With the midterm elections three weeks away, a new report warns candidates and elected officials not to use inflammatory rhetoric that contributes to hate-fueled attacks. The group Stop Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Hate, or Stop AAPI Hate, documents a trend of reported hate incidents on Asian Americans when politicians use inflammatory language, like blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic downturn and national security concerns. The report, called “The Blame Game,” finds more than 20% of Americans believe Asian Americans are at least partly responsible for COVID. This is nearly double from last year. On Monday, PBS explored the issue in a new documentary called Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day in March.
as I was mentioning before, we were seeing the ramping of the rhetoric, calling the pandemic “China virus” and “kung flu,” and we were seeing these attacks, one after another, on our social media feeds and seeing it in the news. And so, when March 16th happened, I don’t think a lot of people were necessarily surprised — I mean, absolutely devastated, of course, but not necessarily surprised. We sort of saw it coming.
And the perpetrator, the person who killed these eight people, including six women of Asian descent, said that it was because of his sexual addiction. Well, you know, when he went to the first spa and killed the four people, brutally murdered four people, he then drove 45 minutes to the next two spas, where he killed additional four people. And he passed many different
— source democracynow.org | Oct 18, 2022
