This is not the outcome people on the left wanted. As I wrote yesterday, a 65-year-old woman walking down the street in the middle of the day was violently assaulted by a man police later identified on surveillance video:

Police released photos of the man (seen above) and today they announced he has been arrested and charged with a hate crime:

New York City police identified the suspect as Brandon Elliot, 38, who was charged with two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count each of attempted assault as a hate crime, assault and attempted assault.

He was already on lifetime parole for fatally stabbing his mother in 2002, authorities said. He was freed from prison in November 2019, according to police. No other details about the murder were released.

The police credited help from the public in their announcement of the arrest:

Thanks to assistance from the public and excellent investigative work by @NYPDHateCrimes Detectives, the individual wanted for Monday’s assault of a 65 year-old Asian female, at 360 West 43rd St, was arrested and charged with Felony Assault as a Hate Crime. pic.twitter.com/ZQRVGZEAb2

— NYPD Hate Crimes (@NYPDHateCrimes) March 31, 2021

This is not the narrative the media and the left wanted. The increase in hate crimes was supposed to blamed squarely on white supremacy but reality hasn’t been cooperating with that agenda. Bari Weiss wrote a piece today which will no doubt outrage many because she dares to state the obvious. The media and activists are playing a racial blame game with these attacks:

Should a person’s life matter more to us if they are attacked by someone of one race, rather than another? Because that is exactly the calculus we are seeing.

Asian-Americans are being attacked and the media and the political class are contorting themselves to find a way to blame white supremacy or the legacy of Trumpism. Why? Because when the perpetrator is a neo-Nazi it is a moral gimme. When the person carrying out the hate crime comes from a group that’s also a target of hate crimes condemnation becomes much more difficult.

This dynamic deserves more attention.

Weiss concluded by saying, “The value of a victim should not be dependent on the identity of their victimizer.” That’s not the way things have operated since the arrival of BLM on the public scene. The whole operating premise of BLM is that some shootings and some deaths require total national media coverage based on the race of the victim and shooter, while other shootings and deaths can be safely ignored as local crime stories.

Last weekend in Chicago, 36 people were shot and four of them were killed. The week before that it was 21 shot, including a 10-year-old boy, and four killed. And the weekend before that it was 40 dead and four killed. The casualties that weekend included a 13-year-old boy and a police sergeant (both of whom survived).

Perhaps more significantly, there was a mass shooting that weekend in which 15 people at a warehouse party were shot and two of them were killed. Both of the deceased victims, Rayneesha Dotson and Lionel Darling, were black. Did you hear about that mass shooting in the national media? Did you see any think pieces about about that mass shooting? Probably not since it barely made news outside Chicago. But you can bet you would have heard about it if the victims had been Asian or if the shooters had been white.

Here are two local news reports on the mass shooting which happened just a couple days before the massage parlor shootings in Atlanta.