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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

> Many blame the Trump administration for inciting this violence; Trump and numerous other members of his White House staff embraced racist and xenophobic anti-Asian rhetoric...

> NYPD date showed that there has been a 1,900 percent increase anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City in the past year... An 84-year-old Thai American man, Vicha Ratanapakdee, was killed in an unprovoked attack in San Francisco; a 64-year-old Vietnamese American woman was assaulted in broad daylight in San Jose... caught on camera shoving a 91-year-old man in Oakland’s Chinatown

Trump only won 20% of the votes in New York City. Only 13% of the votes in San Francisco. Only 25% of the votes in San Jose. And 16% of the votes in Oakland. All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.

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How much longer can we blame trump for everything before realising America has problems deeper than one person.

Well that would perhaps lead to solving some of the problems, which is not in any politician's interest. Having the problems, and blaming them someone else, is far more useful.

Perpetrators of racist attacks tend not to be accurate representations of the local population.

And the fact that CA and NY are mentioned rather than Oklahoma and Idaho is far more likely to be the result of there actually being Asian people in New York and California.

Plus, of course, these two states are among the most populated. There are far more Trump voters in California than the Dakotas.

There are 90,000 Asian Americans in Oklahoma. There are over a million in Texas. And more than half a million in Florida. Certainly enough for a pre-mediated act of political terrorism to find a target.

You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population. That's definitely not true outside the coastal states. If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters, the Trump-stronghold of Houston (which has one of the largest Asian-American populations of any American city) should be a hotbed of hate crimes. Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco. Clearly there's an x-factor that goes beyond Trump.

> There are 90,000 Asian Americans in Oklahoma

There's about 300,000 in the City of San Francisco.

Heck, there's more of both Asians and Trump supporters in California than any red state, and probably far more of both in just red counties in California than in Oklahoma.

> You're constructing a false dichotomy where you assume all Red counties are rural, white, and low-population.

No, you’re constructing a dichotomy where blue states consist entirely of blue counties and blue voters.

> If the trend is being primarily driven by Republican voters

What if it's driven primarily by Republican voters who are lashing out at highly visible targets outside of official channels where they don't control local and state governments and therefore feel disempowered?

> Yet far more seem to occur in San Francisco

San Francisco has about twice as many Asians as Houston, with about 1/3 the total population, for about 6 times the concentration. The average Trump supporter in SF (where, sure, there are fewer) is going to encounter a lot more Asians in daily life than in Houston.

Antoine Watson

Yahya Muslim

Yep, definitely sounds like average Trump supporter names...

There's a flagged-to-death response here that really deserves a response:

> It's Trump's fault Blacks in CA and NY are attacking Asians?

To the extent that it is blacks attacking Asians this is more plausible than it superficially might seem: people here love to cite the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, but if you think that that is a significant force dealing with content of intellectual interest in a single news source, you probably ought to recognize how much more powerful it is for messages playing on out-group fear relayed through multiple social channels.

Sure, the ground is prepped for it by preexisting background racial animosity, but then even if not Trump specifically, a lot of that is also from racist propaganda of a white supremacist origin permeating society and turning nonwhite groups against each other.

>Trump only won 20% of the votes in New York City

That's like 600,000 people...

The least Trump-supportive areas are also the areas where the Trump followers who do exist are most likely to interact with Asian people.

> All of the examples cited occurred in some of the least Trump-supportive areas of the country.

So? Do you think Trump supporters are more likely to feel persecuted and lash out in rage against vulnerable targets outside of government-sanctioned mechanisms where they are a majority and control local government and institutions or where they are a small minority with little influence on local government and institutions?

And do you think that, even that general factor aside, when looking specifically at attacks on Asians by Trump supporters, the number of Trump supporters in the area is really more important than the frequency of interaction between Trump supporters and Asians?

People are downvoting this because the facts make them uncomfortable. Funny how when you posts stats it makes them angry.

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