British pop star Lee Ryan was convicted in 2023 of “racially aggravated common assault” on a flight from Glasgow to London. He clasped the wrists of a black flight attendant, asked her for a kiss, and drunkenly intoned, “You’re my chocolate darling, my chocolate cookie, and I’m going to have your chocolate children.” That landed him with a 12-month suspended prison sentence. He wept in the dock as he explained to the judge that he did not intend the word “chocolate” to be an insult.

The rationale of so-called hate crimes, such as “racially aggravated” public order offenses in the United Kingdom, is that while drunken flirting with a flight attendant is always a boorish thing to do, calling her “chocolate darling” elevates such embarrassing behavior to a criminal level. This case illustrates the significance attached to racially charged language and what is now defined as “hate.” The number of academic Hate Studies departments is growing, bringing in millions in grant funding to study all forms of so-called hate.

In his May Chronicles column (“Sympathy for Blue-Eyed White Devils”), Taki Theodoracopulos noted the case of a drunken migrant in Florida who called white people on his flight “blue-eyed white devils” and threatened to “take this plane down.” Racial animus towards white people, he showed, is often treated as perfectly acceptable because critical race theory teaches that white people are to blame for everything, so nobody minds if they are offended. 

In other words, saying “chocolate cookie” is hate, but saying “blue-eyed white devils” is not hate at all. On the contrary, the prevailing ideology holds that white people deserve offensive things said about them. It’s payback for colonialism and the patriarchy. Theodoracopulos observes:

Dividing Americans into white people who are guilty and people of color who are innocent is the left’s ghastly enterprise today. Whites at work are compelled to sit through “diversity, equity and inclusion” humiliation sessions, with “critical race theory” shoved down their throats.

Theodoracopulos puts that in the wider context of anti-whiteism:

Whites are under the gun today for a very simple reason: their past implies a position of cultural supremacy. This is a fact confirmed by the history of civilization, which really began with the Greeks followed by the Romans.

Ultimately, the social justice warriors are at war against Western civilization. They rail against “white supremacy” because they see white people as inextricably bound with that civilization. In that light, it is clear why so many academics want to “abolish whiteness” through efforts such as “decolonizing the curriculum.”

For years, the BBC has railed determinedly against “white supremacy,” casting black characters in their “blackwashing” interpretations of history in a desperate attempt to convince the British public that Ancient Greeks and Romans were really black people. According to a professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, casting Bantu people to play Greek heroes makes perfect sense because “the Greeks would be a spectrum of hair colours and skin types in antiquity … not only were the historical Greeks unlikely to be uniformly pale-skinned, but their world was also home to ‘Ethiopians,’ a vague term for dark-skinned North Africans.”

Civilization itself is regarded as an embarrassing concept that ought to be dismantled as it excludes nonwhite people, which is a violation of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Likewise, the attempt to expunge history of any components embarrassing to black people explains why the history of slavery carried on for centuries by Arabs and Africans is rationalized as “benevolent slavery.” We are informed that Arabs and Africans treated their slaves just like family members, so it was not evil, unlike the racist trans-Atlantic slavery in the Americas. It is conveniently forgotten that Africans captured and sold fellow Africans to Arab slavers, who marched them to the coast to be loaded onto European slave ships. African slavers regarded trading in humans as no different from trading in any other goods.

The effort to dismantle Western civilization harnesses both state and law to help achieve this goal. This is where civil rights and “hate crimes” play an essential role, as the concept of “hate” provides convenient grounds to imprison those who reject the new culture.

Leading the charge against “hate” is Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act of 2021, which seeks to root out hate not only from public spaces but also from private homes. In justifying his extension of public order offenses to private homes, Scotland’s Justice Minister Humza Yousaf explained that what is said in the privacy of one’s home may be overheard by members of the public, thereby leading to public disorder. Children who hear “problematic” views expressed in their homes may repeat these views at school, which would create public disorder. To root out hate, the boundary between public and private, therefore, had to fall.

Under Scotland’s law, “racially aggravated harassment” is defined as “stirring up hatred” by being “threatening, abusive or insulting” and “causing the person alarm or distress.” An offense is “aggravated by prejudice” if the offender “demonstrates malice and ill-will towards the victim,” but only if the victim belongs to a protected class. The legislation helpfully adds that “it is immaterial whether or not the offender’s malice and ill-will is also based (to any extent) on any other factor,” so it is irrelevant if malice towards a black person is based on factors other than race.

Take, for example, a traffic altercation with a black driver where the defendant’s malice is triggered by the fact that he was cut off, not by the fact that the driver was black. That is potentially a “racially aggravated public disorder,” as a serving Royal Navy officer discovered when he was charged with hate crimes for shouting salty words at a black driver who cut him off as he cycled to work.

According to this reasoning, taking a plane down is a crime; taking a plane full of white people down is also a crime, but taking down a plane full of racially marginalized people would be worse because that would be classified as a crime “aggravated by prejudice.” This pertains even if the act was not motivated by any particular animus as long as it has what is called a “disparate impact” on the protected group. It is on this basis that “climate change” and “the pandemic” are said to be racist. The aggravation lies in the prejudice—not in the feeling of ill will towards innocent people in itself or a manifest intention to cause them harm, but in the feeling of ill will towards people designated as “protected groups.”

Moreover, as illustrated by the “chocolate cookie” example, the ill will is to be derived from the words used, not from the presence of actual ill will. The list of forbidden words grows daily. Stanford’s much-derided “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” included not only words like “master” and “slave,” but also the words “American” (because it might offend immigrants) and “grandfather” (because it implies belonging to a family). The University of South Carolina suggested avoiding the word “field” because slaves worked in fields. Presumably, the word “house” is next.

Why are some groups “protected” from hearing words that might upset them while others are not? The groups protected by civil rights law generally include those defined by race, religion, sex, and gender identity. But, as Jeremy Carl points out in his book The Unprotected Class, white people, as such, are not protected by civil rights law. The rationale is that civil rights law is designed to protect historically disadvantaged people. While white women can claim historical disadvantage on the basis of being women, white men do not fall into any protected group unless they can claim a protected religion or sexuality or, better still, claim to be women.

The reluctance of many people to defend Western civilization and the eagerness of both Republicans and Democrats to support anti-hate legislation such as the new Antisemitism Awareness Act should be seen in this light—as partly driven by a desire to avoid being snared by the Hatefinder’s net.

(Correction: The tenth paragraph of an earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a statement to Scotland’s current Minister of Justice, Angela Constance. The Justice Minister at the time was Humza Yousaf.)