Are hate crimes against minority groups, based on race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation   increasing and getting worse? There’s evidence that most people are far more tolerant than in the past such that an increase doesn’t make sense.

There does seem to be a media focus on “hate crimes”, often taken to an extreme.

A bigot writes something nasty on a Starbucks cup in an east coast city and it becomes national news. A school yard spat between two kids in a small elementary school in Nebraska turns into a national news story. (When I was in elementary school, recovering from a skull fracture, a kid threw a football that hit me in the head – this was not even a story within the school then.)

What do you think about this item?

Read the full Twitter thread here. As Shellenberger notes, there are 10x more murders in California than reported hate crimes.

Does the existence of “hate crimes” require the expansion of government reporting programs, establishment of official reporting offices and more online monitoring and censorship of speech?