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A quarter-century ago this week, Nevada Newspaper Hall of Famer Guy Richardson penned our cover story. The topic was hate crimes.
Here’s the first portion of the piece:
Local headlines scream hate.
A synagogue firebombed. Gay people beaten and murdered. A rabbi threatened with death. Two men beaten with baseball bats at a Sparks mosque. Young black men arrested in Reno, allegedly only because they are young and black. A Tongan using an ax to kill a University of Nevada, Reno, cop because, in his words, “I wanted to kill someone white.”
The list of Reno-Sparks hate crimes in the last few years could go on and on, but you get the idea. Have we gone nuts? Has Northern Nevada fallen into a steaming swamp of hate crime?
As always, there’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is that Reno-Sparks isn’t any worse than the rest of the country, according to National Conference for Community and Justice Executive Director Christiana Bratiotis in Reno. The bad news is that the rest of the country is pretty bad.
Reno hasn’t seen anyone dragged to death behind a pickup truck, but gay teen Derek Henkle charged that two boys at Galena High School tried to lasso him to drag him behind a pickup. Henkle said he’s alive today only because his fellow students were lousy at roping.
Most hate crimes, here and across the nation, aren’t done by ideologically committed, cold-blooded bigots, but by young men seeking a thrill-fix of violence. They commit fully 60 percent of hate crimes, according to a Northeastern University (Boston) study.
“There seems to be a gender specificity to these crimes,” said Dr. Viktoria Hertling, founder and director of UNR’s Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace studies. “If you look at demonstrations, it’s always men in the front throwing, kicking, screaming.”
That’s true not just in the United States, said Hertling. “It’s a global cultural phenomenon.”
Humans have been knocking each other off ever since Cain whacked Abel because God liked Abel better. Groups of prehistoric humans hated the humans in the next valley because they looked or acted a bit different. In historic times, various human groups have tried to wipe out other human groups—and have been frighteningly successful at it.
Christian crusaders killed everyone indiscriminately, including other Christians. Everyone picked on the Jews, at least until the Jews took over the former Palestine, and some Jews started being scary themselves. Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League, who visited Reno a year ago, has said: “I want for every Jew, a .22—keep alive with a .45.”
So. We are all guilty. We are also all victims. …
A violent incident in mid-March rocked Northern Nevada’s Muslim community. Two young men walked up to Dr. Eltag Mirghani, 48, and Muhammad Sanad, 46, in the parking lot of a Sparks mosque on Oddie Boulevard. Both men were beaten with a baseball bat. Mirghani was hospitalized and in a coma. His condition has since been upgraded to serious as he slowly recovers. Sanad’s arm was broken. At first, the crime had the earmarks of a hate crime—the attackers seemed to have made no demands of the victims, and the attack happened next to a place of worship.
California teen Scott Anthony Cannady and David Nollette, 15, of Reno, are being charged with attempted murder and robbery. The Sparks Police Department has since announced that it wasn’t a hate crime after all.
A little later, Richardson called out the hateful content on Michael Savage’s radio show, which was broadcast locally on KKOH:
Hate speech sells.
Often, the innocent pay.
A week before Mirghani and Sanad were beaten with a baseball bat in Sparks, syndicated talk show host Michael Savage of “The Savage Nation” railed about Muslims. “Show me one Muslim country that has the freedom we have in the U.S.,” he sneered as part of his diatribe on Reno’s KKOH-AM, one of the stations that airs his show.
Of course, it would be hard to draw a direct causal connection here. But it does illustrate a mindset. Savage calls Third World countries “Turd World countries.” Does this remind you of white extremists who call people of African descent “mud people”?
But even if the attack in Sparks wasn’t itself a hate crime, Savage’s words add to a very real atmosphere of anti-Muslim hate in the United States.
On April 5, Savage asked his radio audience: If the United States and China went to war “as the Red devils seem to want,” should Americans of Chinese ancestry be jailed?
Guess what Savage thought. This is a man who earlier said: “It’s time for hate. I’m sick of love, love, love.”
Savage’s syndicated show is popular. San Jose Mercury News radio columnist Brad Kava called Savage, whose real name is Michael Weiner, “the slimiest guy in talk radio.”
Radio stations announce that the opinions of talk show hosts do not necessarily reflect those of the staff and management. In the case of Savage, that’s probably right. However, you don’t have to agree with hate to use it to sell air time.
Let’s be clear—we are not talking about people like Rusty Humphries or Michael Reagan, both right-wingers with KKOH talk radio shows. Humphries and Reagan both avoid severe hate speech and bring up short most call-ins that attempt to spew hate.
Savage, however, is vicious. He has a constitutional right to say what he does, but no radio station is obliged to air his sewage.
Except, alas, hate sells. And the innocent pay.
Let’s see where we stand today, 25 years later:
• Michael Savage no longer has a syndicated radio show … but he’s got a weekly show on Newsmax. (In his latest show, he railed against birthright citizenship, leading off with a quip about the ethnicity of the ACLU attorney who argued the matter in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.) He also does a podcast—with Alex Jones.
• KKOH is still a thing, and runs syndicated programs by Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, who have both made ridiculous and hateful claims about Muslims (and other minority groups) in America.
• Local headlines still scream hate. I remain deeply disturbed by what some Reno High School students did last year (and I am not sure it was formally classified as a “hate crime”).
On a state level, hate crimes are on the rise—and significantly so.
The Nevada Department of Public Safety documented 284 hate crimes in 2025—a whopping 76.4 percent increase over 2024 (161), and well more than double the number in 2023 (113). The increase even spurred Attorney General Aaron Ford to create a task force and a reporting hotline.
—Jimmy Boegle
Read this newsletter at RenoNR.com!