John Sexton:
Outgoing Senator Harry Reid continues to do his best to divide the country and invalidate the mandate of the incoming president. Tuesday Reid took to the Senate floor and blamed Trump for a crime wave.
“A man who lost the election by two million votes or more is now the president-elect,” Reid said. “His election sparked a wave of hate crimes across America,” Reid added. Reid went on to cite the Southern Poverty Law Center as the source of his information.
The SPLC has been encouraging people to report hate crimes using a form on their website. SPLC is currently claiming there have been 437 hate incidents since Trump’s election. Some of those were reported by local news sources but the majority appear to have come from people filling out the web form, meaning they probably haven’t been investigated.
Reason has highlighted a number of alleged hate crimes or incidents which appear to have been fabricated. There are also categories of incidents such as “swastika” which may be being generated by people looking to protest Trump’s election. For instance, in San Francisco a man raised a Nazi flag outside his home only to have people assume he was welcoming in the new Reich. In fact, he was protesting Trump.