We’re all familiar with the time-honored creed, “Snitches get stitches.” In states like Oregon, it turns out they get taxpayer-funded therapy.
That’s according to the Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium, who investigated the “bias response hotlines” popping up in states and cities across the country. In Oregon, for example, “trauma-informed operators” overseen by the state’s justice department field calls outlining “bias incidents”—cases of “non-criminal” speech allegedly motivated by prejudice or hate, like “racist images” or “offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.”
Sibarium called the Oregon hotline to report a fictitious incident in which he said he was a Muslim concerned about the “genocide” in Gaza and felt “targeted” by an Israeli flag on his neighbor’s front door. It took just 20 minutes for an operator to log the incident in a state database as a “warning sign.” The operator went on to suggest installing security cameras. “He also informed this reporter that, ‘as a victim of a bias incident,’ he could apply for taxpayer-funded therapy through the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, which covers counseling costs for bias incidents as well as crimes,” Sibarium writes.
Similar reporting systems are up and running in Connecticut, Vermont, Philadelphia, and Maryland. In the City of Brotherly Love, residents can fill out an online form that asks for the “exact address,” name, and gender identity of the alleged offender. The city uses that information to “contact the offending party and try to do training so that it doesn’t happen again,” according to a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations.
“The systems, which include hotlines and online portals, resemble the bias response teams commonplace on college campuses, which allow students to report each other, anonymously and without verification, for ideological faux pas,” Sibarium notes. “What sets the state-run systems apart are their ties to law enforcement.”
Hellbound and Down 