How to make the facts fit the narrative

Distracted by vaccine warfare, for once the British haven’t leapt onto America’s latest bandwagon of fake self-excoriation. Following last week’s massacre of eight people at three massage parlours on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, the US mainstream media has flown into ecstasies of self-loathing over the country’s racist attacks on East Asians. The rise in anti-Asian bigotry — naturally — is all Trump’s fault. If Americans blame the Chinese for the pandemic, that’s not because the disease actually did originate in China. Rather, it’s because the left’s much-missed nemesis kept calling Covid ‘the China virus’, thereby exploding a nascent prejudice to monstrous, murderous proportions.

Granted, it looks terrible. Six victims in Atlanta were East Asian women. (The two white victims complicate the narrative so they are generally left out of the story.) How could that be a coincidence? It wasn’t, exactly. According to the 21-year-old suspect in custody, Robert Aaron Long, he was a customer at two of the establishments — where, given the young man’s perverse explanation for his rampage, he must have ordered the deluxe package. The murders, says Long, an evangelical Baptist, were his attempt — however insane — to rid himself of the temptation to service his ‘sex addiction’, for which he’d already spent time in Christian rehab. I guess the rehab didn’t work.

In the post-Floydian universe, the American press isn’t engaged by such warped particulars. There’s only one story the media wishes to tell the United States about itself: America is systemically, irremediably racist — preferably ‘white supremacist’ — which is why the likes of the New York Times had previously chosen not to disclose the racial identity of numerous perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes. The paper did report Long’s pigmentation, because he’s white. That’s the race he’s supposed to be.