With doubt surfacing as to whether the act itself was a result of white supremacy, media has turned their spotlight on the officer who gave the information as to the suspect’s confession.
After a horrific act of violence against women on Tuesday in and around Atlanta, Georg., media jumped on the story that the man who is suspected, and arrested, for committing the act did so because he is a white supremacist. This narrative began to fall apart once officers released information that the man likely committed the acts due to his sex addiction.
Where did media get the idea that the cop was racist? It was from Vox Associate Editor Aaron Rupar who misrepresented what the officer had said. Rupar took words said by the police spokesperson, Captain Jay Baker, out of context to make it look like he sympathized with the suspect. He wrote that Baker said that it "was a really bad day for him and this is what he did," making it seem like this was Baker's take, instead of what the suspect had said.
"Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did" -- a law enforcement official explains Robert Aaron Long's decision to kill 8 people in a strange manner pic.twitter.com/u0zFcqjbNK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar)
What Baker said was "The investigators, they interviewed him this morning, and they got that impression, that yes, he understood the gravity of it, that he was pretty much fed up, and he was at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did."
When asked if the suspect was remorseful, Baker said "I don't know if he was remorseful or not."
Police further reported that under interrogation, the suspect admitted that his motivations were instead misogynist. He told officers that he is a sex addict who wanted to destroy the that which he believed drew him into temptation. This account was corroborated by a halfway house roommate of the suspect's, who said that he had an addiction to pornography.
Since the media can't get over its hyperfixation with race, the politics of the police spokesperson in Atlanta has now become the focal point of the story rather than the shooter, whose actions were unlikely to have been racially motivated given everything we now know about him.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray)
With doubt surfacing as to whether the act itself was a result of white supremacy, media has turned their spotlight on the officer who gave the information as to the suspect's confession. The idea is that the officer, Captain Jay Baker, who told press on Wednesday that per their investigation the attack was "not racially motivated," is a white supremacist.
The Daily Beast has reported that Baker "posted racist COVID shirts on Facebook." What they don't tell you is that the idea that these shirts are racist stems from a one-year-old media hoax that purports that identifying COVID by its location of origin is racist.
The shirts read "Covid 19: Imported virus from Chy-na," imitating the way that former President Donald Trump would say the country's name. They report that "...spokesperson shared racist content online, including pointing the finger at China for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—the same vitriol advocates say has fueled a horrific surge in violence against Asian Americans."
They slam him for promoting these shirts, and go on to slam the online retailer who sold them on their platform because that site, Deadline Appeal, owned by a former colleague of Baker's, a man who used to serve as deputy sheriff from Cherokee County. The Daily Beast critiqued the other apparel that's for sale on the site, and the owner of that site, saying that he worked in Iraq in a private capacity and had security clearance in 2016, during the Obama administration.
The investigation into the mass murder on Tuesday is ongoing.
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