Category: Crime

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.

Of the many kinks, fetishes and perversions with which I’m familiar, the one I’m sure I never suffered is “yellow fever.” It is true that some guys are into that whole “exotic Orient” trip, obsessed with the idea of allegedly “docile” Asian women, but I was never one of those guys.

De gustibus non est disputandum, of course, and whatever floats your boat, but I guess I’m just a regular vanilla kind of guy, and never really understood that kind of racial fetishism. Inevitably, however, in the wake of the Atlanta massage parlor massacre, we get takes like this:

Asian Women Have Always Been
a Deadly Obsession of White Men

Notice the lack of qualifiers there. “Always” white men everywhere have universally been guilty of this “deadly obsession” — or so we are expected to believe because this one guy in Atlanta, who police confirmed frequented Asian massage parlors, went on a murderous rampage.

Your honor, I plead not guilty.

This idea of collective blame is the essence of racism. It is also the negation of the core concept of individual responsibility.

However much benefit so-called “progressives” imagine they can derive from promoting group guilt in the name of Critical Race Theory, I can assure you that the costs will ultimately outweigh whatever short-term political gains are to be made by playing this racial blame-game.

Does it not occur to our friends on the Left that two can play that game, and that the resentments stirred up by identity politics will not always be limited to their intended purpose of “energizing” various ethnic groups to vote for Democrats? If the potential for backlash frightens me — a white guy whose reputation as a right-winger is rather notorious — then how much more should it frighten liberals? Yet they’re like children playing with matches, never thinking they’ll get burned.

As it turns out, we now have extensive testimony that Robert Aaron Long, who killed eight people in his Atlanta rampage, was not motivated by racial hatred and the reason he patronized Asian massage parlors wasn’t “yellow fever.” Rather, his former roommate says, Long considered these venues the “safest” way to cope with his sexual cravings:

Long told his roommates that he’d chosen to go to the Asian massage parlors “not because of the employees’ race, but because he thought the spas were safer than paying for sex elsewhere.”

In other words, if there had been massage parlors with white women offering “happy endings” for the right price, Long might have patronized those establishments but . . . Well, it is what it is.

It’s always easier to deal with facts rather than theories. Speaking of facts, in 2019 (the most recent year for which federal statistics are available), there were 16,425 homicides in the U.S. Do the math, and that’s 45 homicides on an average day, so that these eight murders in Atlanta were less than 20% of the daily total. On the same day, there were more than 35 murders that didn’t get nationwide attention. And yesterday, there another 45 murders, and 45 murders today, and there will be 45 murders tomorrow — on average, I say. There will probably be more than 300 Americans murdered this week, and yet nearly all of those murders will be strictly “local news.” CNN won’t even notice them, and pundits won’t write columns interpreting the political meaning of these deaths.

There is a remarkable selectivity involved in the process of deciding which murders deserve national attention, and you should question the motives of the media in the process of making those choices.

If you’ve got a “deadly obsession” with Asian women, seek psychiatric help, but as for me? Nope. Not guilty, your honor. I rest my case.