A Vermont jury convicted Jason Eaton of attempted murder Monday for shooting three Palestinian college students in Burlington, and the press is already warming up the machine to demand more hate crime laws and speech restrictions — the kind that punish thought, not just action.
Eaton, 51, faces up to life in prison for the November 2023 attack that left Hisham Awartani paralyzed from the waist down and wounded Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid. The verdict itself is straightforward: a man who shot three strangers will go to prison for a very long time. That's the justice system working as designed.
But the institutional press doesn't want the story to end at justice served. Both the Dallas Morning News and the Mercury News made sure to highlight that the shooting "spawned calls for a hate crime investigation" — before quietly acknowledging that no hate crime charges were ever filed. The Mercury News and the Dallas Morning News used nearly identical language, noting that "questions persisted about whether anti-Palestinian animus, an altered mental state or something else had compelled Eaton to open fire."
Here's what the outlets buried: Eaton's own defense was that he was psychotic. He claimed the CIA and Mossad were transmitting orders to him via FM radio. His lawyer, Joshua O'Hara, argued he suffered a delusional break after losing his job at a credit union two weeks before the shooting. The jury rejected the insanity defense, but the facts underlying it — a man hearing radio commands from intelligence agencies — hardly paint the picture of a clear-eyed ideologue the hate crime crusaders need him to be.
The victims testified they were speaking Arabic and English and two were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves. Awartani said Eaton was standing on a porch and walked toward them before opening fire. Prosecutors found three shotguns and the Ruger .380 handgun used in the shooting in Eaton's apartment; he'd purchased the handgun seven months earlier.
The existing attempted murder statute delivered a conviction carrying up to life in prison. So what exactly would hate crime charges add — except the precedent that the government can sort your motivations into approved and disapproved categories?
That's the stake. Every time the press flogs a conviction into a demand for new hate crime enhancements, the net around lawful speech tightens. Prosecutors didn't need a hate crime statute to put Eaton away. They had the facts, the weapon, the victims, and a jury of twelve Americans who reached a verdict in hours. The system worked. The question is why that's never enough for the people who want to police what you think, not just what you do.
Eaton's sentencing date hasn't been set. Watch what gets said between now and then.
