I grew up with a grossly racist grandfather — he survived the Pacific War of WWII and came out of it with alcoholism and an abiding contempt for the Japanese. I heard so many racial slurs! He knew them all, and hated them. What I got out of it, though, was the stark contrast between what he said and what I knew. This was in the Pacific Northwest; I had many friends of Asian descent, I worked my way through summers in high school in the employ of Taki Nagasawa, who’s ethnicity you might guess from the name. What I learned from the experience was that my drunken grandpa was full of shit. That’s all. That when a racist starts spewing racism you should simply disbelieve everything he says.

So when Donald Trump started babbling about the “Chinese Flu” or the “Kung Flu”, what I saw was Drunk Grandpa raging from his armchair, sloshed to the gills on Budweiser. He’s wrong. I can ignore everything he says. Unfortunately, I can’t ignore the criminally moronic people who believed him, now fueling a wave of anti-Asian violence.

Hatred against Asian-Americans is being expressed far more freely now.

Asian Americans reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents during the pandemic, a number that experts believe to be just a fraction of the true total.

From 19 March 2020 to 28 February 2021, Asian Americans from all 50 states experienced everything ranging from verbal abuse to physical assaults, from getting coughed on to getting denied services because of their ethnicity, according to a report released on Tuesday by Stop AAPI Hate, a not-for-profit coalition tracking incidents of violence, discrimination and harassment.

More than 68% of the abuse was verbal harassment or name-calling, while 11.1% was physical, the report found.

Once again, I find myself looking from my Asian-American friends to these abusive assholes, unable to comprehend how wrong they are. It’s madness. Why are you saying these outrageous untruths, why are you treating your fellow citizens with such contempt?

I haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of the hatred. Yesterday, a man deliberately walked into three Asian-American businesses and opened fire, killing 8 people, including 6 women of Asian descent. It’s a clear case of racial targeting and mass murder. They’ve caught the murderer, a scraggly-bearded 21 year old white man. We’re already hearing what a good kid he was.

Long was described as a religious person by a former classmate at Sequoyah High. The 21-year-old graduated in 2017. The classmate said Long’s dad was a pastor, and he had seemed “innocent” and “nerdy.”

“He was very innocent seeming and wouldn’t even cuss,” the classmate told The Daily Beast. “He was sorta nerdy and didn’t seem violent from what I remember. He was a hunter and his father was a youth minister or pastor. He was big into religion.”

Social media posts from the Crabapple First Baptist Church show Long and his family had a lengthy history with the church. Long’s father is not listed as a pastor at the church. The elders of the church released a statement to Heavy.com, saying they were “grieved” and “heartbroken.”

“We are grieved to hear the tragic news about the multiple deaths in the Atlanta area. We are heartbroken for all involved,” the statement said. “We grieve for the victims and their families, and we continue to pray for them. Moreover, we are distraught for the Long family and continue to pray for them as well.”

Posts indicate he attended the church with his mom, dad and his younger sister. His mother organized events at the church, like a movie night with a cotton candy machine.

He wouldn’t even cuss! But he could draw a gun and cold-bloodedly kill young women.

His mom sponsored movie nights! With a cotton candy machine! I bet the movies were all rated “G”, too. But she raised a son with a broken moral compass.

Long was also involved with the church’s Student Ministry Team as recently as 2018, according to minutes from a meeting of the elders. He was one of 11 people who served as team members, which “exists to see students receive Jesus Christ as Lord, and walk in Him, being rooted in the faith.”

The Daily Beast reported an Instagram account that “appeared to belong” to Long professed his love of God and guns.

“Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life. It’s a pretty good life,” a tagline for the account said.

Maybe the church and his family taught him the wrong things, and failed to teach him the important things.

You know what else perpetuates the bigotry? That we know this much about the shooter, that we’ve been served up these little dollops of presumably worthy things about him — religion, cotton candy, guns, prayer, nerdy, innocent — and we know nothing about his victims, who are all faceless Asian women who worked at a spa (wink, wink), and whose lives aren’t summed up with a list of trite objects. Now they’ve been reduced to objects themselves, the murderer is the subject, the verb is “killed”. Maybe eventually they’ll send a junior reporter off to get a quick summary of their lives, but it won’t be a front page story.

I wonder if some editor is thinking now that it would be a good idea to send a young Asian woman reporter off to cover that story (and get traumatized all over again) that’ll get buried somewhere in the back of the paper, and looking over the newsroom, is dismayed to notice they haven’t hired anyone to fit that role.

They also need to find someone to rewrite the puff pieces they’ve done on the murderer, to point out that he was a hate-filled gun-waving homicidal Jesus freak from a morally bankrupt family, with no excuses.

The right-wing freakout over Dr Seuss is amusing. The get everything wrong, but there is such wild-eyed outrage over his publisher not publishing books containing offensive illustrations.

Yes. That’s how it works. The people who own his works are exercising their right to not publish them. It’s not censorship, and it’s not driven by some imaginary leftist cancel culture.

I’ve been reading Seuss for most of my life, we read his books to our kids, and there are some that are popular with my granddaughter right now. They’re great books! No one is taking the Cat in the Hat out behind the chemical sheds. But there are definite examples of crude stereotyping of Asian and black people in some of them, and they taint the good.

I knew that Theodore Geisel had worked as a propagandist during WWII, as did some of the great cartoonists associated with the Warner Brothers label. If he were still alive, he’d probably be relieved to see that his racist works were being removed from the shelves of children’s libraries. We shouldn’t forget that Geisel approved of the internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry, or that he used crude steretoypes of African people, but it’s for the best that that stuff isn’t used in humorous primers intended to help children learn to read.

My grandfather fought in the Pacific during WWII, and came back filled with a lot of hatred and bigotry (which he did not outgrow, unlike Theodore Geisel). While I would like my grandkids to know something about their great grandparents at some point, I’m not going to start by sitting down and teaching them all the slurs Grandpa used for Asian people. That would be taking the wrong message from the experience.

Not Rowan Atkinson, too?

In an interview with the Radio Times, the multi-hyphenated British star blamed social media platforms for increased levels of polarization, which he said makes him fearful for the future of freedom of speech.

“The problem we have online is that an algorithm decides what we want to see, which ends up creating a simplistic, binary view of society. It becomes a case of either you’re with us or against us. And if you’re against us, you deserve to be ‘cancelled’,” Atkinson said.

“It’s important that we’re exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion, but what we have now is the digital equivalent of the medieval mob roaming the streets looking for someone to burn. So it is scary for anyone who’s a victim of that mob and it fills me with fear about the future.”

Tell me, who has been cancelled? It seems to me that what this paranoia is all about is that some people who are dependent entirely on their personal popularity with the citizenry are pleased to have a label to tag on the phenomenon of losing that popularity. It’s not their fault — whether it’s just that their 15 minutes are up, or that their creepiness is publicly exposed, or that someone finds out they are a racist or a pedophile — no, none of that. It’s entirely due to a wicked external force, “Cancel Culture”, that is targeting them for destruction for arbitrary and unfair reasons. So Louis CK might have been exposing himself and masturbating in front of women, but nobody would have known that if Cancel Culture hadn’t revealed that. Milo Yiannopoulos might have been frolicking with Nazis and babbling about how molesting children is OK, but the only way you knew that was because Cancel Culture was picking on him.

It’s as if they’re only now noticing that popular opinion is fickle, and yes, people will decide whether they like you on your personal opinions and behavior. This is the human condition. And if your entire career rests completely on your popularity, there will be ups and downs, and you can thoroughly trash your own reputation without any external agent doing any conspiratorial work against you.

It’s also nothing new. Was Fatty Arbuckle a victim of Cancel Culture? I’ll concede that Julius Caesar definitely was, but if you haven’t been stabbed, you can stop complaining. Critics can be obnoxious, but they’re not Culture Assassins.

It’s a ridiculous invention, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Go ahead, tell me that Louis CK and Milo were victims of “Cancel Culture” — it won’t make a bit of difference in my opinion of them. I don’t like what they did or said, and I can choose not to support them. The fact that I might not like you does not mean that I have a “simplistic, binary view of society” — I can be looking at you with all kinds of nuance, recognizing that you’ve done some good work, that you’re kind to dogs, that your mother loves you, but if you’re also a misogynist I can still decide that, on balance, I’d rather not associate with you. I’ve enjoyed Rowan Atkinson’s comedy, but at the same time I can think he’s being a bit of a dumbass right now. Do these whiners about an imaginary Cancel Culture hiding under their bed want to take my choice away from me?

Nathan Robinson cuts right to the bone here on why it’s perfectly legitimate for employees of Penguin Random House to protest any contract with Jordan Peterson.

It’s not reasonable to claim that employees who object to publishing Peterson are “censorious”. A publisher is not a Kinkos. Penguin Random House rejects far more books than it accepts, and it does not treat all points of view equally. It does not publish works of Holocaust denial or phrenology. It has standards, and it’s reasonable for employees to argue that Peterson does not meet those standards. After all, he has suggested that gay marriage might be a plot by cultural Marxists, that women wearing makeup in the workplace is “sexually provocative”, that trans women aren’t women because they’re not “capable of having babies”, that women cannot handle truth, and that transgender activists are comparable to mass-murdering Maoists. He peddles debunked scientific theories and dangerously dodgy diets. I have gone through his work myself and shown that he is a crackpot, whose writing is devoid of basic reasoning and full of wild unsubstantiated claims. When Pankaj Mishra wrote a critical review of Peterson’s work in the New York Review of Books, Peterson called Mishra a “prick” and said he’d “slap [Mishra] happily”. The things he says are often false, prejudiced and dangerous. What possible obligation does a publisher have to publish the ravings of bigots?

Unfortunately, there’s also a reason Peterson’s new book should have publishers lining up to take it on: there is a legion of gullible fans willing to pay good money for it.

That is a short-term excuse, though. In the long run, you’d think a publisher would want to be able to maintain some level of prestige and some quality control over the books released under its imprint. I think the employees of Penguin Random House are seeing an imminent degradation of the value of their work, while management just has dollar signs in their eyes.

Jordan Peterson really is just one step toward Holocaust denial and phrenology; a publisher shouldn’t aspire to be Quillette, either.

I was in the boy scouts, briefly, long long ago, but that’s such a reactionary organization.