Last week, in the wake of the murder of eight people at two Atlanta massage parlors, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow felt compelled to signal his virtue. After all, he noted, six of the eight killed were of Asian descent, and that group had endured plenty of abuse during the past year as scapegoats for the deadly ChiCom Virus.

Of course, Bacow didn’t call it the ChiCom Virus; he simply called it “the pandemic,” thereby bowing to political correctness and refusing to name the geographic region associated with the origin of the coronavirus — which humans have always routinely done, whether for Spanish flu, or West Nile virus, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, or Ebola, or Lyme disease, or Rocky Mountain spotted fever, or, well, you get the idea.

“Harvard must stand as a bulwark against hatred and bigotry,” he said in a statement. “We welcome and embrace individuals from every background because it makes us a better community, a stronger community. An attack on any group of us is an attack on all of us — and on everything we represent as an institution. … To Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in our community: We stand together with you today and every day going forward.”

That’s certainly a powerful statement of solidarity. But it’s also an insincere one. Harvard, you see, discriminates against Asian Americans when it comes to admissions.

As Wencong Fa writes in The Wall Street Journal, “Harvard has been sued over its race-conscious admissions policy. The plaintiffs contend that Harvard discriminates by assigning Asian-Americans lower ‘personal ratings,’ which are supposed to denote characteristics like leadership and grit. The Princeton Review has advised Asian-American applicants to refrain from noting that they intend to pursue a career in medicine or major in math or science, lest they appear ‘too Asian.’ The Justice Department brought a similar lawsuit against Yale last year, but the Biden administration dropped it in February.”

Fa knows all about this Ivy League discrimination. He’s an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is providing legal representation to various Asian Americans on this front.

But it’s not just the Harvards and the Yales that are singling out and punishing high-achieving Asian Americans. Take New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example. As Fa notes, de Blasio “claims the city’s transparent and objective process for admissions to [elite] specialized schools such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech has led to too many Asian-American students. He called the racial composition of those schools a ‘monumental injustice.’ Mr. De Blasio changed the admissions policy to make it harder for many Asian-American students, many from low-income families, to get in.”

Got that? To de Blasio, it’s a “monumental injustice” when one of his city’s best schools admits too many Asian Americans.

And all along we’ve been told that the vile racists reside on the Right.

California Democrat Congressman Ted Lieu certainly wants us to believe that’s the case. At a recent hearing about the lack of Asian American representation in our court system, he exploded at Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, for having had the temerity to note that a disproportionate number of our nation’s federal judges come from elite Ivy League schools such as Harvard and that the admissions discrimination of those schools against Asian Americans is naturally allowing fewer of them to end up on the federal bench.

“Amid all the concerns about rising anti-Asian bias,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted, “Mr. Lieu and progressives are desperate to squelch any debate about discrimination against well-qualified Asian-Americans by leading universities. They don’t want Americans to know that the left favors discrimination by race when it suits their political purposes.”

As we pointed out last week, leftists are lying about anti-Asian hate crimes. They’re simply trying to further divide the American people by race in an effort to secure another reliably Democrat voting bloc.

Let’s hope the American people — Asian and non-Asian alike — are smart enough to see through it.