Teen Vogue fearmongers using bogus school hate crime stats
February 19, 2024
In a recent piece, Teen Vogue weaponizes inaccurate FBI statistics on hate crimes in schools and colleges to indoctrinate its audience of impressionable teens and preteens into the false narrative that their lives are in danger all day, at least five days a week.
Features director Brittney McNamara’s article sells fears of racist, bigoted violence to readers who already believe they could be senselessly killed any day in a school shooting because Teen Vogue told them so.
Just as it has done with school shootings, the outlet blames an apparent rise in school hate crimes on Republicans, this time because of their (checks notes) school curricula.
“A special report from the FBI found that hate crimes in schools nearly doubled between 2018 and 2022, going from 700 reports at schools and colleges in 2018 to 1,336 reports in 2022,” McNamara writes. “Anti-Black hate crimes were by far the most common reported, followed by antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ hate crimes.”
To unsuspecting readers, that sounds exactly right. To them, Trump taking office in 2017 set off a tidal wave of murderous hatred for America’s most oppressed. Never mind that these same readers now see Jews as oppressors.
No one could use FBI data to support such a false narrative. Organizations like NPR and the Southern Poverty Law Center have every incentive to take FBI statistics seriously, but they haven’t done so for years, if ever. Even Biden’s Justice Department has said the stats from an ally – Chris Wray’s FBI – “cannot reliably be compared across years.”
Without facts, only an agenda remains. In this case, it’s to portray schools and colleges as ground zero for vicious hate crimes – including murder – against minorities of all stripes, playing on fears of school shootings that Teen Vogue already inculcated in its readers.
The stereotypical white male school shooter in their heads has been taught to target minorities by Republicans’ mainstream public school curricula. Such curricula, Teen Vogue says, amount to “the increasing politicization of America’s schools” that it blames for its misreported rise in school hate crimes.
The author explains that since fallen saint George Floyd’s passing, Republicans have responded to BLM and “anti-police violence movements” with racism, naturally, by banning the teaching of truly racist, anti-white Critical Race Theory.
And thanks to intersectionality, summer 2020’s racial obsession somehow turned Ron DeSantis and other Republican governors into would-be eradicators of queer people. They have since passed laws supporting parents’ rights in education – slurred as “Don’t Say Gay” laws – that have made LGBTQ people fresh targets for violent hate crimes.
Whether the readers are one of the many minorities whose lives are in danger or they’re an #ally of Teen Vogue’s politically engaged audience, they are galvanized into voting for Democrats like their or their friends’ lives depend on doing so.