JASON RANTZ

Rantz: Trump out of office, woke Seattle columnist makes excuses on hate crimes

Feb 23, 2021, 8:00 PM | Updated: Feb 24, 2021, 5:51 am

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(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

(AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

With President Donald Trump out of office, one woke Seattle columnist performs some rather impressive mental gymnastics to give a pass to suspects who purportedly attacked Asian Americans.

Naomi Ishisaka is a Seattle Times columnist who focuses on social justice issues. Everything she covers is seen though a radical lens that unnecessarily complicates issues, turning them into potential slights or grievances.

Wear a mask for COVID? Black people will be racially profiled, she contended. The Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill? It was a “white insurrection” that was “tolerated” when “Black protest” was “suppressed.”

Aside from universal condemnation and near-immediate charges against the rioters and an impeachment, I suppose it was tolerated? And aside from the wall-to-wall coverage of Black protests over the course of eight months, it was otherwise ignored.

Now, Ishisaka is faced with a moral dilemma: How can she turn purported anti-Asian hate crimes into a moral crusade against Trump or Republicans when the perpetrators are Black? She won’t. Instead, she’ll give the crimes a pass and exploit it for another offensively transparent progressive narrative.

Giving crimes a pass

Ishisaka, like other partisans, blames Trump’s use of “China virus” for what she calls a “spate” of anti-Asian hate crimes.

Better ideologues than Ishisaka have worked overtime to connect Trump’s use of “China virus” to anti-Asian hate crimes. They don’t have actual evidence tying it together, but they portrayed Trump and his supporters as virulent racists for four years, so this fit their narrative.

But now they’ve run into a problem: The suspects in the high profile, anti-Asian hate crimes are Black.

Ishisaka, and other bad-faith ideologues who see the world through a social justice lens, need a new approach. Can they really blame Trump for Black suspects committing these crimes? It would be so much easier for the degenerate suspects to be white MAGA-hat wearing cretins — the kind that would so credibly attack a TV star in Chicago on the way home from Subway in the middle of the night.

Faced with a dilemma that she can’t blame Trump for this, because even woke Seattle Times progressives have their limits, Ishisaka consults the intersectionality chart that lives in every radical’s mind.

The slow shift

In the world of intersectionality, a Black male is more a victim than an elderly Asian. It’s a sad world progressives live in when they have to rank suffering, but intersectionality demands it. After eight months of peaceful protests and violent riots in the names of Black Lives Matter activism, Ishisaka now must side with the suspects.

She starts her audacious defense slowly.

While it is “tempting” to call out the attacks, she offers a warning. She notes that “the messy truth requires us to complicate the narrative.” What’s so complicated? The suspect in a trio of egregious attacks in Oakland, Calif., “is African American” and might be suffering from mental illness.

In another egregious crime, where an 84-year-old Asian man was killed, Ishisaka also warns her readers to not jump to conclusions. The suspect, also Black, may not have targeted the man for being Asian. She says “it’s unclear what motivated the killing” (even though she uses this crime to describe the “spate” of hate crimes).

The new narrative

It’s now important, Ishisaka argues, to be measured. That’s certainly a welcome change from her February 2020 piece quick to declare a new era of “yellow peril” because Trump rightly blamed China for the coronavirus. But now:

There’s a long and ugly history of Asian Americans being used as a wedge to reinforce white supremacist beliefs and drive anti-Black racism, and we must be careful and vigilant to ensure we don’t again fall victim to assumptions and knee-jerk reactions. Attacks like these force us to put to the test the summer’s racial justice rhetoric around Black-Asian solidarity and our actual commitment to moving away from a reliance on policing as an easy solution to entrenched social problems.

Got that, folks? If you’re concerned about what she earlier implied were targeted crimes against Asians, that could be an embrace of white supremacy. Now you should support “Black-Asian solidarity” that apparently extends to protecting suspects on the basis of their skin color.

And don’t you dare envision a world in which police actually arrest the suspects. Police are racist, murderers, of course. Any reliance on them would turn your back on the Black community. Sure, the Black community isn’t asking for less police. Polls suggest Black Americans back reforms, but not less officers. But you best heed Ishisaka’s warning as she is the social justice voice of the Times.

It gets worse

To be clear, Ishisaka is no thought leader in this issue. She’s mimicking others, though they’re no wiser than Ishisaka pretends to be. She cites a statement from a social justice group, Asian Americans Advancing Justice. They propose “rejecting criminalization and retribution” in response to the attacks.

Ishisaka amplifies that message. She implies we must adopt social justice policies to stay safe. She says: “We can’t achieve true public safety when economic opportunity, housing, education, health care and mental health support are not available to all.”

Should an elderly Asian-American truly expect to avoid being brutally assaulted when there are some Black Americans who are denied economic opportunity? That’s her actual argument.

She continues: “We can’t achieve public safety when huge swaths of people are trying to survive our destructive system of mass incarceration and struggling under the weight of racial oppression themselves.”

You can’t be safe from criminals if the criminals themselves are victims, Ishisaka argues. And this isn’t even satire.

And then she engages in good ole fashion gaslighting: “Until we address foundational issues and continue to invest in cross-racial community building, we can’t be surprised when the byproducts of our unjust systems emerge in the worst ways, as we are seeing now.”

I’m not surprised that degenerates attack people. I’m disgusted by it. That’s the difference between us, I suppose.

Grifters unleashed

Ishisaka’s column isn’t just mind-numbingly vapid nonsense. It’s offensive drivel masquerading as a critical look at complex issues. This isn’t critical, nor is the issue complex. This is next-level pandering that puts contrived concerns of the criminals over concern for the actual victims, which she and others happily use as props to forward a political agenda.

This isn’t her first dumpster-fire column. It won’t be her last. So why am I calling it out? Because it’s dangerous.

Seattle is a city full of easily manipulated white progressives. They are blind adherents to a political ideology that teaches them that they’re oppressors. Now, they must bow to the will of grifters making a living off of their guilt.

There’s a cottage industry of scam artists and radicals getting rich off speeches telling white people they’re inherently racist. There are others making millions doing the same. Ishisaka works for the Times. She’s not making that kind of money.

Absolute drivel… and it’s dangerous

But Ishisaka has an audience of progressives who will actually read this and push politicians to adopt policies that go easy on suspects accused of attacking elderly Asian Americans. That’s not good for society.

Instead of seeing the assaulters as criminals and the assaulted as victims, Ishisaka’s clumsy column reverses the role, though does her level best (and I mean that; she can’t do better) to pretend she’s showing empathy to both sides.

But there is only one side to show empathy — and it’s decidedly not to the suspects, regardless of their race. It’s ironic that a chief complaint of progressive activists is that Lady Justice isn’t truly blind. Yet here we have a supposedly woke columnist demanding that we judge suspects by their race.

How about this novel idea: If you believe we have issues concerning access to housing, education, mental health, etc., you address it with policy. Simultaneously, you can choose to not make excuses for a suspect simply because of the color of their skin.

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3-6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here. Follow @JasonRantz on Twitter, Instagram, and Parler and like me on Facebook

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Rantz: Trump out of office, woke Seattle columnist makes excuses on hate crimes