The purpose of this article is to examine the Atlanta spa shootings, which occurred on March 16, 2021. In particular, the focus will be on the attacker, Robert Aaron Long, his motives——which are made clear by the evidence——and the twisting of these motives by liberal media news outlets for political gain. I feel the need to write something about this event because it is an incredible example of how the modern-day media twists stories to suit their own narrative; in this case, the news organizations decided that since Asians were the victims and a white man was the perpetrator, this was a hate-crime against Asians. The evidence contradicts this claim.
I wrote most of this article immediately after the event occurred in 2021, but I also rewrote some of it in the Summer of 2022. I came to my conclusion myself the instant I read about it for the first time. It was immediately clear to me that there were lies and biases at work in the reporting of this story. I hope this article rectifies this, and makes the truth clear for any readers.
While nothing is certain, based on available evidence Long committed this crime for the following reasons:
His intense religious inclinations.
His pornographic addiction.
His religious inclinations conflicting with his desires relating to his pornographic addiction.
His parents kicking him out onto the street as a result of his pornographic addiction (or whatever else occurred behind the scenes).
Here is a good article which outlines pretty succinctly my main points in making this article: this was not a racially motivated attack, yet it is continuing to be portrayed as a racially motivated attack contrary to the evidence. I will now spend a while sifting through a bunch of poorly written, sensationalist articles claiming that the attack was racially motivated.
Despite his motives being as clear as day——no one is more qualified to give an opinion on their motives than the officers who investigated the crime——this information is hidden behind misleading headlines like this one, which starts very quickly with the line “a white man had just shot three of their co-workers in complete silence.” I bold “white” because it is very clear that that is the point the article wants you to gravitate towards. I also start this section talking about this article because it is one of the worst offenders of this sensationalist, narrative-creating journalism which is plaguing modern media.
Also very telling is the way one section is worded: “Six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. The four women killed in the Atlanta spas were Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; Soon Chung Park, 74; and Yong Ae Yue, 63.” This is worded so poorly; one of the people killed was not of Asian decent, but they wouldn’t want to list that name. They only list these very clearly Asian names to hammer the main point of the article across: these people are Asian, so this must have been a hate crime against Asians. In the eyes of much of the media, a minority cannot have been killed for any reason other than racism.
I despise this type of thinking; how can we ever treat minorities as equals if all we can see when a black, Asian, or Hispanic person gets shot is their skin color, thereby proving in the eyes of the mob that this was a hate crime? These are people who died, but the media wants us not to think of these people as human beings or as American citizens, but as members of the Asian minority group oppressed by the white man.
Let’s also take in the following paragraph for a moment:
“There has been an outcry online that mainstream media is ignoring reports of allegations published in Korean-language media, which state that a local taxi driver told reporters he heard from nearby workers that the shooter said, ‘I will kill all Asians,’ before committing the crime.”
So people are mad because the mainstream media isn’t reading a report from Korean sources that say that reporters heard from a taxi driver who heard from nearby workers who heard from the shooter that he said “I will kill all Asians”? Well, clearly NBC has mentioned the detail, so the criticism now seems misplaced, and is a very good example of just how beholden media organizations have become to random people on Twitter. Additionally, can you really call that a reliable source? NBC admits in the next paragraph that they couldn’t verify this, yet they included it in the article anyway because, we can speculate, it helps push their narrative that the attack was racially motivated. If the shooter was speculated to have shouted “I hate Donald Trump,” then I doubt they would have included the speculatory quote in the article. This whole point is like a bad game of telephone——only, it’s not a game of telephone: it’s the news.
So obvious is it that Long’s motive was not racially motivated that even Wikipedia cannot hide the truth entirely. As mentioned here, “Long said his actions were not racially motivated.” This is a direct denial by the perpetrator of the crime of the media’s false accusations of hate crimes, yet still the courts of Georgia will treat the case as a hate crime.
As an aside, I am amazed that the concept of a “hate crime” is even constitutional. The fact that he was being charged for a “hate crime” rather than just a regular crime implies that Long was punished at least in part for what the media believed that Long thought of Asian people——thoughts, I remind you, that there is no evidence he ever even thought. That’s ridiculous, how can a country like the United States which claims to be a free country punish people to different extents based on their beliefs? Hate is not illegal in the U.S.A, but this appears to have been forgotten. After all, I’m sure the Twitter police would have been gone on endlessly about how racist the justice system is if they had not tried Long’s terrible act as a “hate crime”.
Also hilarious in the Wikipedia article is the last line of the motive section where someone wrote “Multiple experts have said that race cannot be ruled out as a motive because of the fetishization of Asian women in the U.S.” How ridiculous; the line’s presence right after the line where it is stated Long’s “actions were not racially motivated” allows you to imagine someone writing this line as a last ditch effort to uphold their false story. The suspect has directly denied their claims, yet still they find ways to pin the racist tag to Long’s name.
They’d probably call it a microaggression; you can say you’re not racist, the police can say that there is no evidence that the suspect was racist, but this man is 21 years old, religious, and white, so he must be racist. If you think about it, the concept of microaggressions can allow the court to convict anyone they want of a hate crime as long as that crime is committed against a minority. The court could just say it was subconsciously a hate crime or some bull. The color of the skin of Long’s victims is evidence enough for these left-leaning thinkers to convict Long of the great sin against their teachings known as hate crimes.
Back to that article: if these “experts” are so certain what they say is true, why didn’t they ask Long if he truly was fetishizing Asian women in particular, or why didn’t the police get a search warrant to see what type of porn Long was viewing? If they are not pursuing the facts of the case, the only explanation is that they must believe more facts would be a disservice to their attempt to give Long the death penalty. There was also a Hispanic woman killed; if this notion about fetishization is really true, is it not reasonable to suggest that it was women as a whole being fetishized? I repeat: it is reductionist to assume all the worlds conflicts are based on race.
One of the reasons people have labeled this as an Asian hate crime is due to an increase in Asian hate crimes recently. However, reading deeper than a NY Times headline reveals that this increase is just (((someone))) cleverly twisting statistics: as shown in this article, Asian hate crimes have increased by a negligible amount. The crimes increased by “149%” this year in sixteen cherry-picked cities, yet in actuality this increase is “from 49 to 122 - in a country of 330 million people.” It’s horrible, but relatively minor compared to the rate of black-on-black homicides or the damages caused by 2020’s summer riots.
To add to this, I believe this slight increase in Asian hate crimes is not even due to aggression from whites; rather, it is mostly blacks attacking Asians at higher rates (too lazy to source but I read the statistic somewhere). Due to this point not really supporting the narrative of the majority (whites) oppressing the minority (whatever ethnic group Democrats need to increase their voter appeal with), this point is seldom discussed in the mainstream media.
As we can see, some right-wing and centrist news sources have properly referred to this act of violence as exactly what it was: a troubled young man who attacked women at a spa because he saw them as a temptation, no race involved. However, look at all of the sensationalist media that has come out from left-wing sources that millions of people have already read and digested; many of these people will never read an article on the issue again. Politicians will make statements denouncing this Asian hate crime even though it wasn’t one (I’m talking about you, Biden), schools will hold rallies against racial hatred over an event that wasn’t even racially motivated, presidents of companies will feel a greater need to provide more anti-racism training to their employees; even with the truth exposed, the damage has already been done and nobody wants to correct the damage because it serves their interests better as is. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta called any attempts by cops to point to porn addiction as the motive——in other words, any attempts to correct misinformation——“victim blaming, victim shaming”.
Many media organizations are fine with the message they’ve sent out because, even though it’s false, it matches the message that they want to send out about the white race oppressing minorities. This allows the Democratic party to get votes easier; rather than pandering to the individual and that individual voting for who he thinks is best based on his social class, moral values, or politics, they now just vote based on their skin color——this is exemplified by Biden’s famous line “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black.” This is known as identity politics, and I believe that nothing is more demeaning or contrary to the original vision of America——one centered around the individual having the freedom to obtain his own unique version of happiness——than a political system that reduces elections to a game of paint by numbers, where politicians will focus on appealing to certain voting blocks based on the color of their skin rather than other factors such as wealth, culture, and situation. The people who fall for this game are no longer human, but colors that just so happen to speak, and walk, and vote——that last one’s the most important for politicians.
This is not the first time a tragic event will be falsely politicized like this, and it certainly will not be the last.
Part of what makes this story stick around in my head is that, somewhere inside, I am similar to this man. Long seems to me a tragic figure; he had a strong——albeit flawed——moral compass, but that morality conflicted with the valueless nature of modern society. Our increasingly Libertarian (in social sense) society runs into an issue here: this man, as well as so many other men, could have been saved if there were laws enforcing proper moral behaviour in society. Laws like this have pitfalls of their own, of course——I lean more Libertarian than anything else purely because I cannot see how a government can ever be trusted to regulate the moral principles of its people——but it’s worth considering.
Long had morality, but morality is fragile when it stands alone. His parents throwing him out of the house hints at poor parenting (I was too lazy to find a source on this fact, but I’m positive I read it somewhere). EDIT: His parents had a locator app installed on his phone. I should write a separate article explaining how this is a sign of poor parenting. That linked article also explains how Long was living on his own working at a landscaping company, living paycheck to paycheck, unable to even use his credit card or debit card to purchase the gun which he used to attack the spas. It seems like his parents forsook their child and left him to his own devices rather than trying to help him.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Long developed such strong relations with God as a substitute for having poor relations with his family. It seems like the legitimate conversation one could have regarding mental health in these circumstances has been massively overshadowed by sensationalist race-baiting articles. Even in that last link I posted——it being more recent and having Long’s own testimony in it——we can see, a full year after I wrote most of this article, that my analysis of Long’s case was correct. Nothing Long says claims that his violence was racial motivated. One could claim it was a hate crime against women, but——as I previously brought up——the motivations for a crime should not effect the sentence given to the convicted. The ethnicities of his victims were definitely not on Long’s mind.
I do not claim to side with a murderer; Long made the wrong decision that day and killed innocent people. I do not celebrate this act in any way. I have written this article to exemplify how modern society views everything through a racial lens without exception, not to exonerate a mentally ill man of his crime. I hope that he does not get the death sentence, but I hope he goes to jail for a long time and gets the mental and emotional help he deserves.
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