You're getting warm. I think someone else properly defined a hate crime as being against a previously defined"protected class" of people. In this fictitious scenario, maybe the GR are a "protected class", but maybe they're not, since the ATFCE (ostensibly a government agency) seems to have a license to kill them…

I think you clarified the confusion when you stated, "She was not a minority (other than in her affiliation to the GR). At least in the USA in 2014." That is the crux of the matter - this fictional story does not actually take place "in the USA in 2014".

I wonder if the reviewer would have thought it was a hate crime if the person tied to the tree and then stoned was the laundry clerk? She began this line of thinking, or I would not otherwise pose the question.

Jeez! Why in Hell's name would someone want to inject politics into THIS debate? Go onto some political discussion site. Your political opinions are yours. This discussion, however is way off the subject of a fictitious show, and hung up on the hang ups of the reviewer and, apparently, "Down Lowbama" (very original…

Once again, this is a FICTIONAL situation. Definitions that apply to us in the real world might not apply in a world that doesn't really exist, except in the imagination of the person(s) who wrote it. So quibbling over the definition of what is or is not a "hate crime" is kind of futile.

It's not very Zen-like to break into people's homes and steal the pictures of their "departed" loved ones. That is the cruelest thing I have seen the GR do in the episodes so far, but not the ONLY cruel thing. I'm not betting on them getting any more "sympathetic", either. That scene with Laurie blowing the whistle…

I'm a white male, and they're not for me, and I don't get the show yet, either. I don't think it has anything to do with race, religion, or anything like that. They are taking a FICTIONAL event that NEVER REALLY HAPPENED and hypothesizing how people might react to not knowing WHAT happened. Maybe the object is to…

Who's Matt?