Congratulations are in order. The media may have finally found a white person who committed one of the rash of anti-Asian American hate crimes. She’s homeless!
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski hosted a segment Tuesday on the supposed uptick in anti-Asian American harassment claims and was joined by longtime Washington, D.C, swamp thing Kurt Bardella and Daily Beast writer Wajahat Ali. Both guests laughably traced the trend in attacks to white supremacy (a myth), even though nearly all of the incidents cited have been perpetrated by nonwhite attackers.
Bardella naturally linked the assault and harassment to former President Donald Trump and said that it was “incited by the Republican Party.” He also wrote last week in USA Today that “white nationalists” who supported Trump were “willing to act” with regard to Trump having referred to the coronavirus as the “China virus” and the “Chinese virus.”
Asked by co-host Willie Geist how to stop the number of anti-Asian attacks, Ali could hardly contain himself. “First and foremost,” he declared, “we have to stand up and dismantle white supremacy.”
It’s unclear how dismantling white supremacy would have prevented the fatal attack on 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee of San Francisco. He was out for a walk in his neighborhood in late January when a man came up behind him on foot, shoved him to the ground, and then fled the scene. Ratanapakdee died.
The suspect, 19-year-old Antoine Watson, is black, yet Bardella cited the incident as an example of white nationalism instigating anti-Asian hate crimes.
I’d tell Watson to check his white privilege, but I’m not sure how that would work.
Another case of harassment Bardella cited in his lazily written column was the Haijun family in Orange County, California, who for days had endured random knocking and shouting outside their homes by teenagers, some of whom had allegedly called out anti-Asian slurs in their mischief-making.
There are no reports on the race of any of the suspects, who were careful to do their deeds at night while wearing hoodies.
Bardella’s blind assumption, that white supremacists are behind the reported hate crimes against Asian Americans, has been false in nearly every case where we know the race of the perpetrator. In anti-Asian American attacks caught on video and played on cable news, the suspects are invariably black or Hispanic, and there are many such incidents that have been caught on video. It’s also not clear whether most of these attacks are racially motivated at all, although some of them are.
A video from March of last year showed a black man who repeatedly asked a fellow subway rider in New York to move away from the door. When the man didn’t move, the first one picked up a can of something, reportedly Febreze, and sprayed it in his direction.
Another viral video from last year showed a man, again using public transportation, telling some fellow commuters, “Everything comes from China because they’re f—ing disgusting.” He was Latino and spoke with a southwestern Latino American accent.
A video from January of this year showed the assault of a 91-year-old man in the Chinatown section of Oakland, California. A man walks up behind him in a hoodie and uses both arms to push the unsuspecting victim to the ground before walking away. Police have identified the suspect as 28-year-old Yahya Muslim and linked him to similar attacks of two other elderly people from the same day. Muslim is black.
But at the start of the MSNBC segment on Tuesday, Brzezinski finally found the great white hope. A California woman, she related, was charged by police on Monday for assaulting a man of Asian descent. The suspect, 39-year-old Karen Inman, is accused of spitting on the victim and telling him to “go back to where you came from.” She also allegedly stole from a candy store beforehand.
Inman is white. What Brzezinski failed to mention was is Inman is also a homeless woman almost certainly suffering from mental illness.
Surely, Bardella will correct us and point out that she’s homeless with white privilege!
The media finally found their anti-Asian white nationalist. Good for them.
