Who Commits “Hate Crimes”?

Pauly Likens (image from his Facebook profile)

1,290 words

Authorities confirmed this week that human remains that had been found in western Pennsylvania earlier this month belonged to a 14-year-old “trans girl” by the name of Pauly Likens. DaShawn Watkins, a 29-year-old black male who met Likens via the dating app Grindr, has been charged with murdering Likens and dismembering his corpse. Predictably, this incident has elicited condemnations of “transphobic” conservatives (and “TERFs”), whom the Left accuses of spreading “hate” and causing “hate crimes.”

The Left’s impulse to blame “hate crimes” on white conservatives and Trump supporters exhibits a one-dimensional, partisan worldview and a shallow understanding of human psychology. For one, the odds are that Watkins voted for Biden or did not vote at all. 79% of black men voted for Biden in the 2020 election. Yet somehow white Trump supporters are to blame when black men murder black trans women — the most common type of “transphobic” “hate crime” (the murder of a black trans woman in South Carolina earlier this year is a representative example).

According to the white woman who founded the Shenango Valley LGBTQIA+ Alliance, Watkins must have been driven by “a large amount of hate.” One would imagine she, like other progressives, also believes men commit rape because they are “sexist” and “hate” women. The progressive viewpoint is profoundly naïve and betrays a female-typical inability to comprehend male violence. Murder and rape are not byproducts of beliefs that are disseminated and learned; they arise from primal instincts.

Psychopathology, which has a significant biological component, is a greater predictor of whether someone will commit murder than adherence to culturally transmitted beliefs. Anti-social behavior is associated with genes involved in the regulation of certain neurotransmitters, such as the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene. 5.2% of black men carry a certain allele of MAOA that correlates significantly with committing violent crime, while only 0.1% of white men do. This has played a greater role in causing violent “hate crimes” than anything Trump, J. K. Rowling, or any other “transphobic” figure has ever said. The perpetrators of “hate crimes,” by and large, are demographically similar to the perpetrators of ordinary violent crimes. Indeed, it would seem that the victim’s identity, and not the perpetrators’ motivations, is frequently what determines the difference between a “hate crime” and an ordinary violent crime.

Individuals such as Watkins would kill and rape regardless of the beliefs they held. They target women and effeminate men not because they “hate” them or because they oppose feminism or the LGBT lobby per se, but because they have an inner compulsion to prey on others. Elderly people are more likely to be targets of assault and homicide; one cannot seriously attribute this to “ageist” attitudes or something of the sort (except indirectly, in the sense that dumping the elderly in nursing homes makes them more vulnerable to assault). Criminals disproportionately target weaker individuals because they are low-hanging fruit (pardon the pun).

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Often attacks on trans women are not even motivated by outright malevolence, in cases in which a man kills or maims a trans prostitute upon realizing she is male. Attributing such incidents solely to “transphobia” would be a vast oversimplification. It is natural to be distressed upon realizing one has been deceived and entered into an erotic arrangement one would not have otherwise. Thugs react to this with violence because they have poor impulse control, and violence is the only language they know.

There are, of course, killers whose motivations and choice of victims are directly informed by their ideological commitments, but they are quite rare and usually mentally unwell. One’s beliefs and the culture surrounding them can certainly exacerbate one’s violent tendencies, but it would be more accurate to posit psychopathology as the underlying cause of both a killer’s adoption of fringe, anti-establishment views and his enthusiastic embrace of violence, as opposed to the view that certain beliefs directly cause one to become violent. The characterization of, for example, White Nationalism as inherently violent by virtue of attacks carried out in its name is sloppy and dishonest. I attribute the phenomenon of transgender killers (such as Audrey Hale) primarily to individual psychopathology rather than adherence to Leftist views, and I expect Leftists to repay this courtesy. Even if psychopathology were not a factor, the fact that the vast majority of White Nationalists and MAGA conservatives would not endorse homicides carried out in their name is proof enough that their beliefs do not automatically engender violence.

It’s not just progressives who make the error of attributing violent crime to ideology: One commonly hears center-Right types oppose mass migration into Europe on the basis that migrants do not share Western “values” and that their adherence to Islam is responsible for the increasing prevalence of rape and other crimes in countries such as Sweden. Muslim attitudes toward women may play a role to some extent, but migrants who attack women and girls would still exhibit anti-social behavior even if they left Islam. The main problem is their genes, not their “values.”

Criminality is correlated with low IQ, which, for obvious reasons, is most closely associated with lack of political engagement or party affiliation — not MAGA conservatism, despite what Richard Spencer or Richard Hanania would have you think. I would venture that most men who murder trans women do not even fully know what transgenderism is. They certainly would not be clued into online “discourse” about the topic.

Many Mormons are opposed to transgenderism and homosexuality, but when was the last time you heard of a Mormon murdering a transgender person? The mere thought is laughable. Mormons are notoriously law-abiding, conscientious, agreeable, and high in impulse control. (The only Mormon killers I can think of, Ron and Dan Lafferty, were extreme outliers; they belonged to a fringe sect and were excommunicated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.) The psychological profile of Mormons is not identical to that of the median white Trump supporter, but it’s not too far off.

Ironically, one suspects that the people who harp on about how white Trump supporters are “evil” and would-be perpetrators of “hate crimes” are those least likely to have ever encountered them in real life. Otherwise, they would know that most of them are upstanding people who seldom resort to violence unprovoked. I remember once hearing a white liberal academic panic over the possibility of being offered a job in a red state, since living in one would be “unsafe” (you’d think academics would simply be grateful to be offered a job). Somehow crime-ridden cities such as San Francisco are “safer” than mostly white college towns in flyover country where a murder happens once every decade.

One also suspects that Leftists who attribute violent crime to “bad” beliefs lead sheltered lives and have never been made to confront the criminal mind. In the past, every town contained a violent psychopath or two. Now, thanks to greater mobility, there is much more self-selection. Cocooned in middle-class suburbia, many liberals simply have never encountered anyone in the bottom decile, or even quartile, of “badness.” This is evident in their frequent usage of terms such as “asshole” or “bad person” to describe their ideological opponents. They think MAGA conservatives and White Nationalists represent the height of human depravity, in part because the underworld of male violence is invisible to them.

If Leftists truly cared about preventing so-called “hate crimes” — as opposed to opportunistically using them as a pretext to demonize their opponents and pass legislation banning “hate speech” — they would adopt a more proactive approach to combatting crime and would not suppress candid discussions about the etiology of criminal behavior. Scapegoating white conservatives and Trump supporters is the easy way out and does not meaningfully address the issue.