Commentary: The Hate Industry

✪ The “anti-hate” hate industry creates the tribalism it claims to fight, and the only beneficiary of all the hate it creates is the hate industry itself…

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n the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when establishment politicians started to make common use of the term “homeland,” they told us the most dangerous threat to Americans was foreign terrorists. But today, we are instructed to fear the enemy within. A new iconic date, January 6, 2021, is inscribed on our collective consciousness. From coast to coast, Americans are being herded into two camps. There are the “white supremacists,” those bad people who purportedly hate good people. And then there is everyone else, good people who are encouraged to hate the bad people.

“The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.”
— President Joe Biden, speaking at Howard University, May 13, 2023

The common thread, to state the obvious, is hate.

As Joe Biden’s would-be successor, doing his part to nurture and support the hate industry, California Governor Gavin Newsom on May 4 announced “the Launch of CA vs Hate, a New Statewide Hotline to Report Hate Acts in California.” Proclaiming that “hate will not be tolerated,” the governor said that Californians will have “another tool to ensure that not only justice is served, but that individuals have access to additional resources to help deal with the lingering wounds that remain after such a horrendous crime occurs.”

This is agenda-driven hype. The agenda, perfectly expressed by author Michael Shellenberger in a Substack post last week, is to “manufacture a fake ‘hate’ crisis as a pretext for mass spying, blacklists, and censorship.” The hype, also exposed by Shellenberger in his recent article, is underscored by the fact that over the past 10 years, hate crime convictions, as opposed to “criminal complaints of hate crimes,” have not increased at all. In a state with 40 million people, hate crime convictions were a minuscule 109 in 2021, and a negligible increase from 107 in 2012.

The hate industry is a vast agglomeration of lucrative hustles, now institutionalized and expanded into multiple and overlapping sectors. There is the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) sector; the equity, social, and governance (ESG) sector; the activist sector comprising countless groups, including Black Lives Matter and Antifa; the corporate, academic, and government sectors; the media sector; the politicians; and the pundits. All of these sectors have spawned scores of thousands of well-paying jobs.

If these institutions weren’t able to point to rising levels of hatred in America, then their specialty, the business of hate, would no longer be a growth industry. Where there is no hate, they must manufacture it. Where hatred has diminished, they must discover new forms of hate, often so subtle that we foolishly fail to recognize it without their assistance.

Peddling Hate Is A Dangerous Game

It’s a dangerous and divisive game. For hate to exist, you have to have a hater and a victim of hate. And who might they be? A list of Newsom’s “Community Specific Resources for People Targeted for Hate” might provide a clue. Virtually every imaginable group is listed as “people targeted for hate,” including “Communities living at the intersection of multiple identities (Coming Soon).” Isn’t that great? Resources for those who live “at the intersection of multiple identities” is “coming soon.” They’re awfully busy at the State of California’s Civil Rights Department. These, we are told, are the victims.

Not listed, of course, are heterosexual, “cisgender” white males who speak English, and lack learning disabilities, physical disabilities, mental health disabilities, or are elders, or students, and don’t belong to the “Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, and Jewish communities.” Got that? If someone is a member of this rapidly disappearing fraction of California’s population, there are no “community resources.” These, then, are the haters.

The problem for Newsom—and Biden, and every other hate-hyping demagogue in America—is that data doesn’t validate the hate narrative. To keep the industry supplied with the fuel of hatred, Newsom must differentiate between hate crimes, because hardly any of these occur, and “hate incidents,” which, like harvested ballots, appear in numbers proportional to the amount of money invested to procure them. Here is how Newsom’s Department of Civil Rights describes a hate incident: “A hostile expression or action that may be motivated by bias against another person’s actual or perceived identity(ies).”

If this seems vague, that’s on purpose. When trolling for hate incidents, cast as wide a net as possible. A “hostile expression,” that “may” be motivated by bias. That’s awfully broad and awfully subjective. And to ensure California’s epidemic of hate is fully documented, a “CA vs. Hate Portal” has been set up through the “Submit Hate Incident or Hate Crime Report” button, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week on your desktop or mobile device.

If you click through this online interface to the main screen, you will learn that the “Types of Crime or Incident” that qualify include “cyberbullying/internet harassment (text, email, or social media), verbal harassment, hate literature/flyers, hate mail” and several other categories offering an almost unlimited latitude of qualifying criteria.

Exaggerating Hate & Marketing Hate

Anyone who thinks the number of reported “hate incidents” can’t be goosed upwards by marketing a site like this should reflect on just how trivial some of the alleged transgressions have been that attracted wide publicity and outrage.

California’s local television networks in the Sacramento area were agog a few years ago with a report that flyers stating “It’s OK to be White” were posted around the campus of the University of California at Davis. News reporters interviewed college officials who were shocked and terrified and anxious to assert their commitment to keeping UC Davis “safe” from these “triggering” flyers. The presumption was that this rather innocuous assertion was “hate literature.” Exactly why this was considered hate literature was not explained.

During the 2020 election season, the need for evidence of alarming “white supremacist” activity was so desperate that national television networks, for several days, ran a story about a white man who yelled anti-Asian slurs at some Asian diners in a restaurant in Carmel Valley, California. The point here isn’t to excuse the man’s comments. For all we know, maybe he deserved the dogpile that followed. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The hate machine needed to find a hater, so there was never any attempt to contextualize the incident. What made this man angry? How much had he been drinking? Were the diners he insulted being disruptive, noisy, or rude? Was there no provocation whatsoever?

But the answers are beside the point. This incident, while unpleasant and regrettable, did not merit national news coverage. It had no geopolitical significance. It was national “news” because it was the only example available that week, in a nation of 330 million people, during a time when it was important for the hate industry to foment a national terror of “white supremacy.”

Recognize any of that today? It’s bigger than ever, with the hate machine still focused on white racist hate crimes. And if a perpetrator isn’t white, such as the Latino man who just murdered five people in Texas, the hate machine makes sure to play down that fact, but is sure to mention he is a “suspected Nazi sympathizer.” What about another Latino, also in Texas, who recently ran his SUV into a crowd outside an immigrant center, killing eight? The media takeaway—he yelled “anti-immigrant insults” when he was detained. White supremacy, courtesy of Latinos.

If the story doesn’t fit the narrative, and you can’t find a story that does, then warp the story. Make it fit. Hugely disproportionate rates of black-on-black crime? What’s that? Blacks beating a white girl half to death? Crickets. A white person, with the assistance of black person, subdues a deranged black career criminal before he hurts somebody and, in the struggle, he unintentionally chokes him to death? The dead black criminal is a saint, the brave white hero is a “vigilante,” and the brave black hero is ignored because he doesn’t fit the narrative.

All of this warped coverage generates lucrative hate. White liberals and blacks are encouraged to hate white racists. White conservatives hate the lying media and resent the double standard. And as hate grows, money is made, and authoritarian bureaucracies expand.

This point cannot be emphasized enough: The “anti-hate” hate industry creates the tribalism it claims to fight, and the only beneficiary of all the hate it creates is the hate industry itself.

All Hate Matters, Hating Haters Is Still Hate

As is usual with so much in 21st-century America, the irony here is so thick you’d break a chainsaw trying to cut through.

Gavin Newsom, a man who checks almost every box in the “hater” category, is part of a hate machine that is fueled by ginning up hatred for the haters. There is irony everywhere. Walk into any classroom in California, and more often than not, you will encounter at least one poster stating “Everyone is welcome here,” against the backdrop of a gay/trans pride flag. You may rest assured that whoever puts up a sign like this is most definitely not going to welcome “everyone.” Whoever does not share their views is a “hater,” who deserves to be hated.

There are plenty of reasons for the growth of America’s hate industry. There have always been political incentives to marginalize opposition candidates and movements, but the modern hate industry was born when the internet democratized communication. All of a sudden, instead of three or four major broadcasting networks and newspapers competing for a huge national news audience, there were thousands of new online sources of information. The knockout blow came when social media and search giants came on the scene, within a few years co-opting over 50 percent of national advertising dollars by offering precision placements of advertising content. How did the national news media respond? By peddling hate.

In a recent interview, Elon Musk offered an insightful explanation of why hate sells better than love. As humans evolved, he said, we developed a much stronger response to fear than to attraction, because if we didn’t immediately and forcefully react, for example, to a charging lion, we would die, whereas if we took our time ambling over to a sweet berry bush, we would merely defer a bit of pleasure.

The fact that it takes less investment to retain viewers if you appeal to their negative emotions has become the business strategy of media companies struggling to compete in a market that has become infinitely fragmented and ruthlessly competitive. Hate sells.

Even if peddling hate weren’t the survival strategy of America’s beleaguered media companies, the modern era would still be spawning more than the usual amount of hate. Social media has granted every individual on earth access to billions of potential critics, every one of them with the ability to lob insults from a distance and anonymously. Humans aren’t wired to cope with an audience for their opinions that includes an infinite number of people who can insult them perpetually, without the desire to engage in reason, and without the slightest fear of consequences.

The Hate Industry’s Hidden Agenda

It’s obvious the “anti-hate” hate industry is a self-perpetuating, self-aggrandizing fraud. But behind all the hatred that is nurtured by a hate industry that grows when hate grows, and hence is doing everything it can to divide Americans, there is a deeper agenda. Whether in preparation for martial law to be imposed if there is a major war, or the reduction of our standard of living in order to achieve “sustainability,” or to pacify a population that might otherwise rebel against mass immigration with all the economic and social disruption it will entail, or to divide, diminish, incite, and then crush the populist rebellion against all three of these profiteering, globalist gambits, America is slowly being turned into a technology-driven police state. If we can be convinced that we must be terrified of the haters who are rampant among us, we will accept everything being done to stop them.

America’s hate industry employs a diabolical strategy, whereby everything they do to supposedly eliminate hate actually creates more hate. In the name of fighting hate, the hate industry demands tolerance when it is not actually promoting every abnormal, deviant, debauched, destructive, indolent, criminal, or bizarre behavior. It normalizes the strange and then accuses anyone of questioning the health or the efficacy of mainstreaming the marginal of being haters. It continuously ups the ante, creating as much disruption as possible, while monetizing the controversy in the form of bigger DEI departments, more “environmental, social, governance” criteria, more bureaucrats, more thought police, and bigger audiences for their salacious, indignant cable and online shows.

If there aren’t enough adverse reactions against the hate industry’s campaign to deconstruct American culture and traditions, they make them up. Increase the scale and scope of this deconstruction while at the same time lowering the level of reaction necessary to trigger accusations of hate. Eventually, declare a state of emergency. Game over.

Several years ago, a refugee from the Soviet Union said something to me that I didn’t immediately understand. “The only perfectly safe place,” he said, “is a prison.” As America drifts further towards the state of perfect safety, free of unsanctioned hate, yet saturated with hate masquerading as tolerance, it becomes obvious what he meant. So bravo, Joe Biden. And bravo, Gavin Newsom. You two are doing your part. ✪