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*Additional supporting information can be found in the full text tab for this article in theWileyOnlineLibrary at http:// onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim. 2020.58.issue-4/issuetoc. Wegratefully acknowledge thehardwork byDarenG.Fisher to assure that theGATE datawere accurately, validly, and reliably collected and codedby the interns he supervised.His endless and creative endeavors to access open-sourcematerialmade this researchpossible.Weare also grateful for the 39 START interns and Michelle Fabianiwhoworked tirelessly to code theGATEdata. Furthermore, we thankPhil Schrodt for his continued technical support.Additionally,we are grateful toMinXie and the astute anonymous reviewerswhohelped tomake this a better paper. Finally,wewould like to dedicate this research to the late Stephen E. Fienberg,whomentored the lead author in statistics, andhiswife, the late Joyce Abstract How do expressions of support or opposition by the U.S. federal government, influence violent hate crimes against specific racial and ethnic minorities? In this article, we test two hypotheses derived from Blalock’s (1967) conceptualization of intergroup power contests. The political threat hypothesis predicts that positive government attention toward specific groups would lead to more hateful violence directed against them. The emboldenment hypothesis predicts that negative government attention toward specific groups would also lead to more hateful violence directed against them. Using combined data on U.S. government actions and federal hate crime statistics from 1992 through 2012, vector autoregression models provide support for both hypotheses, depending on the protected group involved. We conclude that during this period, African Americans were more vulnerable to hate crimes motivated by political threat, and Latinx persons were more vulnerable to hate crimes motivated by emboldenment.