It’s Pride Month. Have you noticed?

If it’s eluded you to this point, you must not have plugged the word “pride” into Google recently, and so missed the glitzy display cartoon marchers bearing rainbow flags and confetti that pops up as soon as you do.

A big part of the mission of mainstream media in June is to remind you endlessly of how important it is that we have a Pride Month. And one of the reasons we need it is that American society is so dreadfully hateful toward LGBTQ people.

Unfortunately, the hate is so great that the existence of Pride Month seems to be doing nothing to mitigate it, as things are only getting worse. For this Pride Month, the Department of Homeland Security and the Human Rights Campaign—in what one suspects must have been a coordinated operation—have each released statements indicating that LGBTQ people are experiencing unprecedented levels of threat and oppression in the U.S.

The DHS reports that threats against those who identify as LGBTQ are intensifying. As part of the evidence to support that claim, we have this statement from a DHS official: “High-profile attacks against schools and faith-based institutions like the recent shooting in Nashville have historically served as inspiration for individuals to conduct copycat attacks.”

But work through that, if you will, to fully savor the logic. The official is insinuating part of the threat to LGBTQ folks is possible “copycat attacks” modeled on examples like the Nashville attack. Which was an assault by a self-identified trans person against a conservative Christian school. (And the self-identified trans mass murderer left an ideological manifesto explaining the logic of the attack which has two months later still not made it before the eyes of the public.) An attack by an LGBTQ-identified person against non-LGBTQ conservative Christians is thus presented as evidence of an increased threat to…LGBTQ people.

The Human Rights Campaign report is equally alarmist. HRC president Kelley Robinson is quoted as follows:

LGBTQ+ Americans are living in a state of emergency. The multiplying threats facing millions in our community are not just perceived—they are real, tangible and dangerous…. In many cases they are resulting in violence against LGBTQ+ people, forcing families to uproot their lives and flee their homes in search of safer states, and triggering a tidal wave of increased homophobia and transphobia that puts the safety of each and every one of us at risk.

But what are the data on actual physical violence against LGBTQs? None are given in any of the reporting of the HRC’s statement in the mainstream media. There is no evidence of this information in the HRC’s report on their own webpage either, so there were evidently no data to report. All one finds is a list of states that have asserted that biological men are prohibited from using women’s public restrooms; or moved to ensure that only biological girls and women participate in school sporting activity designated for biological girls and women; or refused to cater to activist demands that people use pronouns demanded by trans people even if they are demonstrably inconsistent with biological sex; or acted to prevent public schools from bringing trans pornographers to perform their sex club dance acts for students. This effort by states to protect the rights and safety of girls, women, and young students—and not, say, any evidence of greater violence against homosexuals and trans people—is what HRC is telling the public constitutes a “real, tangible, and dangerous” threat to LGBTQ people.

The Human Rights Campaign view of things, then, is roughly this: Unless American society as a whole immediately does everything desired by the most radical activists in the LGBTQ demographic, LGBTQ people as a group are in very, very grave danger.

A look at hate crime data is helpful for understanding just how out of touch with reality these alarmist claims about LGBTQ oppression are. The FBI is constantly expanding its definitions of hate crimes, so it is difficult to get an accurate read of how this is changing over time, but in 2021, the most recent year for which we have FBI data on this, there were a total of around 2,000 such crimes committed that might fit the LGBTQ profile. The FBI lists hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity (not clear how these last two are differentiated). Together, these three categories make up only about 20 percent of total hate crimes.

Are 2,000 such crimes in a year, some substantial percentage of which involve verbal or property offenses and not physical attacks, a “tidal wave”? Some estimates show that perhaps as many as 7 percent of the American population identifies as some category of LGBTQ, which would give us a raw number of about 24,000,000 people. So 2,000 crimes against a population of that size gives odds of around 1 in 12,000 that such a crime will happen to you. This is, for the activists and their media supporters, a “tidal wave.” Just to give you an idea of the level of risk, here’s a comparative data point: All Americans face a 1 in 93 lifetime risk of dying in an automobile accident.

HRC also claims that families are fleeing en masse to escape all this oppression. What is the evidence of this claim? None is given, and reporters ask for none.

But here’s another intriguing thing about the FBI Hate Crimes data that is never properly reported by mainstream media. Whites are significantly underrepresented as perpetrators of hate crimes, and blacks are significantly overrepresented. Whites make up somewhere around 65 percent of the American population, but only 52 percent of hate crime offenders. Blacks are 14 percent of the overall population, but nearly 22 percent of hate crime offenders.

It is of significant interest that when media sources do talk about the racial demography of offenders, they always do it in a way that insinuates that whites are disproportionately committing them, which is, as just indicated, utterly false. Here, for example, is a typical story, which notes that “[o]f the known offenders, more than half were white,” and stops there with no mention of the fact that this is in fact an indication of an underrepresentation of whites as offenders.

June is almost over, and the drumbeat of news about Pride and the danger of hate threatens to end soon. But, it is good to report, transgender “Admiral” Rachel Levine of the Public Health Service Commissioned Core has called for this to be a “Summer of Pride.” So we can look forward to at least another three months or so of confetti, rainbow flags, and tragic admonitions about gender “refugees.” We need it.