© Jason Leung/Unsplash
The reaction to the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, over the last week
has revealed how invested the Democratic establishment is in one all-powerful narrative. Both shootings produced an immediate response from the media, Democratic politicians, and activists —
that the slaughters were the result of white supremacy and that white Americans are the biggest threat facing the US. That interpretation was reached, in the case of the
Boulder shooting, on the slimmest of evidence, and in the case of the
Atlanta shooting, in the face of contradictory facts.
After the Boulder supermarket attacks, social media lit up with
gloating pronouncements that the shooter was a violent white male and part of what Vice President Kamala Harris's niece declared (in a since-deleted tweet) to be the "greatest terrorist threat to our country." (Video of the handcuffed shooter being led away by the police appeared to show a white male.) Now that the shooter's identity has been revealed as
Syrian-American and his tirades against the "Islamophobia industry" unearthed, that line of thought has been quietly retired and replaced with the stand-by Democratic response to mass shootings —
demands for gun control.
But the false narrative about the Atlanta spa shootings still has legs.
It represents a double lie — first, that the massacre was the product of Trump-inspired xenophobic hatred, and second, that whites are the biggest perpetrators of violence against Asians. The most striking aspect of these untruths is the fact that they were fabricated in plain sight and in
open defiance of reality. Given the enduring hold of the Atlanta story on mainstream discourse, it is worth examining in some detail.
Comment: While some might call Romney's distinction 'courage', many would call it 'revenge'.