Name: Corporate Media Don’t Want To Talk About The Atlanta Gunman’s Real Motivation
Brand: thefederalist.com
SKU: thefederalist-com-1266
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Corporate Media Don’t Want To Talk About The Atlanta Gunman’s Real Motivation

preview

ShareThere’s something off about press coverage of the shooting rampage in Atlanta earlier this week. Nearly every corporate media outlet has framed the killings as a racially-motivated “hate crime” against Asian Americans, noting that six of the eight victims are Asian and the alleged shooter is white.Yet race doesn’t appear to be a significant motivating factor here, at least not according to the accused gunman, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, who was arrested Tuesday evening after targeting three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Long denied that he chose his victims based on their race and that he had a “sexual addiction” and that he carried out the killings to eliminate his “temptation.” (Two of the dead, a man and a woman, were white, and a third victim, who was injured, was a Hispanic man.)That motive has since been corroborated by at least two other sources. According to a former roommate, Tyler Bayless, who met Long in an Atlanta halfway house for recovering addicts, Long would frequent these massage parlors “for explicitly sexual activity.” Bayless that Long was “deeply religious” and became “very emotionally distraught that he frequented these places.”Another former roommate, who on condition of anonymity, said Long went twice to rehab for sexual addiction last year. The roommate reportedly lived with Long for several months in summer 2020 at a transition house for people exiting rehab, and called police after recognizing Long in a surveillance photo after the shootings Tuesday night.There’s also evidence Long had other targets in mind that had nothing to do with race but much to do with sex. When police caught up with him Tuesday, he was , where he was planning to attack “some type of porn industry,” according to authorities. Another law enforcement source told CNN that Long was recently kicked out of his parents’ house because of his sexual addiction, which included frequently spending hours on end watching pornography online.By contrast, there’s little evidence so far that Long was motivated by racial animus, which in turn suggests a much different scenario than what corporate media has almost unanimously presented as a racially-motivated killing spree. Corporate media, like nearly every other elite institution and industry in America today, can be expected to obsessively focus on race and see a race angle in every story. But in this case, perhaps the laser-like focus on race belies a reluctance to discuss the role of sex, and sexual pathology, in our hyper-sexualized culture.After all, if Long was addicted to pornography, and addicted to paying for sex at massage parlors, the story takes on a different narrative shape. Instead of being about an angry white man taking out his racist hatred on Asian women—and thus fitting neatly into a larger media narrative about racism in America—it becomes a story about a deeply disturbed young man dangerously addicted to pornography and sex in a society that treats both as harmless.Of course, that Long is a sex-addict makes him no less culpable for his alleged crimes, but it does shift the narrative frame into something our cultural elites are loath to confront because of their complicity in it. The media want to use this tragedy to indict supposedly racist attitudes in America, but it appears rather to indict prevailing attitudes about pornography and sex—attitudes that are especially prevalent among our cultural elite. Whether it’s casual sex, the proliferation of porn, online hook-up culture, the sexualization of children, or the normalization of gender dysphoria and transgenderism, we are told these things are okay, that they are normal, that we should accept them and not judge. We are never told that they are dangerous, or that there might be consequences—dire ones—for embracing these things as cultural norms.Seen in this light, the Atlanta killings becomes a story that forces us to confront our priors not about race but about sex and sexuality. Maybe, just maybe, all of these prevailing attitudes about sex come with some pretty serious societal pathologies and some pretty heavy human costs. Maybe these “blessings of liberty,” as David French might call them, are in fact curses. Maybe we were wrong about all of this. Maybe unfettered sex and ubiquitous porn are not compatible with a healthy society. Maybe they are actually evil, and maybe we should start talking about how to push back and help unwell young men like Long before their lust turns to bloodlust and they go on murderous shooting sprees.Our cultural and media elite don’t want to talk about any of that. So they’re making this a story about race, even though everyone knows what it’s really about.September 9, 2022September 7, 2022September 3, 2022August 31, 2022IntroducingJoin now to unlock comments, browse ad-free, and access exclusive content from your favorite FDRLST writers×

ShareThere’s something off about press coverage of the shooting rampage in Atlanta earlier this week. Nearly every corporate media outlet has framed the killings as a racially-motivated “hate crime” against Asian Americans, noting that six of the eight victims are Asian and the alleged shooter is white.Yet race doesn’t appear to be a significant motivating factor here, at least not according to the accused gunman, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, who was arrested Tuesday evening after targeting three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area. Long denied that he chose his victims based on...

public

John Daniel Davidson is the Political Editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, The LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

https://thefederalist.com/author/jddavidson/

John Daniel Davidson

A web magazine of culture, entertainment, and politics. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

Corporate Media Don’t Want To Talk About The Atlanta Gunman’s Real Motivation

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS