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A deadly shooting spree in Georgia has rocked AAPI communities already reeling from a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes, as authorities bumblingly cautioned that it’s not yet clear which particular side of the white, male supremacy lizard brain was dominant here.
- A white 21-year-old man shot and killed eight people at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night, and may have been on his way to Florida to carry out more shootings when he was arrested. Six of the eight victims were Asian women. The gunman had purchased his gun just hours earlier—Georgia has no waiting period for buying firearms. (Georgia does have a 24-hour waiting period for abortions, funnily enough.) He’s been charged with eight counts of murder.
- In a mess of a Wednesday press conference, authorities said it was too early to know if the shootings targeting massage parlors with largely Asian staff, committed by a shooter who reportedly said, “I’ll kill all the Asians,” had anything to do with race. Police reported that the killer had denied any racial motivation for his attacks, attributing them instead to his “sex addiction” and desire to eliminate his “temptation.” (And as we all know, racism and misogyny are two totally distinct motivators that never go hand-in-hand, particularly when it comes to violence against sex workers.)
- Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office bizarrely offered up the gunman’s own self-pitying narrative: “Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.” Buckle up for the opposite of a surprise: Baker has previously posted photos of a racist coronavirus t-shirt on Facebook.
- Whatever the specific balance of the gunman’s personal hatred levels, his attacks came amid an unmistakable wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S. Hours before the shootings, Stop AAPI Hate released a report showing that there were nearly 3,800 reported hate incidents targeting Asian Americans in the past year alone, with women reporting attacks at twice the rate of men. White-supremacist propaganda (the physical, offline kind) also surged in 2020, according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League, hitting the highest numbers seen in at least a decade.
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There’s no honest way to divorce that pattern of violence from the disgraced former president’s racist pandemic rhetoric, or Republican ideology more generally.
- It was one year ago today that CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang reported that a White House official had referred to COVID-19 as the “Kung-Flu” to her face. Donald Trump used the phrase “China Virus” on Fox News as recently as Tuesday night, and his grossest allies in Congress have kept up the racist drumbeat since he left office. Reps. Judy Chu (D-CA) and Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) each drew an explicit link between Trump’s coronavirus rhetoric and the escalating violence, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday that there was “no question” it had fueled threats. Republicans in Congress dutifully responded to this on Wednesday by voting overwhelmingly against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.
- While Trump helped create an acute crisis, it’s a good time to remind each other that anti-Asian hatred in the U.S.—particularly against Asian American women—is nothing new: The Page Act of 1857 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, two of the country’s earliest immigration laws, were designed to keep Chinese women and laborers out of the country. When illnesses spread through San Francisco in the late 1800s, Chinese American residents were repeatedly blamed. That xenophobia helped lay the groundwork for Japanese internment during World War II, and persists in the same prejudices that Trump reactivated when coronavirus arrived.
The investigation is still ongoing, but it seems safe to say that Tuesday’s attacks were probably fueled by a roiling blend of pervasive problems—racism, misogyny, the heightened vulnerability of sex workers and immigrants—and made possible by the outrageous ease of gun access. There’s plenty of work to do on all of those fronts, but for now, here’s where you can support Asian communities, sign up for bystander-intervention training, and donate to help protect Asian and migrant sex workers.
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On this week's Pod Save The World, Tommy and Ben discuss America's role in getting the whole world vaccinated, crackdowns on dissent in Uganda and Myanmar, and the fight for women's safety in UK and Australia. Also, how much Jared Kushner's new op-ed sucks. Listen now wherever you get your pods →
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President Biden has announced that he supports reforming the Senate filibuster, marking a sea change in the debate over democracy reform. Biden hasn’t come around to total abolition yet (we will convince him, with shirts) but said he’s in favor of requiring senators to stay on the floor and keep talking in order to hold up legislation. Perfect timing, because Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s ready to get this For The People Act show on the road. It’s still unclear exactly what steps Democrats will take to pass it: Democratic House leaders have reportedly begun angling to create a voting-rights exception to the filibuster, an idea that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) unequivocally rejected on Wednesday, and there are nine Senate Democrats who remain filibuster-reform wild cards.
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- One in four House members have chosen not to get vaccinated, three months after shots were made available to them. It appears to be Republicans who are refusing, if you can believe it.
- President Biden said in an interview that Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) should resign if the investigation confirms the sexual harassment allegations against him: “I think he'll probably end up being prosecuted, too.”
- The Biden administration will invest $10 billion to ramp up coronavirus testing in schools, and the CDC will help state and local health departments set up school testing programs in places where they don’t yet exist.
- The IRS has delayed the tax-filing deadline until May 17. Procrastination hive, rise up.
- Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has sued the Biden administration over the coronavirus-relief package because it won’t let states use the money tax cuts.
- Prosecutors have brought conspiracy charges against four Proud Boys leaders in connection with the January 6 insurrection. At least 13 members of the Proud Boys have now been charged.
- A Capitol insurrectionist has been jailed until his trial after telling members of the Texas Three Percenters that he had set up a fake security company to get his hands on high-grade weapons.
- Two seated jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial were dismissed after they said news of Minneapolis’s $27 million settlement with George Floyd’s family had wrecked their impartiality. One juror said the amount “kind of swayed me a little bit,” because it sent a message that the city “felt that something was wrong, and they wanted to make it right, to the tune of that dollar amount.”
- Stella Keating, a trans 16-year-old from Washington state, testified confidently before the Senate Judiciary Committee as a witness in support of the Equality Act.
- Scientists successfully grew some mouse embryos in an artificial uterus, which, and we have no evidence for this, feels like the first step towards a Stuart Little situation. Again, this is based on nothing at all, but we are probably 5-10 years out from mice that wear pants and talk.
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The European countries that paused their use of the AstraZeneca vaccine did so largely for political reasons, and at great cost to their vaccine rollouts. Germany’s decision to pause AstraZeneca shots after a few recipients developed serious blood clots caused a domino effect: Italy, France, and Spain quickly followed suit to avoid looking reckless by comparison. But there was (and remains) no evidence that blood-clotting issues are more common among people who received the vaccine than in the general population, or of any causal link—it’s like if a country paused vaccinations because a few people who got jabbed were later hit by cars. Europe’s vaccine rollouts were already lagging due to shortages, and the suspensions could endanger hundreds or thousands more lives as coronavirus cases surge. The pause also seems likely to drive up vaccine hesitancy if and when AstraZeneca shots do resume. Not great, on the whole!
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Let’s face it: The stock market isn’t exactly famous for its inclusivity. Only about half of all Americans have any positions in the stock market, and these numbers skew lower for women and POC. Technology has made investing more accessible to more people—but to truly democratize the stock market, we need to change its culture.
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The House has passed a reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Amalgamated Bank, the largest union-owned bank in the country, has become the first major U.S. bank to come out in support of reparations for Black Americans.
Forty-three progressive groups have joined a coalition to reform the filibuster.
A Japanese court ruled that the government’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, which advocates hope will pave the way for marriage equality.
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