"In my mind...this was an anti-Asian hate crime."  So declared Congresswoman Judy Chu regarding the Atlanta shooting, in which eight women died, six of whom happened to be Asian.  It seems to be a popular opinion.  Andrew Sullivan, writing on his Substack page, reported that (as of March 19) the New York Times had published nine pieces that presented the slaughter as motivated by anti-Asian racism, while the Washington Post had published sixteen stories in the same vein.  All these stories, to a T, found the real motivation of the murders the deeply rooted anti-Asian bigotry in American history.  Many of them also linked it to the rise in anti-Asian crimes, which was then coupled with Donald Trump's labeling of COVID-19 as "the China virus."

What makes these stories so shocking — or predictable — is that there is no evidence at this point to suggest that the shooter, Robert Aaron Long, was motivated by racism of any kind.  When questioned by police as to why he killed the eight women and wounded several more, Long replied that he was a sex addict who saw the women as a near occasion of sin (he is also Southern Baptist) and decided that if there were no more temptations, there would be no more addiction.  Several pieces of evidence back up this declaration.  Long's former roommates told authorities that he had frequented the spa/masseuse parlor where his victims worked because he could acquire cheap sex easily.  It also doesn't make sense that a white supremacist operating under anti-Asian bigotry would kill two white women along with his six Asian victims.  But the lack of evidence has not stopped the powers that be from declaring with the gravitas of Nero that Long's crime was racially motivated.

NBC made one of the most blunt statements in this regard, declaring that Long "doesn't get to decide" whether his crime was motivated by racism or not.  According to Elaine Gross, president of the New York–based organization ERASE Racism, "you can't ask perpetrators what they think.  That's not how we determine whether something is or isn't a hate crime."  She also asked, if his spree wasn't racially motivated, "then why wasn't there a variety" among the victims?  That has to count for something" (ignoring that two of his victims were white).

In the minds of those baptized into the gnostic faith of critical theories, the lack of evidence is itself evidence for their own interpretation of events, facts and personal confessions be damned.  As Sullivan observed:

The only evidence it [Critical Race Theory] needs it already has.  Check out the identity of the victim or victims, check out the identity of the culprit, and it's all you need to know.  If the victims are white, they don't really count.  Everything in America is driven by white supremacist hate of some sort or other.  You can jam any fact, any phenomenon, into this rubric in order to explain it.

In this way, CRT becomes not a theory, a set of parameters, or even a paradigm.  Instead, it becomes an alchemical machine in which any series of events or actions can be transmuted into evidence that circles back to reinforce the theory.  It's an arrangement that will inevitably lead to terrible consequences for everyone who does not swear allegiance to the elites.

It will, in the first place, empower the elites more by allowing them to usurp even more power.  There is no point denying that the left, at this moment, controls all the major avenues of power in America — from the media to academia, from education to entertainment, from government to business, the left has entrenched itself, giving it unprecedented power over our lives.  We see this in the nationwide spread of "drag queen story time," the unveiling of a "gay Captain America," and the continual pledges of "diversity" and "equity" from companies as prestigious as Bank of America and Nabisco.  But this narrative around the Atlanta shooting marks a graduation of the left's power. It has, in essence, declared that it can divine our actions better than we can.  Divine is an appropriate word here, since the left is ultimately claiming to be able to read our thoughts and souls.  Trevor Noah all but admitted this when he declared, "You killed six Asian people.  Specifically, you went there.  Your murders speak louder than your words."  Noah knows the real motive behind Long's killing spree because as a woke member of a minority group, he can see "the truth."

When a select sliver of society declares that it can read the thoughts and motives of the "impure," it has announced itself to be the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, a brahmin caste for the 21st century.  What's worse than the power this confers onto the select is how this power is conferred.  If someone can arrive at the true essence of your thoughts and actions — a true essence unknown even to yourself — it means the übermensch knows you better than you know yourself.  It is a power on par with God's omniscience, which enables Him to know the meaning and intent of a word before it has even left our tongue.  And just as God is our objective superior in part because of His knowledge, this power of the left, if real, means that it is our objective superior as well.  The end result is a society without equality, since that is impossible in a society where you are either a king or a pawn.

This, naturally, affects justice, the giving to another what is due to him, as Aristotle defined the virtue.  The catch is that in order to give to another what is his due, we have to be able to know what he actually did.  How can we dispense justice if it is impossible to know what a person did?  Investigations, deductive and inductive reasoning, logic are useless.  The only thing that can arrive at the truth is the purity of the woke, who are now judge, jury, and executioner.  This, in and of itself, shreds justice.  Even worse is the fact that the left, with its newfound power, will be able to create crimes out of thin air.  A person may think he's going to trial for rear-ending another driver but then finds out he's being charged with a hate crime since the driver he rear-ended happened to be black, meaning that the real reason he rear-ended the man wasn't that he was texting and driving, but because he's racist.

America was founded on several principles, two of which were that justice is the end of society and that all men are equal before God and the law.  If both are discarded for the sake of a racist ideology, it is up for debate how much of America is actually left.

Image: stevepb via Pixabay, Pixabay license.