As we mourn the victims of yet another attack on the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs this month, we should avoid considering it an isolated incident. This was a foreseeable consequence of a deliberate and ongoing dehumanization campaign. From message boards and social media, to classrooms, churches and statehouses, the LGBTQ community is constantly made into a target of violence and hate, even here in Hawaii.

Although we tend to think of Hawaii as a state with a diverse culture and significant gun control legislation, local hate groups have still found a niche in the darker corners of the internet. For instance, one message board focused on Hawaii Second Amendment rights has facilitated the trading of firearms by the very same people spreading anti- LGBTQ hate speech. Boards like this incite radicalization of their members, and some groups inevitably put hateful ideology into action.

For example: Nicholas Ochs, leader of the Hawaii Proud Boys, recently pled guilty to a felony charge for breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Another group, called the Knights of Aloha, has organized several rallies and vehicle convoys around Oahu to spread prejudice and QAnon conspiracy theories.

Most of these groups do not openly advertise the full extent of their hate to outsiders, but their online discussions tell a very different story. Sexual orientation discrimination is combined with other longstanding prejudices like racism, sexism and antisemitism in a cesspool of ignorance and bigotry. They sometimes go as far as saying that LGBTQ people should be killed or imprisoned simply for not being straight and cisgender. Their members promote conspiracy theories and deliberately dehumanize the LGBTQ community to portray it as a scapegoat and mark it as a target of violence.

These hateful narratives are not limited to obscure forums, and many have been taken on by national figures in right-wing media and politics. Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host, has repeatedly spread some of their talking points to millions of viewers on prime-time television. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz have consistently worked to entrench anti-LGBTQ hate into state and federal legislation. Instead of condemning the ideology that stokes the flames of domestic terrorism, these public figures use their positions of power and supposed credibility to give it a false image of legitimacy.

This peddling of hateful rhetoric by political leaders puts innocent people in danger. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, between 2017 and 2020, people who identified as LGBTQ were more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than those who identified as straight, and transgender persons were 2.5 times as likely to be victims as cisgender persons (bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vvsogi1720.pdf).

In Hawaii, approximately 1 in 5 hate crimes from 2018 to 2020 was motivated by a bias against the victim’s sexual orientation (www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/state-specific-information/hawaii).

Chances are, you have witnessed anti-LGBTQ hate yourself, if not through overt acts of violence, then by words shrouded by a joking tone or a supposed religious conviction. Many of us do not know what it is like to have that hate directed at us, but so many do; our friends and our family who have to put up with an onslaught of harassment and threats for their simple act of existing.

Whether you consider yourself an ally or have not yet taken a stand, I challenge you to push back against the hate wherever you see it. Question the jokes and the bigotry. Confront the endorsement of hate. Show them that Hawaii is a place of aloha and acceptance, and that hate has no place here.

Jordan Rynning is a U.S. Navy veteran with a background in military intelligence analysis and a political science degree from University of Hawaii-Manoa.