“It looks racially motivated to me,” said Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, commenting on the fact that six Asian women were among the eight people murdered last week at two Atlanta massage parlors by a deranged young man.

And when it comes to racially motivated behavior, the Thailand-born Duckworth ought to know. After all, she vowed on Tuesday not to support any more of President Joe Biden’s executive branch nominees who were either straight or white, because he didn’t have any Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders in his cabinet. Duckworth’s threat didn’t last long, though. Someone must’ve clued her in that anti-heterosexual bigotry is technically still bigotry, and anti-white racism is technically still racism — even when the bigoted racist is a Senate Democrat.

Which brings us to today’s topic: the purported wave of white supremacist, anti-Asian hate crimes sweeping the nation due to former President Donald Trump having routinely referred to the China virus as the China virus. (We’re still waiting for those vile racists at Wikipedia to purge their website of its Spanish flu page, its West Nile virus page, its Middle East respiratory syndrome page, its Ebola virus page, its Lyme disease page, its Rocky Mountain spotted fever page, and, well, you get the idea.)

But if the identity pimps on the Left are going to create another massive voting bloc of aggrieved-and-hyphenated Americans (just as they have for blacks and Hispanics), it appears they’ll have to do it by lying. And, frankly, they’re off to a good start.

For one thing, the “surge” isn’t really a surge — at least not in the way we generally understand and use the term. In fact, the race baiters are simply having some fun with statistics. As Dennis Prager writes, “The Atlanta lie is part of the greater lie that there is a national epidemic of white supremacist anti-Asian racism. On March 18, for example, The Washington Post reported: ‘Anti-Asian hate crimes have spiked 150 percent since the pandemic began, according to a recent study.’ … The 150% increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes is contained in its ‘Fact Sheet: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2020,’ according to which the number of anti-Asian American incidents rose from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020. So, the entire edifice of hate against Asian Americans is predicated on an alleged increase of 73 incidents.”

Seventy-three incidents.

Think about that. Ours is a country of 330 million. And the Left wants us to believe that Asian Americans are under siege because the number of attacks against them (Note: Even a “slight” is considered an “attack”) jumped from 49 in 2019 to 122 in 2020. That means the ratio of assaults against them “jumped” from 1 for every 6,734,693 Americans to 1 for every 2,704,918 Americans. This is the equivalent of a bad year for lightning strikes or shark attacks.

For another thing, if there is an increase in violent crimes against Asian Americans, it isn’t being perpetrated by white supremacists — or whites generally. As Robert Cherry writes in The Spectator, “Using 2019 FBI statistics — the most recently available data — I computed black and white perpetrators of hate crimes as a percentage of men 18 to 44 years old in their populations. The black rate was 40 percent, 76 percent, and 303 percent higher than the white rate for hate crimes against the Asian/Pacific Island, Latino, and LGBTQ communities respectively. Even more troubling, black rates for hate-crime assaults were 94 percent higher while for property destruction and vandalism, they were 14 percent lower than white rates.”

So the increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans is minuscule, and the group most responsible for it is most likely another minority group, Black Americans. But, yeah, other than that, the vile narrative being foisted upon us by the Left is accurate.