All public evidence indicates that Aaron Long, the man who shot up three massage parlors near Atlanta this week, killing eight people, was not motivated by race. That won’t stop CNN from insisting that he was!
Anchors at CNN are convinced there’s white supremacy at hand here somewhere, and they’ll uncover it, even if they have to plant it there themselves.
According to police, Long confessed to the killings (already a death penalty offense) and was specifically asked by authorities whether he was targeting people of Asian descent. Long denied it, stating instead that he suffered from guilt over a sex addiction and that he was targeting places that he patronized to satisfy his impulses. When he was apprehended by police, he was driving southbound to, he said, perhaps kill actors in the pornography industry that he believed he could find in Florida.
More evidence will come out about what Long’s online activity was like, what kinds of things he stored on his computer and cellphone, and the contents of conversations he will have had with friends and family. But people at CNN were alarmingly skeptical of Long’s confession from the jump.
Chris Cuomo on Thursday said it was “hard to divorce this crime on several levels from race, specifically anti-Asian animus.” Why would he say that? Because Cuomo personally found the sex addiction claim to be “uncompelling.” That’s it. That was his reason. He didn’t even explain why.
It’s a good thing Cuomo is paid to talk on TV and not to be in a courtroom.
He further charged that Long “certainly doesn’t have a very high credibility index, right?”
Wrong. Long may not have a soul, but if there’s one thing he does have right now, it’s credibility. He admitted to the killings without a fight. He confessed to an extremely embarrassing sex addiction, which has been corroborated by a man who roomed with Long at a rehabilitation facility.
But we’re supposed to believe that when it got to the issue of race, Long suddenly got shy? Yes, I just murdered eight people on a shooting spree with the intent to kill more, and I’m a raging sex fiend. But don’t tell anyone I’m a racist! That could ruin me for life! Didn’t you see what just happened to Sharon Osbourne?
CNN and plenty of others in the media need for Long to have been motivated by race because it would fit their preferred narrative that white supremacism is the country’s greatest problem.
When producers at CNN heard about the shootings and saw that the suspect was white, they immediately set the wheels in motion to make this about white racism and, of course, former President Donald Trump.
Unfortunately for them, the facts didn’t bear it out. No matter for CNN, though. They’ll keep shoving the triangle-shaped block into the square hole, hoping it eventually fits.
Anderson Cooper on Thursday tried it this way: “The idea that [Long] equates sexual temptation with, presumably Asian spas, that itself seems based on race, which seems to counteract what the police have been saying, that race had nothing to do with this.”
Long didn’t equate sexual temptation with Asian spas. He equated sexual temptation with the places he literally went to in order to satisfy his sex addiction. One of the spas, Aromatherapy Spa, isn’t even subtle about the services it offers. The website advertises that masseurs “can give you amazing aroma energy charms for love, luck and more… Shhh… It’s secret!”
Correspondent Amara Walker, on Cooper’s show, said it was a “good point” to note that “you can’t take at face value the comments of a confessed murderer.”
Here’s a mental exercise: Would the people at CNN be as resistant to “take at face value the comments of a confessed murderer” if that murderer were Long and he had actually said, “I’m a white supremacist, and I voted for Trump”? Everyone knows the answer to that one.
If Long had said that, Cuomo might have popped a champagne bottle on set.
