It is inevitable that anytime there is a mass shooting here in the U.S., Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media are on the edge of their seats, hoping to be able to blame Republicans for allegedly motivating the perpetrator to commit the heinous crime.
As per the norm, no one waits for the investigation to play out. Before we even know the victims’ names and the shooter(s), speculation runs high on the left that the killer(s) was probably white and had a library full of right-wing books and/or wore a MAGA hat.
Absent knowledge of the killer’s library collection or hat choices, the left will pounce on the perp’s race, as long as he or she is white. They use it as evidence that the murderer is a right-wing kook and a white supremacist if the crime victims are minorities.
The latter scenario is playing out with the Georgia spa murders that took place two days ago. 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, who is white, has been charged with a total of eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault in the shootings, which took place shortly after 5 pm at three massage parlors in and around the Atlanta area.
Six of the eight murder victims were Asian-American.
As Mary reported yesterday, Long reportedly confessed to the killings and told investigators that he blamed sex addiction for his actions. He did not blame race.
People who knew Long before Tuesday’s mass shooting confirmed in interviews that Long viewed himself as a sex addict who needed help for his addiction:
Robert Aaron Long … had been in rehab for sex addiction and was wracked with guilt about his sexual urges, according to two people who lived with him in transitional housing.[…]Long was deeply religious and could not control his desire to visit massage parlors and engage in sexual acts, something that sent him into deep bouts of depression, said Tyler Bayless, who lived with Long for six months in 2019 and 2020 at Maverick Recovery Center in Roswell, Georgia. Long would frequently relapse, then express guilt because of his Christian faith, Bayless said.[…]Bayless’ account, was mirrored by another former housemate, Bronson Lillemon, who said he lived with Long for three months in 2020.“He felt a lot of guilt, and a lot of shame,” Lillemon said. “I don’t know the specific massage parlors that he went to, but I would assume that the ones he shot up were the ones he went to.”
Lillemon and Bayless said they’d never heard Long disparage or use racially offensive language toward or about non-white people. They also said he didn’t even own a smartphone.
Though we’re waiting to learn more about what may have motivated Long, that hasn’t stopped Democratic members of Congress and the mainstream media from assigning political motivation and predictably lining up to blame former President Trump for the Tuesday murders:
“We think that this is the culmination of a whole year’s worth of hate stoked by the xenophobia of Donald Trump,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:
Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) immediately blamed “white supremacy,” which to the left is code for “blame Trump”:
Naturally, media hall monitor Brian Stelter (D-CNN) invoked Trump into the debate, too:
The big problem for the “blame Trump” crowd is twofold. For starters, and as I noted above, there is no evidence, zero, nada 48 hours into the investigation that the suspect was an avid Trump fan or own a collection of books from right-wing media figures. And even if he were, that in and of itself would not necessarily establish motivation.
The other big problem with the left jumping to conclusions is that they are often wrong about the supposed political motivations of the perps in violent crimes against Asian-Americans. As Mary noted a couple of days ago, the two suspects in the vicious murder of an elderly Asian-American man as he took his morning walk in Oakland, California, are black. Before the suspects were known, the left was busy blaming – you guessed it – Trump.
In addition to that, a black man – Yahya Muslim – was charged last month in a series of violent attacks that targeted elderly Asian-Americans in Oakland’s Chinatown district.
Related to that, what is not often mentioned when the media writes about the rise in violent assaults against Asian-Americans since the pandemic started is where the vast majority of them are happening:
The NYPD reported that hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian sentiment jumped 1,900% in New York City in 2020. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, received 2,808 reports of anti-Asian discrimination between March 19 and December 31, 2020. …. While anti-Asian violence has taken place nationwide and particularly in major cities, the uptick in attacks in 2021 has been particularly focused in the Bay Area, especially in San Francisco and Oakland’s Chinatowns.
The discerning reader will note that New York City, San Francisco, and Oakland are not exactly MAGA hotbeds.
So-called social justice warriors on the left desperately want the police and investigators to assign racial motivations to Long. They don’t do it in the interests of making minority communities safer but because in doing so, it would allow them to further paint an entire race with a broad brush for the actions of a few – and craft government policy based on that. Simultaneously, these radical left-wing groups and their Democratic allies frequently ignore the numerous cases where the perps aren’t white because that doesn’t fit in with their narratives.
Each case is different, of course, but making sweeping generalizations before all facts are known – as the left and media are doing this week in response to the Georgia murders – does more harm than good and further fans the flames of racial tensions and resentments.
Which, come to think of it, is precisely why they do it in the first place.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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