The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Atlanta: The Backstory Emerges

Posted on | March 21, 2021 | Comments Off on Atlanta: The Backstory Emerges

The bottom line is that anti-Asian racial prejudice was not the motive for the shooting rampage at three Atlanta-area massage parlors.

The Washington Post assigned a team of reporters to do a full background profile on gunman Robert Aaron Long. The resulting article is nearly 2,000 words, with four bylines and five other reporters listed as contributors. This is the kind of all-out journalistic blitz that major news organizations rarely do on any crime story, which shows what a priority it was for the editors. Here is the summary paragraph:

But over the past four years, Long’s life turned toward the tumultuous. He started college classes and left after one year. He believed he was straying from his faith, telling friends that he was fixated on sex to the extent that he thought he was addicted. His relationship with a girlfriend collapsed after she found out that he frequented massage businesses, according to his roommate. His bond with his parents frayed; on the night before the shootings, they threw him out of their house, according to police.

Being kicked out by his parents seems to have been the event that precipitated his shooting rampage. This appears to have been part of a pattern of parental efforts to control their son:

[A]fter finishing high school, Long seems to have drifted. He took odd jobs for neighbors. He enrolled at the University of North Georgia campus in Cumming, 45 minutes from home, but left after one year without completing any degree program at the school, which primarily offers community college-level courses.
In 2018, he was baptized at his family’s church.
By January 2019, he was involved in a relationship with a woman in Chattanooga, Tenn., but his parents called the police that month to report that Long, then 19, had gone to visit the girlfriend and refused to return, according to a report from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office.
A deputy who met with the parents at their house wrote that Long had not returned on time from the girlfriend’s home in Chattanooga and had texted his parents to inform them that he would not be coming back. “He wanted a fresh start,” the deputy wrote. Long and his girlfriend ignored his parents’ repeated calls, they told the deputy, so they called 911. . . .
By August of that year, Long was back in Woodstock, but not home with his parents. He was living, for about six months, at Maverick Recovery, a 12-step transitional-housing facility in Roswell, Ga., about 13 miles from home. He was also frequenting massage spas, one of his friends said — including, according to Atlanta police, the same Atlanta spas where this week’s slayings occurred.
Long sought treatment for his pornography habit and penchant for buying sexual services at massage facilities, according to his parents and Tyler Bayless, a roommate at Maverick from August 2019 through at least January 2020. . . .
Long blamed his troubles on pornography, Bayless said: “He hated the pornography industry. He was pretty passionate about what a bad influence it was on him. He felt exploited by it, taken advantage of by it.”

Wait, didn’t liberals tell us pornography is harmless? But we will leave that aside to the more immediate point: Nothing in this extensively reported Washington Post account shows any indication that Long was motivated by racial prejudice, despite the fact that, at the same time their editors were assigning this story, they were also publishing numerous analysis/commentary articles which sought to frame this crime within the preferred political narrative of anti-Asian “white supremacy”:

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.

That’s from Andrew Sullivan, of all people, giving Ed Driscoll a chance to employ the “BIZARRE HELL-WORLD” theme. Sullivan also extensively documents the reality that anti-Asian “hate crimes” are most often committed by black suspects, so read the whole thing.




 

Category: Crime, Georgia, Racism

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