Don’t let the news about Jussie Smollett distract you from the real issue — hate crimes are on the rise in America.
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00:00It's a shame that so much attention is being given to this, and it shouldn't take away from the fact that there are crime, hate crimes, legitimate hate crimes going on, you know, probably as we speak.
00:19Every week we used to put out a hate report that outlined the hate incidents, hate crimes throughout the week before.
00:28And we never had a lack of things to report on. And as for the conservative media, I think it's disgusting that they're paying so much attention to this one, you know, silly thing that this man did instead of paying attention to the legitimate problem that we have with hate crimes.
00:58I think unquestionably, you have to point the finger at Donald Trump. I mean, here's a man who has the biggest bully pulpit in the world, and he uses it to denigrate people of color, to denigrate immigrants.
01:20You can still point at an increasing trend and say, you know, this is massively underreported, but it is still increasing. I don't think there's a minority in the United States that, you know, a minority person that would tell you that they haven't at some point been subjected to hateful abuse.
01:40You know, I'm sure a lot of your listeners are sitting there nodding their heads going, yeah, that's happened to me. I'm a white male. I've never had it happen to me. But, you know, whenever I talk to friends of mine who are people of color or immigrants or Muslims or Jews, you know, they've all been subjected to some sort of hateful activity at some point in their lives.
02:10The sort of people who point to the Jesse Smollett case and say, you know, see, that shows that there's no such thing as hate crime are in denial, you know, and coincidentally, they mainly seem to be middle aged white men or middle aged white women, you know, those people are never going to believe that there's a problem or probably will never believe that there's a problem.
02:37And this isn't going to change anything. But I think the vast majority of Americans know that hate crimes are a real thing, because they don't have their head in the sand. People do strange things for strange reasons. And unfortunately, it takes attention away from the real debate we should be having in America about why are people acting hatefully towards other people and what can we do to address that and to stop that from happening, or at least to minimize it.