I recollect reading something where the son of a prolific serial killer (who targeted sex workers and women of color) said that police would sometimes approach him sympathetically because they were big fans of his father… the Onion’s jokes are often dead-on, but sometimes don’t go far enough.
That is almost exactly what the KKK now say - that they’re not “racist,” they’re “pro-white civil rights.” Even if that made sense, it’s so obviously disingenuous, especially given the history of the organization, that it somewhat undermines the claim…
And was stopped on his way to a fourth, that was apparently more of a drive… He was quite committed to his “bad day.”
The two non-Asian people he killed were bystanders, it seems (one was actually a man - another male bystander was shot and survived). They apparently were spa customers who either tried to stop him or just were in the line of fire - they weren’t his intended targets. His intended targets were all Asian women, so racism was definitely a motivator as well as misogyny.
I have to wonder if, post-Trump, they even bother with the disingenuous deniability. Seems like more racists suddenly became willing to say, “Yeah, I’m a racist.”
There’s that, but then there’s also sometimes that words themselves become good or bad without caring about meaning. Like how most countries believe in democracy, but with very different opinions about what that means, or how just about everyone hates terrorism, and the question is who the real terrorists are.
I think there are a lot of people who know that racism is bad, and so are very unhappy when you say that to about people who are just trying to look out for the future of poor little white people in a world full of lazy and sinister others.
I agree. Trump made it far more acceptable to be openly racist.
Agreed. But some do own it, and there are people doing that more often publicly than before. You also see far more white nationalist talking points in powerful places (John Oliver’s show this past week about Carlson being a good example).
He went and bought a gun, then hours later used it to murder women in a spa. Then he drove to two different locations and murdered more women. But no, no premeditation involved here at all.
Yeah, something that became incredibly clear because of Trump is that while, as a society, we had all agreed that being a racist or Nazi was bad, the terms hadn’t ever been societally defined. So it turned out that, in practice, it meant being called a racist or Nazi was the actual bad thing that got people upset, not openly being a racist/Nazi; we had stigmatized the words rather than what they described.
Yeah, and don’t forget, this “not premeditated attack” was scheduled to continue after driving hundreds of miles to Florida to continue it. And this thing that just happened out of the blue was stopped because his family almost immediately on hearing the news called it in, AND supplied police with the GPS Tracker information for the GPS tracker they placed on his car.
My experience post-trump is that the particularly smart ones will say overtly racist shit, even HH for fuck sake, then when called out just flatly deny racism.
They like to DARVO too.
“Just because I said ‘kill all n$$$$$s’ now I’m a racist? Why do you have to make everything about race!? Are you a racist? It seems very racist to me to constantly be calling innocent white men who care about their women and children racist!” blah blah blah, it’s the boringest shit ever and I’m glad I don’t encounter these people IRL cuz I don’t know if I’d have the self control not to get violent with them.
has there been a mass shooting for which the media or the law enforcement didn’t minimize it by either saying it was a loner or it wasn’t racially motivated or both?
That kind of confirms my theory that this idea of the shooter saying “it’s not racially motivated” was from the cops persuading him to say that shit, so he wouldn’t be charged under our hate crimes statute.
And now I’m reading reports from witnesses that the shooter was saying “I’m going to kill all Asians.” But he totally wasn’t motivated by racism!
I just saw that and my immediate thought was, “Nope, not surprised in the least.”
Witness: “He said, ‘I’m going to kill all Asians!’”
Cops: “If we completely ignore what the witnesses said and just listen to the murderer, he totally didn’t do it because of racism!”
Something tells me this ploy isn’t going to hold up now that it’s been made public. Although it’s only being reported, as far as I can see, in the Korean language press, so…
I didn’t say I believed the cop. I just don’t believe a newspaper in south korea when literally no other newspapers in georgia are saying boo about it.
