Hate crimes in America have reached a 12-year high, according to figures released earlier this week by the FBI. That’s a 6% jump over last year. Breaking it down by category, reported hate crimes against blacks rose 42%, while reported crimes against Asians were up 73%. These look like earth-shattering spikes — some might even say explosive.

Just how many hate crimes were there in 2020? The FBI counted 7,759. That includes all ethnic, religious, and political groups in the entire country — everybody. And there were only 445 more of these crimes than last year, which is what the much trumpeted 6% spike translates to in the real world. Does that sound like an epic wave of hate sweeping a country of 330 million people? Hardly. In fact, we surpassed this number all the way back in Barack Obama’s coronation year of 2008, that last supposed banner year for hate, when there were 7,783 reported hate crimes. That means that 2020 is still only second place in the hate stakes.

These barbs are certainly not meant to downplay crime, or to disparage victims of real crimes. Democrat-run inner cities are indeed declining at an alarming rate.

But let’s face it. Hate crime statistics are merely fodder for leftists’ attempt to portray America as a hopelessly, endlessly racist country that must be destroyed. The entire concept of the hate crime was born out of the politically correct revolution of the 1990s. The intent was to portray crimes motivated by racism or bigotry as more dangerous to the social fabric than regular, old-fashioned murder, rape, and assault. The result was to introduce into the halls of justice a socially constructed imbalance that treated certain victims (and perpetrators) differently from other victims despite them having the same crime in common. And now, all crime data is put through the prism of whether it’s a hate crime. Even stealing a MAGA hat from a kid is a hate crime. Granted, anyone who steals a kid’s hat is a lowlife, but do they deserve to be charged with a hate crime because of what was printed on it?

America is not a “systemically racist” country, and we do not have a hate crime problem. The Left knows this, which is why the media twists itself into knots to make it seem like hate crimes are out of control. Manipulation of data is a valuable tool in this regard.

Let’s take another look at the FBI report for 2020. Hate crimes against blacks rose from 1,930 incidences in 2019 to 2,755 in 2020, a year-over-year increase of 825 crimes. The total year-over-year increase in hate crimes against Asians rose from 158 to 274. In 2020, the year in which Asians were supposedly “targeted,” to use a choice word of the media, the raw number of reported hate crimes against them doesn’t seem to support a wave of hate.

Again, some perspective. In 2020, there was a year-over-year increase of 1,117 shootings in the city Chicago, most of them involving minorities shooting other minorities. In New York, the number of shootings more than doubled to 1,824, again with predominantly minority perpetrators and victims. 2020 was a violent year, but it had nothing to do with “hate” crimes. It was mostly the fault of Democrat knuckleheads who reduced police presence in major cities to please the woke mob and an all-but-sanctioned spree of leftist-inspired violence against police, property, and the public at large.

Hate crimes are not a significant problem, not statistically speaking and not realistically speaking. When attention-starved C-list celebrities like Jussie Smollett and Bubba Wallace have to fake hate crimes, then the problem lies with them, not with the American public.

We are led to believe that hate crimes are rampant because of how often they are reported. Since they fit the leftist narrative, the media can’t seem to generate enough coverage. Even Smollett’s story, which was debunked a couple of days after it was reported, stayed in the news for weeks. In fact, with the political divisiveness in America today, and the lack of respect people seem to have for other points of view, you might also think there would be more hate crime than the few thousand they can drum up in the counting.

Maybe all these views about violence are overblown, and Americans are more even-tempered than we give ourselves credit for. It’s worth pondering.