When Is a Hate Crime Not a Hate Crime? 

A reader writes:

I know you are in Nicaragua so you may not have seen the story of a man shooting and killing 8 people at 3 Asian massage parlors in Atlanta.

It’s been a highlight of the news for days.

The media is trying to determine if it’s a hate crime against Asians. But if the women working at these parlors were Russian or Polish, he would have killed them anyway!

It’s unbelievable.

Yes, I saw it…

We now have a formula to use to determine if a mass shooting is a hate crime… If two-thirds of the victims are of one race, that’s what it is – and that’s what the media pounce on.

In this case, it’s pretty clear that race hatred wasn’t the reason for the attack. The shooter was apparently a regular customer of those massage parlors. He said he blamed them for his sex addiction.

So far, he’s denied he was motivated by race.

But the mainstream press has decided thus us an example of anti-Asian hate, even though the killing was demonstrably indiscriminate. I mentioned this fact to an acquaintance of mine that was bemoaning this news as more evidence of America’s systemic racism. She said, “Well, if he didn’t hate Asians, why did he target Asian massage parlors?” I explained that in the US, “Asian” massage parlors are where the action happens. “They didn’t say that in the NYT,” she said. “Exactly,” I said.

There’s no doubt that Asians are victims of discrimination in America… hugely so. It is even practiced by the likes of Harvard and Mayor DeBlasio – both upset that when college admission policies are neutral, the entering students are disproportionately Asian. No surprise there, of course. Asians are the most successful race in the US, Europe, and just about everywhere else they migrate to. With good reason. (I wrote about it here and here.)