King County, the county that includes Seattle, Washington, will spend $5 million of the “COVID relief” provided under President Joe Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” to fight anti-Asian bias in response to recent shootings in Atlanta, Georgia.
The shootings at three massage parlors, in which six of eight victims were Asian American, had no known racial motive.
Only a portion of Biden’s $1.9 trillion bill, passed along party lines, is actually directed at coronavirus-related spending. Much of the spending is directed toward padding the budgets of Democrat-run state and local governments, and the expansion of social welfare programs, in what Democrats have hailed as “the most progressive bill in American history.”
The Seattle Times reported Monday:
[King County Executive Dow Constantine] announced his plans to fight anti-Asian racism with money from the “American Rescue Plan,” the pandemic relief legislation that granted billions of federal dollars to Washington state, including $437 million to King County.
The first part of the funding, he said, will be $5 million for community organizations, including multicultural media and a coalition of eight organizations battling hate and bias.
King County prosecuted 59 anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020, up from 39 in 2019. Local leaders blamed rhetoric around the coronavirus, including former President Donald Trump’s references to the fact that the pandemic originated in China.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.