‘WHITEWASHING’ TROUBLING ATTACKS ON ASIAN AMERICANS:
A tragedy occurred last month when Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old immigrant from Thailand, was fatally assaulted in San Francisco.
A rally among wokesters followed, with calls to “unite against white nationalism.” While it’s great to call out violence and racism, “my truth” does not count; facts still matter.
Antoine Watson, the 19-year-old charged with murdering Ratanapakdee, is black. Watson therefore probably is not a white supremacist. And most suspects in recent troubling attacks against Asian Americans are from other minority groups.
Across the bay two weeks ago in Oakland’s China Town, Yahya Muslim committed one of the highest-profile attacks on Asian Americans. Muslim is not a Klansmen either.
Matters aren’t helped when disingenuous outlets like CNN often avoid identifying the ethnicity of the recent assailants.
It seems progressive activists hope to use a spike in violent crimes against Asian Americans to ignore reality and promote their ideological agenda; unsurprisingly, this includes blaming former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric for the violence.
“There’s a clear correlation between President Trump’s incendiary comments, his insistence on using the term ‘Chinese virus’ and the subsequent hate speech spread on social media and the hate violence directed towards us,” Russell Jeung, a professor at the radical San Francisco State University, told Time Magazine. “It gives people license to attack us.”
Explain the “clear correlation,” sir.
In an article headlined “Asian-Americans Under Attack?,” City Journal’s Charles Fain Lehman writes:
Trump’s words were reckless, but it is unlikely that a year later they are the primary cause of these attacks. More generally, police have not officially established that prejudice motivated any of the assailants. And it makes no sense to blame “white supremacy” when most of the offenders captured on camera in these attacks thus far have been young black men, including Ratanapakdee’s alleged killer.
A more likely culprit is the climate of lawlessness that has reigned in many of America’s big cities following this summer’s protests against law enforcement. It should also come as no surprise that the Bay Area, which has been at the forefront of progressive criminal-justice reforms for years, is bearing the brunt of these attacks.
Historically, American cities have had a simple response to the sort of lawlessness that Chan and others describe: put additional cops on the beat, stop potential violent offenders before they do serious damage, and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law when they do commit violent crimes. But in Northern California, that system is breaking down. Oakland slashed $14.3 million from its police budget and charged a task force with cutting the remaining budget in half over two years, even as homicides in the city have surged. In San Francisco, cops have fled the force “in record numbers,” and Mayor London Breed has pushed for a $120 million cut to the police and sheriff’s department. Statewide, research has linked an increase in the felony-theft threshold passed in 2014 to soaring retail burglaries of the sort now terrorizing Oakland.
Rather than enforce law and order, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Santa Clara County D.A. Jeff Rosen are working to weaken prosecution, ending cash bail and waiving gang and “three strikes” enhancements to sentencing. That means criminals feel greater freedom to offend and reoffend.
San Francisco has already felt the effects of prior “reforms,” as vagrancy, public drug use, and other public-order offenses have soared. That disorder has spilled over into higher transit crime, including a series of high-profile murders on the Bay Area Regional Transit system that an Alameda County grand jury pinned on lax quality-of-life enforcement. The crime wave is now clearly hurting the region’s Asian citizens as well.
As Steve would say, paraphrasing H.L. Mencken, the Bay Area is once again getting it “Gooder and Harder.”