Narrative trumps facts in Atlanta massage parlor shooting

At least it’s permissible to question the conclusions of federal law enforcement again. During the Russia investigation and afterward, officials like FBI Director Christopher Wray were put on a pedestal by Democrats and the media. Now, Wray has occasioned sharp Democratic dissent by stating that the horrifying murder spree at Atlanta-area spas that killed six Asian American women wasn’t racially motivated.

Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic senator from Illinois, said she wants a deeper investigation, “It looks racially motivated to me.” The new Democratic senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, agreed, “We all know hate when we see it.” These are evidence-free objections to an FBI evaluation that we have every reason to believe is based on the best-available facts. All indications so far, including the perpetrator’s statement as related by the police and reporting about his background in the press, suggest that he was struggling with a sex addiction, visited massage parlors for sex, and carried out his attacks as, by his perverse reasoning, vengeance against the parlors as the occasion for his temptation. What he did is unforgivably awful, heartbreakingly destructive, and, of course, profoundly hateful. It’s just not the right kind of hate to fit a woke narrative of white supremacists targeting Asian Americans in a frenzy of racism fueled by former

President Donald Trump’s use of terms like “the China virus” and “Kung Flu.” There has been an effort to link the spa shootings to a trend of increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans. But this broader trend doesn’t appear to fit a neat woke narrative, either. For one thing, many attacks against Asian Americans clearly aren’t acts of white supremacism, or even incidents of racial hatred. It is an unfortunate feature of big American cities at the moment that not much explanation is needed for attacks against anyone other than a rising tide of lawlessness. That surely accounts for some significant percentage — if by no means all — of the attacks.

None of these complications are allowed to interfere with a simplistic narrative of Asian Americans as victims of white supremacy, no matter what the facts are, no matter what the hitherto unassailable FBI director says.

Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.