What The Heretical 2 Case Says About The Federal "Hate Crimes" Bill

Any day now, unless the American public wakes up and contacts its Congressthings, the Englishmen who have dubbed themselves "The Heretical 2"— writer Stephen Whittle (pen name Luke O'Farrell), and his publisher, Simon Sheppard—will be deported back to the UK, where they will be imprisoned for up to seven years.

I wrote in July, September, and again on May 18 about this pair, who had been convicted in England of thoughtcrimes, specifically of "publishing racially inflammatory written material" on the internet. (In January, Sheppard was also convicted of five more counts in absentia). They fled the UK for the U.S. last July, and upon arrival trustingly notified the authorities that they were seeking political asylum.

It made perfect sense. They have been convicted of a purely political offense, which is not a crime in the U.S.—yet. (Indeed, Whittle has persuasively argued that, based on English jurists' expansive reading of U.K. "hate crime" statutes, even VDARE.com writers could be arrested on "hate crime" charges, should they ever so much as change planes in England.) The U.S. gets tens of thousands of asylum applications a year. Virtually all are let in on their own recognizance. A very high proportion end up staying here, with asylum or not.

The sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric Sheppard and Whittle are plenty inflammatory, alright. They are typically referred to as "Holocaust-deniers," though Whittle has rejected my characterization of them as such. On that point, we're going to have to agree to disagree.

Sounds like a hot story, no? And yet, the American MainStream Media have given them the silent treatment. (The first major story has only just appeared: Men bedeviled in bid for sanctuary, by Dana Parsons, Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2009).

Why do Sheppard and Whittle matter, and why do they matter so much?

Because the U.S. government's treatment of them is of a piece with its treatment of white Americans with the "wrong" sort of views—views which are increasingly being criminalized, the Constitution be damned.

The federal government permits people to immigrate here by the millions whose beliefs are incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, and who routinely commit acts as part of their "culture," such as female genital mutilation, polygamy, slavery and honor killings (also here and here), which are crimes here. Sheppard and Whittle made a classic asylum argument, showing that the actions for which they were convicted in the UK are not crimes here. Why do the feds welcome criminals, while refusing asylum to men whose actions violated no American laws?

The answer is that Sheppard and Whittle are unapologetically white, and pro-Western. In contrast, our elites seek out and welcome Somalis, Sudanese, and other African Bantu and Moslems etc, because those groups are unapologetically non-white, and anti-Western.

Consider federal prosecutor Michelle Myers' kangaroo court reasoning in the Heretical 2's asylum case. Whittle: "[T]hat as U.S. Asylum laws were designed to protect refugees and we criticized refugees, we could not possibly be protected under said laws".

Myers also implied she supported EU crackdowns on freedom of speech, discreditable to her but irrelevant to American law.

My hunch: Myers is so used to "making her cases" through wielding the coercive power of the state like a brickbat, that she is incapable of making a legal argument. And since she had a like-minded judge, Rose Peters, she didn't have to. The logic of the Heretical 2's case meant nothing. (In contrast, in 2004, Judge Peters refused to allow the US government to deport an IRA man convicted of abetting the murder of two British soldiers.)

The EU-style crackdown on free speech is coming here. Militant homosexuals, illegal immigrants, racist blacks and their totalitarian supporters are presently championing a new, enhanced "hate crime" law, the "Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act" (LLEHCPA—H.R. 1913/S. 909) which, if passed, will degrade civil liberties in America to the level rest of the planet. (For more VDARE.COM coverage, see here and here).

Earlier, the bill was called the "Matthew Shepard Act". Matthew Shepard, 21, was a homosexual college student in Laramie, Wyoming, who in 1998 was robbed, tied to a fence, and pistol-whipped by white heterosexuals. Shepard later died.

The MSM and Hollywood have exploited Shepard ever since, asserting that he was somehow representative of an entire besieged demographic group whose persecutors were getting mere wrist slaps.

In fact, Shepard's killers are currently each serving two consecutive life sentences, in one case without the possibility of parole, i.e., as much or more punishment than they would have gotten under a hate crime law.

"Huh. Well…what injustice is this Matthew Shepard Act preventing, exactly? I thought it was just barely illegal to kill and torture gay people…but shockingly, it seems that the existing laws against murder and violence ALREADY cover gay people as well, and ostensibly, even handicapped people." [Preventing Another Great Travesty of Justice by The Kvetcher, May 13, 2009.]

Shepard's murder provided no rationale for a new law. But homosexuals wield incredible power within the MSM. In William McGowan's landmark 2001 book, Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, he juxtaposed the MSM's treatment of the Shepard murder with the 1999 rape-torture-murder, committed in Rogers, AK, by homosexual pedophiles against 13-year-old Jesse Dirkhising. In the first month after the Shepard murder, 3,007 stories were devoted to the case. In contrast, the Dirkhising rape-torture-murder story was "spiked", with only 46 stories appearing the first month after the murder.

The reason was simple: the Shepard case cast homosexuals in the role of victims. But the Dirkhising case cast homosexuals as the villains, which political correctness forbids.

Another notorious crime which was exploited by the "hate crime" lobby was the 1998 torture-dragging murder, in Jasper, Texas, of black James Byrd Jr., 49, by three white supremacists. (All four men were ex-cons, and had "served jail time together.") During the 2000 presidential campaign, the NAACP illegally campaigned on behalf of Democratic candidate Al Gore, running TV ads condemning then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush for not supporting "hate crime" legislation, which supposedly would have achieved justice for Byrd and black victims of similar crimes. 

But as Bush pointed out at the time, one of Byrd's killers had been sentenced to life in prison, the maximum he could have gotten under the proposed legislation, and the other two had been sentenced to death. Thus, the claim that heinous crimes committed by heterosexual white men against blacks were being inadequately punished was a lie.

With all due respect for the memory of James Byrd, a white Texan named Ken "Bimbo" Tillery was murdered near Jasper in 2002 in a similar fashion by three racist blacks. And I routinely report on black rape-torture-murders of whites so gruesome that they make the Byrd case look like a tea party. However, the MSM and political activists pushing for "hate crime" laws suppress news about the white victims of racist black killers; failing that, they deny that the whites were victims of "hate."

Critics point out that LLEHCPA will lead to the inflation of non-crimes and misdemeanors into felonies, the multiplication of charges and sentences upon conviction, the criminalization of (white) Christians and other people, based solely on their opinions, and will violate the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

The militants counter that the critics are crazy homophobes, and that the legislation will have no such effect. But that's what militant homosexuals said in England and Canada. And once those countries enacted "hate crime laws," Christians were persecuted for acting, or merely speaking as Christians. Militant homosexuals here speak fondly of those draconian laws. (Indeed, extant "anti-discrimination" laws in America have already been used to persecute Christians.)

Consider the ongoing hate campaign that California homosexual militants orchestrated, beginning last November, against whites who had financially contributed to the successful campaign for Prop. 8, which affirmed yet again, that marriage is between a man and a woman. (Never mind that it was black Christian support that carried the referendum.) Considering how hate-filled the militants already are, do we really want to put the power of Leviathan in their hands?

LLEHCPA also applies to the fictional category of "transgenders," those poor, deluded souls who are convinced that they are sexually the opposite of that which God or nature made them, and who have their bodies butchered and re-formed like so much chopped meat. Critics of the bill call it the "Pedophile Protection Act," arguing that it would also confer protected minority status on practitioners of anywhere from 30 to 547 sexual perversions ("paraphilia"), including incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, voyeurism and exhibitionism.

The bill's supporters have accused opponents of dishonesty. Yet its sponsors have refused to define "sexual orientation," and rejected an amendment expressly denying pedophilia status as a "sexual orientation."

An equally crazy consequence of LLEHCPA would be to codify the presently illegal practice by scores of cities and two states of granting sanctuary to illegal foreign invaders. Under LLEHCPA, illegal aliens would have superior status to Americans in federal law simply by virtue of being part of a "protected class".

"Hate crime" statutes are a logical consequence of the civil rights movement. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was supposed to guarantee equality under the law, was instead converted, via bureaucratic alchemy, into legal privileges for blacks (racial quotas), and later for other groups. And when a group gets one legal privilege, it soon demands more.

The civil rights laws created a parallel legal system of Shadow Law, which contradicted and usurped the U.S. Constitution. The Shadow Law system sees certain groups (e.g., blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals) as "protected classes," legally superior to non-protected classes (e.g., heterosexual whites, particularly heterosexual white boys and men). The notion of "protected classes" violates the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, and inexorably leads to additional, cascading abuses.

LLEHCPA also puts its favored groups above the law. A member of a "protected class" can assault a member of an unprotected class, and claim that he had merely responded to "hate speech" from the actual victim.

Such crimes have already been rampant for years. In virtually any large American city, racist blacks daily commit countless racially motivated attacks on whites and Asians, particularly in the public schools, which are typically racist torture centers. (See my chapter on education in the NPI report, The State of White America-2007, which is downloadable here.) Often, they shout racial epithets at their victims. And yet not only are the racist black criminals rarely arrested for their crimes (and virtually never for "hate crimes"), if their white victims defend themselves, the latter are often arrested.

Based on an unspoken agreement between racist blacks and white elites, the false claim by a black assailant that his white victim called him the "n-word" often serves as a "get-out-of-jail-free" card (see section, "The Magic Word" in my post on the Atlanta courtroom incident.)

LLEHCPA would also bury what is left of the prohibition against double jeopardy, which is anchored in the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and goes back to 355 B.C. in ancient Athens.

Over the past generation, federal civil rights prosecutions have routinely violated this prohibition, by taking someone who had been acquitted of a crime at the state level, and prosecuting him all over again at the federal level, under a different statute, under the sophistic theory of "dual sovereignty". According to "dual sovereignty" theory, each citizen owes allegiance to two sovereigns, state and federal. Because of the change in sovereignty, and because federal and state statutes are different laws, even though the identical act is again being prosecuted, one power may prosecute someone who has already been acquitted or convicted in the other power's court. Except that, under this theory, the two prosecutions are not for the identical act, because "a defendant who violates the laws of two sovereigns, even if by a single act, has committed two distinct offenses, punishable by both authorities."

Such casuistry effectively eliminates the prohibition against double jeopardy. But since prior to the 1960s there were relatively few federal laws, dual sovereignty theory was unable to cause much mischief. Beginning in the 1960s, however, Congress decided to remake America through massive, continuous legislating.

The Fifth Amendment provides three different protections against double jeopardy: Against being re-tried for a crime, after being acquitted of it; against being re-tried for a crime, after being convicted of its commission; and against being punished again for a crime for which one has already been punished. Civil rights prosecutions began the unconstitutional tradition of violating the first protection; LLEHCPA will eliminate the other two.

LLEHCPA provides for federally re-prosecuting—and thus re-punishing—someone who has already been convicted of the same crime at the state level, if prosecutors believe that he wasn't punished harshly enough the first time! Buried in the bill's labyrinthine subsections, in SEC. 6. PROHIBITION OF CERTAIN HATE CRIME ACTS.: 'Sec. 249. Hate crime acts: 3(b)2(D), we find as a justification for a federal "hate crime" prosecution,

'(D) the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.

LLEHCPA is thus paradise for federal prosecutors.

America is the only country with a First Amendment, which forbids criminalizing ideas, as opposed to actions.

Unfortunately, few judges or prosecutors appear to have read that document. Since VDARE's 1999 founding, it has chronicled the illegal imprisonment of Americans for exercising constitutionally-protected speech in Michigan, Idaho, Maryland and Louisiana.

And those were the good, old days of the creeping totalitarianism under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush! Today we are faced with the galloping totalitarianism of Barack Obama and Co. who, with help from our old friends the $PLC, have defined all political opponents to their right—i.e., millions of patriotic Americans—as "potential terrorists," as shown by the recent, $PLC-influenced MIAC and DHS reports on "Rightwing Extremism."

LLEHCPA's institutionalized violation of the First Amendment would have a chilling effect even on social policy debate. Consider a case which would appear to have nothing to do with First Amendment law: The Minority Mortgage Meltdown. And yet, as Steve Sailer wrote on May 17, "[T]he root cause [of the minority mortgage meltdown] was the elite's intoxication with the concept of diversity—and its concomitant suppression of dissent."

Any honest statement about diversity made by a member of a non-protected group —regarding racial and ethnic differences in education, illegitimacy, crime, creditworthiness, etc.—could be charged as a "hate crime", based on some member of a protected group, somewhere, having been assaulted, following the statement.

The next, inevitable step will be for the mere honest statement about diversity to be redefined into a "verbal assault" against all members of a protected class, and thus a "hate crime." Multiculturalists in academia and the MSM have worked for over 20 years to institutionalize the notion of "verbal assault," for just such a purpose.

Nat Hentoff titled one of his First Amendment books, The First Freedom because, if it is lost, all other freedoms will also be lost in its wake. Meanwhile, Obama and his comrades embrace real bomb throwers and the adherents of a philosophy determined to destroy Western Civilization.

Keep in mind that while I have enumerated some of the apparent problems with LLEHCPA, every law is inevitably extended and abused beyond its written meaning in ways that cannot be foreseen.

Thus, this bill is best thought of as a contemporary "Enabling Law", which would give Obama unlimited power.

Stephen Whittle and Simon Sheppard will probably be deported back to the UK and jail.

But how many American Sheppards and Whittles will there soon be?

Nicholas Stix [email him] lives in New York City, which he views from the perspective of its public transport system, experienced in his career as an educator. His weekly column appears at Men's News Daily and many other Web sites. He has also written for Middle American News, the New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Chronicles, Ideas on Liberty and the Weekly Standard. He maintains two blogs: A Different Drummer and Nicholas Stix, Uncensored.