On April nineteenth, ninety ninety five, a young white man named Timothy McVeigh exploded a truck outside of a government building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The explosion killed one hundred and sixty eight people, making it the worst terrorist attack in American history prior to 9/11. McVeigh, (who was later given the death penalty) was a former army veteran of the first Iraq war who had been radicalized by the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries, claimed that his motivation for the attack was to strike back at the overbearing federal government. He was especially disgusted by the raid that had been carried out by the FBI against a cult in Waco, Texas two years earlier.
In the aftermath of the attack, then President Bill Clinton began to hint in some speeches that part of McVeigh's hatred of the federal government could had been fed by the right wing media's continual demonization of "big government." When right wing media figures began to fire back, he quickly moved on to other things. But was he wrong? When you have a media system that pumps out hatred everyday, is it wrong for them to at least be held partly responsible when that hatred leads to violence? While I'm certainly not calling for any kind of censorship, and McVeigh's anger seems to be as much linked to his bitterness at being single and in debt than any messages from the right wing media, it's not wrong to say that words can matter, and inspire people to commit terrible acts.
Which brings us to the horrific recent shooting of eight innocent people in Atlanta three days ago. The confessed killer, Robert Aaron Long is, like McVeigh, a deeply confused young man who killed innocent people out of some alleged transgression. The victims were all people who worked at massage parlors, and Long claimed that he killed them as a way to remove the temptation he had to visit such places because of his sex addiction. Six of the eight victims were Asian women, although Long claimed that there was no racial motivation to the killings.
Whatever his crazed justification for these killings, this tragedy draws a sharp focus to the terrible rise in anti Asian violence that has been occuring in this country in the past year. And, like the right wing media's anti government rhetoric that may have fueled McVeigh's hatred, we once again have a right wing media demonizing a certain group of people. But this time it's even worse, this time the hateful speech used to come from the President himself.
Ever since the coronavirus first hit our country, Donald Trump has been calling it "the China virus" and the "Kung Flu." From his point of view, there were two benefits to this: firstly, by constantly reminding people that the virus began in China, he could deflect criticism of his administration's disastrous response to it, shifting the blame to another country. The second benefit was that this kind of thinly disguised race baiting was extremely popular with his base. For a chilling example of this, watch any speech he gave in which he used the term "Kung Flu" and just listen to the crowd roar with laughter and excitement at the words. To be fair, he did tweet out last March twenty third that "It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States, and all around the world." But that didn't change his tone in his speeches, and he used the term "China virus" in an interview on Fox News just four days ago.
And his terrible words have led to terrible actions by some people: The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian American hate crimes reported to police rose 149% between 2019 and 2020. Overall, over three thousand and eight hundred hateful incidents (some of which were not crimes) have been reported recently, and the center says that many more go unreported. They range from screaming epithets to the pushing and shoving of innocent older people. While nobody in the world has enjoyed all the lockdowns and difficulty that the pandemic has brought, blaming and lashing out at innocent people because of their race is morally despicable and inexcusable in any decent society, displaying the worst aspects of human nature.
So what do we do? Sadly, this is no easy answer other than to speak out against such hatred and compel out elected officials and media outlets to do the same. The fact that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (who is herself half South East Asian) have given speeches condemning both this shooting and the rise in anti Asian hatred in general is a good start. Let's hope that as the pandemic begins to draw to an close, the hatred that it inspired will also diminish.
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