America is going to a bad totalitarian place at an incredible speed.

A California duo was charged with a hate crime for defacing a newly painted Black Lives Matter mural outside of a courthouse, officials announced Tuesday.

Painting over a political message you oppose is not a hate crime. Authorities who support that message using hate crime regulations to suppress protests are blatantly using the law to enforce their political affiliation. 

As Anderson painted within the lines, allowing the letters “B” and “L” to remain visible, Nelson told onlookers: “we’re sick of this narrative.”

“The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism,” Nelson declared. “It’s a lie.”

“I said no one wants Black Lives Matter here!” he added. “That’s what I said. All Lives Matter, you punk.”

This might at most be vandalism. It’s not a hate crime. There’s no expression of hatred or hostility for black people. There is a rejection of Black Lives Matter, a political movement.

Conflating the political movement with black people and then treating hostility to BLM as a hate crime makes opposition to a political movement into a crime. Treating it as one, while members of the racist Black Lives Matter movement tear down statues and terrorize people, is enlisting local authorities in that same campaign of political terror, punishing people for the political content of the vandalism, rather than for the act itself.

Anyone who engages in vandalism ought to be treated the same regardless of their political motives.

Instead, authorities are protecting BLM vandals while illegally throwing the book at opponents of BLM.

This is the same thing that blue state authorities did when they ruthlessly went after Reopen protests, while endorsing BLM riots.

There are effectively two justice systems and two sets of laws now for people based on the political context of their crime. 

Anderson and Nelson were charged with vandalism, violation of civil rights and possession of tools to commit vandalism of graffiti.

2 out of 3 of those charges are illegitimate, a troubling precedent, and a reminder that the country is going to a very bad place that Russia, China, and Cuba have gone to before us.