The massacres at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area this week,
leaving eight human beings dead, others injured, and their families
scarred, were horrifying. Read this deeply moving story about the son of one of the women killed to remind yourself of this. It’s brutal. The grief will spread and resonate some more.
But
this story has also been deeply instructive about our national
discourse and the state of the American mainstream and elite media. This
story’s coverage is proof, it seems to me, that American journalists
have officially abandoned the habit of attempting any kind of
“objectivity” in reporting these stories. We are now in the enlightened
social justice world of “moral clarity” and “narrative-shaping.”
Here’s
the truth: We don’t yet know why this man did these horrible things.
It’s probably complicated, or, as my therapist used to say,
“multi-determined.” That’s why we have thorough investigations and
trials in America. We only have one solid piece of information as to
motive, which is the confession by the mass killer to law enforcement:
that he was a religious fundamentalist who was determined to live up to
chastity and repeatedly failed, as is often the case. Like the 9/11
bombers or the mass murderer at the Pulse nightclub, he took out his angst
on the source of what he saw as his temptation, and committed mass
murder. This is evil in the classic fundamentalist sense: a perversion
of religion and sexual repression into violence.
We should not
take the killer’s confession as definitive, of course. But we can probe
it — and indeed, his story is backed up by acquaintances and friends and
family. The New York Times originally ran one piece reporting this out. The Washington Post also followed up, with one piece
citing contemporaneous evidence of the man’s “religious mania” and
sexual compulsion. It appears that the man frequented at least two of
the spas he attacked. He chose the spas, his ex roommates said, because
he thought they were safer than other ways to get easy sex. Just this
morning, the NYT ran a second piece which confirms
that the killer had indeed been in rehab for sexual impulses, was a
religious fanatic, and his next target was going to be “a business tied
to the pornography industry.”
We have yet to find any
credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in this man’s history.
Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates
say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women
were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were
just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out
more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias
points away, not toward it.
Get the Dish every Friday
And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of
the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white
supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen!
One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory
would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one
of their columnists denounced
reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper,
because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT
ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.
Mass killers, if they are motivated by bigotry or hate, tend to let the world know:
The
suspected attacker in Pittsburgh allegedly said he wanted to “kill
Jews” while rampaging inside a synagogue. Police said the man charged
with killing people at an El Paso Walmart told them that he was
targeting “Mexicans” that day. And the man who massacred Black
parishioners inside a Charleston church detailed his racist motivations
at length.
This mass murderer in Atlanta actually denied any such motive, and, to repeat myself, there is no evidence for it
— and that has been true from the very start. And yet, a friend
forwarded me the note swiftly sent to students and faculty at Harvard,
which sums up the instant view of our elite:
Many of
us woke up yesterday to the horrific news of the vicious and deadly
attack in Atlanta, the latest in a wave of increasing violence targeting
the Asian, Asian-American, and Pacific Islander community … This
violence has a history. From Chinese Exclusion to the nativist rhetoric
amplified during the pandemic, anti-Asian hostility has deep roots in
American culture.
And on and on. It was almost as if
they had a pre-existing script to read, whatever the facts of the case!
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the most powerful journalist at the New York Times,
took to Twitter in the early morning of March 17 to pronounce:
“Last night’s shooting and the appalling rise in anti-Asian violence
stem from a sick society where nationalism has been stoked and
normalized.” Ibram Kendi tweeted:
“Locking arms with Asian Americans facing this lethal wave of
anti-Asian terror. Their struggle is my struggle. Our struggle is
against racism and White Supremacist domestic terror.”
When the cops reported the killer’s actual confession, left-Twitter went nuts. One gender studies professor recited the litany:
“The refusal to name anti-Asianess [sic], racism, white supremacy,
misogyny, or class in this is whiteness doing what it always does around
justifying its death-dealing … To ignore the deeply racist and
misogynistic history of hypersexualization of Asian women in this
‘explication’ from law enforcement of what emboldened this killer is
also a willful erasure.”
In The Root, the real reason
for the murders was detailed: “White supremacy is a virus that, like
other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to
infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it,
extract it, and kill it.”
Trevor Noah insisted
that the killer’s confession was self-evidently false: “You killed six
Asian people. Specifically, you went there. Your murders speak louder
than your words. What makes it even more painful is that we saw it
coming. We see these things happening. People have been warning, people
in the Asian communities have been tweeting, they’ve been saying,
‘Please help us. We’re getting punched in the street. We’re getting
slurs written on our doors.’” Noah knew the killer’s motive more surely
than the killer himself.
None of them mentioned that he killed two
white people as well — a weird thing for a white supremacist to do —
and injured a Latino. None pointed out that the connection between the
spas was that the killer had visited them. None explained why, if he
were associating Asian people with Covid19, he would nonetheless expose
himself to the virus by having sex with them, or regard these spas as
“safer” than other ways to have quick sex.
They didn’t because,
in their worldview, they didn’t need to. What you see here is social
justice ideology insisting, as Dean Baquet temporarily explained, that intent doesn’t matter. What matters is impact.
The individual killer is in some ways irrelevant. His intentions are
not material. He is merely a vehicle for the structural oppressive
forces critical theorists believe in. And this “story” is what the media
elites decided to concentrate on: the thing that, so far as we know, didn’t happen.
We
don’t know all the nuances of this case. Again, we shouldn’t take a
killer’s confession at face value. Or his roommates’ memories. We may
yet be surprised by some other factor — including perhaps anti-Asian
bias that has so far been missing. (One rumor aired in Korean media, but
unconfirmed anywhere else, is that the killer conveniently cried “I
want to kill all Asians!” before the murder spree. )
But notice
how CRT operates. The only evidence it needs it already has. Check out
the identity of the victim or victims, check out the identity of the
culprit, and it’s all you need to know. If the victims are white, they
don’t really count. Everything in America is driven by white
supremacist hate of some sort or other. You can jam any fact, any
phenomenon, into this rubric in order to explain it.
The only complexity the CRT crowd will admit is multiple, “intersectional” forms of oppression: so this case is about misogyny and
white supremacy. The one thing they cannot see are unique individual
human beings, driven by a vast range of human emotions, committing
crimes with distinctive psychological profiles, from a variety of
motives, including prejudices, but far, far more complicated than that.
There’s
a reason for this shift. Treating the individual as unique, granting
him or her rights, defending the presumption of innocence, relying on
provable, objective evidence: these core liberal principles are
precisely what critical theory aims to deconstruct. And the elite media
is in the vanguard of this war on liberalism.
This isn’t in any
way to deny increasing bias against Asian-Americans. It’s real and it’s
awful. Asians are targeted by elite leftists, who actively discriminate against them in higher education, and attempt to dismantle
the merit-based schools where Asian-American students succeed —
precisely and only because too many Asians are attending. And
Asian-Americans are also often targeted by envious or opportunistic
criminal non-whites in their neighborhoods. For Trump to give these
forces a top-spin with the “China virus” made things even worse, of
course. For a firsthand account of a Chinese family’s experience of
violence and harassment, check out this piece.
The
more Asian-Americans succeed, the deeper the envy and hostility that
can be directed toward them. The National Crime Victimization Survey notes
that “the rate of violent crime committed against Asians increased from
8.2 to 16.2 per 1000 persons age 12 or older from 2015 to 2018.” Hate
crimes? “Hate crime incidents against Asian Americans had an annual rate
of increase of approximately 12% from 2012 to 2014. Although there was a
temporary decrease from 2014 to 2015, anti-Asian bias crimes had
increased again from 2015 to 2018.”
Asians are different
from other groups in this respect. “Comparing with Black and Hispanic
victims, Asian Americans have relatively higher chance to be victimized
by non-White offenders (25.5% vs. 1.0% for African Americans and 18.9%
for Hispanics). … Asian Americans have higher risk to be persecuted by
strangers … are less likely to be offended in their residence … and are
more likely to be targeted at school/college.” Of those committing
violence against Asians, you discover
that 24 percent such attacks are committed by whites; 24 percent are
committed by fellow Asians; 7 percent by Hispanics; and 27.5 percent by
African-Americans. Do the Kendi math, and you can see why Kendi’s “White
Supremacist domestic terror” is not that useful a term for describing
anti-Asian violence.
But what about hate crimes specifically? In
general, the group disproportionately most likely to commit hate crimes
in the US are African-Americans. At 13 percent of the population,
African Americans commit 23.9 percent of hate crimes.
But hate specifically against Asian-Americans in the era of Trump and
Covid? Solid numbers are not yet available for 2020, which is the year
that matters here. There’s data, from 1994 to 2014, that finds little racial skew among those committing anti-Asian hate crimes. Hostility comes from every other community pretty equally.
The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data
on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York
City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They
record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were
African-American, two Black-Hispanic, two white, and five white
Hispanics. Of the black offenders, a majority were women. The bulk
happened last March, and they petered out soon after. If you drill down
on some recent incidents in the news in California, and get past the
media gloss to the actual mugshots, you also find as many black as white
offenders.
This doesn’t prove much either, of course. Anti-Asian
bias, like all biases, can infect anyone of any race, and the sample
size is small and in one place. But it sure complicates the “white
supremacy” case that the mainstream media simply assert as fact.
And, given the headlines, the other thing missing is a little perspective. Here’s a word cloud
of the victims of hate crimes in NYC in 2020. You can see that
anti-Asian hate crimes are dwarfed by those against Jews, and many other
minorities. And when you hear about a 150 percent rise in one year,
it’s worth noting that this means a total of 122 such incidents in a country of 330 million, of which 19 million are Asian. Even if we bring this number up to more than 3,000
incidents from unreported and far less grave cases, including
“shunning”, it’s small in an aggregate sense. A 50 percent increase in
San Francisco from 2019 - 2020, for example, means the number of actual
crimes went from 6 to 9.
Is it worse than ever? No. 2020 saw 122 such hate incidents. In 1996, the number was 350.
Many incidents go unreported, of course, and hideous comments, slurs
and abuse don’t count as hate “crimes” as such. I’m not discounting the
emotional scars of the kind of harassment this report cites. I’m sure they’ve increased. They’re awful. Despicable. Disgusting.
But
the theory behind hate crimes law is that these crimes matter more
because they terrify so many beyond the actual victim. And so it seems
to me that the media’s primary role in cases like these is providing
some data and perspective on what’s actually happening, to allay
irrational fear. Instead they contribute to the distortion by
breathlessly hyping one incident without a single provable link to any
go this — and scare the bejeezus out of people unnecessarily.
The
media is supposed to subject easy, convenient rush-to-judgment
narratives to ruthless empirical testing. Now, for purely ideological
reasons, they are rushing to promote ready-made narratives, which
actually point away from the empirical facts. To run sixteen separate
pieces on anti-Asian white supremacist misogynist hate based on one
possibly completely unrelated incident is not journalism. It’s fanning
irrational fear in the cause of ideological indoctrination. And it
appears to be where all elite media is headed.
