove otherwise, white supremacists not only do not live within high crime areas, it's not clear they can afford the bus fare to get there. Their efforts remain mostly against the Jews, and those mostly vandalism, if only because your average white supremacist is too ignorant to identify a Jewish person. And if he spray paints a mosque while aiming for a synagogue it's probably six of one, half a dozen of the other within that class of ignorance. Regardless, white supremacism isn't a growth industry, which we cannot say about crime in general. For purposes of simplicity I'm ignoring all the fake hate crimes, which are straw man attacks perpetrated by the anti-hate crime movement itself, as the false flag operations you may recall following the election of Donald Trump.