In remarks commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta shootings on Wednesday, President Biden attributed a never-proven racial motivation to the killer, calling last year’s tragic events “a stark reminder that anti-Asian violence and discrimination have deep roots in our nation.”
“While nothing we do can bring the victims back, their loss has compelled us to reckon with our nation’s long legacy of anti-Asian sentiment and gender-based violence,” stated Biden, who rhetorically connected the shootings to “the terror and anguish that too many Asian Americans have felt since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-Asian xenophobia, harassment, and violence skyrocketed to alarming levels.”
But while the murders were a tragedy for the Asian American community — six of the eight killed were Asian women — there has been no evidence presented to suggest that the shootings were the result of racial animus.
The murderer has, in statements given to authorities, explained that he attacked spas known to double as fronts for prostitution because of his own struggles with sex addiction; the day before the killings, he was kicked out of his parents’ house over concerns pertaining to that addiction. He even expressed to police that he had considered suicide before settling on targeting the spas so as to prevent others from succumbing to “temptation,” and explicitly denied any racial motivation.
Shannon Wallace, the Cherokee County prosecutor who secured a plea deal leading to four lifelong terms in prison for the perpetrator, has noted that “we’ve considered the evidence collected by the FBI and our sheriff’s office, which failed to show any type of history this defendant had with any form of racism towards any other ethnicity.”
Biden — a president acting under the belief that “systemic racism touches every facet of American life” — has made similar mistakes in the past, rushing in 2019 to respond to the hate crime faked by actor Jussie Smollett (“homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts”) and labeling teenager Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist in a 2020 campaign ad.
Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges in November 2021, after a jury determined that he acted in self-defense in shooting multiple assailants during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the summer of 2020. After Rittenhouse’s trial, Biden stated that “the jury system works,” but professed to be feeling “angry and concerned.”
Send a tip to the news team at NR.