The Ideas That Motivate Hate Crimes Are Just Normal Now

Geovanny Villalba Alemán and David Crawford were inspired by ideas they could have heard on FOX News.

On Wednesday, a man walked into a Gender Studies classroom at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, asked what was being taught in class, and then proceeded to stab three people.

He stabbed the professor, a 38-year-old woman, and two students, a 20-year-old woman and 19-year-old man, who were later taken to the hospital with “serious but non-life-threatening” injuries. Luckily for those three people (and everyone else in the class), Canada has a ban on assault weapons.

Police have arrested 24-year-old Ecuador native Geovanny Villalba Alemán , who had just recently graduated from the University of Waterloo. Instead of going to get a job or doing something worthwhile with his life, he decided to celebrate the end of his school career by stabbing three people.

They're thinking of charging it as a hate crime, which makes sense given that it is not a doily or a pair of shoes or a trip to an all-inclusive resort, but for now he is just being charged with aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose.

This incident comes as people like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson and all of the other professional right-wing zealots on earth have been hard at work convincing people that all of their problems are due to things like gender studies courses in college and transgender people doing sponcon for beer.

Also this week, former Laurel, Maryland, police chief David Crawford, 71, was sentenced to eight life sentences plus 75 years for a series of arsons he committed. In one instance, he targeted a woman for removing his wife from the Court Appointed Special Advocate program because his wife didn't believe in white privilege.

Via NPR:  

Crawford targeted people for a range of reasons, from perceived slights by his former colleagues to anger directed at his chiropractors. There were also racial and social motivations: One entry on his arson target list identified a person only as "White Privilege."

That reference was linked to Crawford's wife, Mary, who disputed the concept of white privilege during training for volunteers in a Court Appointed Special Advocate program, according to charging documents in the case. After the program's coordinator removed Mary Crawford from the program, a car was set on fire at the coordinator's home, causing significant damage to her mother's 2014 Toyota Camry.

If I had a third example I could call this a trend piece. I don't. I have far, far more than that. We could be here all day.

Nine years ago, when Elliot Rodger went on a mass shooting spree, I knew immediately that he had to be someone who frequented PUAHate.com, the original incel website (which had started out as a forum in which to complain about being taken advantage of by pick-up artists). His beliefs were so specific as to be immediately traceable to that one obscure web forum. Three years before that, it was a good (and correct) bet that Anders Breivik had spent a lot of time on the neo-Nazi website Stormfront.

Today, if I read something that Geovanny Villalba Alemán wrote or heard something he said, I might not be able to point you to a specific website or subculture or guru, because we now live in a culture where all of the ideas that might motivate someone to go and start stabbing people in a gender studies classroom have become extremely mainstream. I also wouldn't immediately assume that David Crawford spent a lot of time on Stormfront or The Daily Stormer or that he was a member of any particular hate group, because flipping out over concepts like "white privilege" is now a relatively mainstream activity on the Right.

More and more lately, when someone goes on a killing spree, instead of finding out that they are part of some obscure subculture of hate, it's a lot more likely that they're just super into Tucker Carlson. 

Many of the misogynist ideas about women and the world we live in that inspired Elliot Rodger and other incel mass murderers are now, also, being spread by relatively "mainstream" conservatives. They've picked up ridiculous incel theories like their claim women lose their ability to "pair-bond" after having sex with a certain number of men or that feminism and the sexual revolution have ruined everything for men.

These ideas are on Fox News, they are on Twitter, they are on YouTube, they are everywhere. The ideas that we know tend to stoke the kind of fire that inspires people to stab three people in a gender studies classroom or go on a shooting spree or set fire to someone's car are more common and easily accessible than ever. There are people and companies making millions of dollars off of them.

And in the meantime — in less than a decade — mass shootings have doubled.

And hate crimes are on an upswing. 

It's probably not a coincidence.

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