in the face of any form of hate. then senator amy klobuchar and the new push for the violence against women act. and congresswoman veronica escobar on what's really happening at the southern border. when "all in" starts right now. good evening from new york. i'm chris hayes. there are eight people dead in the atlanta area after a horrifying spree shooting last night at three different locations, three different spas. the suspect is in police custody and we know some of the victims' names. delaina ashley yaun, age 33. xiaojie tan, age 49. daoyou feng, age 44. paul andre michels, age 54. seven out eight victims were women. six of the eight were of asian descent. south korean consulate in atlanta confirmed that four of the eight victims were ethnic koreans. we done know their nationalities. the rampage began around 5:00 p.m. yesterday at young's asian massage near acworth, georgia a suburb northwest of atlanta. four people were killed there. and about 45 minutes later, officers responded to gold spa in northeast atlanta where they found three women killed. while officers were on that scene, shots were fired across the street at aromatherapy spa. they found one woman killed there. police arrested 21-year-old robert aaron long following a manhunt yesterday evening, charging him with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault. this story you might recall was breaking just as we got off the air last night and in the hours that followed many folks were watching this happen made the obvious connection between this tragedy and the horrifying spike in anti-asian hate crimes we have seen around the country recently. a group called stop aapi hate received reports of nearly 3,800 anti-asian hate incidents in the last year. more than 2/3 of them against asian women. and that context hung over the news reports as they came out this morning and during the day it was glaring as police held a press conference in atlanta this morning putting on frankly i have to say a strange performance as they shared what the shooter allegedly confessed to them. >> he claims that these -- as the chief said, this is still early but he does claim that it was not racially motivated. he apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction, and sees these locations as something that allows him to -- to go to these places and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. that interviewed him this when i spoke to investigators that interviewed him this morning, they got the impression that he understood the gravity of it and he was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did. >> it was a bad day for him. a really bad day for him. this is what he did. to eliminate the temptation. as many people pointed out whatever the shooter's own understanding of his motive or what he told police perhaps somewhat self-servingly, having been arrested after allegedly shooting and killing eight people, or what the police's characterization is, it is just impossible to separate the context of these specific human beings who were killed, murdered where they worked, and where they came from and what they looked like and where they worked and who owned those facilities and the world they inhabited and the violence that was committed against them by this individual. atlanta mayor keisha lance bottoms stepped out to the mic just after officer baker to make that point. >> whatever the motivation was for this guy, we know that many of the victims, the majority of the victims, were asian. we also know that this is an issue that's happening across the country. it is unacceptable. it is hateful. and it has to stop. >> president biden echoed mayor bottoms earlier this afternoon, expressing concern about the violent trend in this country. >> the question of motivation is still to be determined. but whatever the motivation here, i know that asian-americans are in very -- are very concerned because as you know i have been speaking about the brutality against asian-americans for the last couple months and i think it's very, very troubling. >> vice president kamala harris, we should note the highest ranking asian-american in the history of american politics, offered this. >> i do want to say to our asian-american community that we stand with you and understand how this has frightened and shocked and outraged all people, but knowing the increasing level of hate crime against our asian-american brothers and sisters, we also want to speak out in solidarity with them and acknowledge that none of us should ever be silent in the face of any form of hate. >> for the latest on the investigation we go to nbc news correspondent kathy park in atlanta. kathy, what is the latest? >> reporter: chris, good evening to you. it certainly has been a very difficult day for the people of atlanta as well as the asian-american community. you might notice the growing makeshift memorial behind me in front of one of the shooting locations, one of three that happened in a span of about an hour or so. the suspect, robert aaron long, 21 years old of georgia, said that these attacks were not racially motivated. however, officials are not ruling this out at this point. but he did say that he was -- had some sort of sex addiction and was targeting these establishments which he has visited in the past before as a way of lashing out. as far as the victims, there are in total eight. one person has been injured and still recovering from his injuries at this hour. but six of those victims were of asian descent and that's why it's been so painful for the asian-american community because as you mentioned there has been a surge in anti-asian hate crimes against asian-americans all across the country. in fact, one non-profit that has been tracking the latest numbers say that the number is around 3,800 since the pandemic kicked off around march. and you have celebrities, everyday citizens here in atlanta and beyond who are now speaking out on social media saying enough is enough. chris? >> kathy park in georgia, thank you so much. i want to turn to nbc news correspondent jo ling kent who has been covering, as kathy referred to, the increase in hate incidents against asian-americans. she joins me now with more on that new report. jo, we have seen reporting on this. we have seen folks speaking up about it. incidents. we're starting to get some data now as well. >> reporter: that's right, chris. it's an understatement to say the asian-american community and asians globally are really feeling so much pain over the past 24 to 36 hours not to mention the entire past year when so much of this has gone underreported and unacknowledged. so as we look at the data we see these reports of hate incidents are coming from all 50 states and washington, d.c. we see it's approaching 4,000. the pace is picking up according to stop aapi hate which is tracking these. i want to point out that this is -- these are people who are reporting these incidents, not the scores of individuals who aren't reporting. for fear of retribution or being shunned beyond what is already happening on the ground. as for who it's happening to, it's happening twice as often to women as it is to men according to those who are reporting. 68% of those incidents reported came from women. 29% male. we always want to know where is this happening. what is the context here? we know now according to this data that 68% -- 35% of the time it's happening at businesses and on public streets. and that's been reinforced by what we saw in atlanta. and of course we do not have a causal link at this time. we done have a motivation. but chris, when you look at the context in which so many of these incidents have been reported you start to see a pattern and you start to see why the asian community is feeling so much pain right now, especially asian american women. >> jo ling kent who's been reporting on this throughout, thank you, jo, for making a little time with us tonight. i appreciate it. >> thanks. >> i want to bring in democratic congresswoman juddy chu of california. first chinese-american woman elected to congress. chairs the congressional asian pacific american caucus. a lot of folks i talked to today there's a real visceral and raw sense of anguish and fear in the wake of yesterday, particularly because it comes on the heels of this past year. how are you thinking about what we're seeing here? >> well, we were shocked and heartbroken when we heard about the deaths of these eight people, six of them being asian women. we think that this is a culmination of a whole year's worth of hate that was stoked by the xenophobia of donald trump. and let me point out this man says that this was not a hate crime but he picked three businesses to deal with this sex addiction and all three of them just happened to be asian businesses with the first one being called young's asian massage. so what does that lead you to believe when the majority of the victims were asian-american? nonetheless, it is something that you could have seen from this year and what has happened with these 3,800 hate crimes and incidents that have occurred. >> i want to ask you about the personal experience in terms of constituents because this is something that for the last year there's been a lot of focus on coronavirus, the president calls it the china virus, and increasing rhetoric from a lot of corners of american life of china as a kind of enemy, as an external enemy. and in your relationship with your constituents in terms of what you hear, how has that impacted the folks you represent? what has that meant over the past year? >> well, we first saw it in january when the coronavirus was making its appearance. but when donald trump started calling it the china virus and the wuhan virus, contrary to the advice of cdc and the world health organization who said to call it covid-19 because calling it otherwise would only cause a stigma for those of different ethnicities and from different countries. donald trump actually doubled down. he actually said it even more and had his republican followers use those terms even more. hence what it caused was even more fear and terror in the asian-american community so we kept on hearing about stories after stories of people who were the victims of taunts and racial epitaphs, of people like -- that in the sands club in texas where a man stabbed all three of them, two being children 2 and 6 and afterward said it's because he wanted to kill asian-americans due to the coronavirus. so this is happening all over. in my district there was a chinese-american man who was attacked with his own cane at a bus stop in rose meade causing him to lose part of his finger. so yes, it is happening everywhere, including in my district. >> my understanding is the house judiciary committee tomorrow will be having a hearing about this which you will be participating in. i guess the question is, what at a federal level of policy, right, what can be done? >> we have been pursuing many things. one is right after the president made his executive order we asked for a meeting with the department of justice and let me say how significant it was that president biden did that. we've been asking for a year to meet with the department of justice due to all these hate crimes and incidents but we were totally ignored. president biden issued this executive order for the department of justice to meet with the aapi community, and so that was arranged immediately. we met with them last week on things we need to do to address the situation, hate crimes. we called for the anti-asian hate crime hearing which will take place tomorrow in the house judiciary committee and we are calling for the passage of the no hate act, which would vastly improve the collection of data on hate crimes, which right now is very spotty, is toothless because the federal government relies on local law enforcement to report and many of them have great variance in terms of how they treat hate crimes, as to whether they report it at all. in fact, three states don't even have a hate crime statute. and we are calling for march 26th to be a national day to speak out against anti-asian hate. >> march 26. that hearing will be tomorrow. congresswoman judy chu will be participating. congresswoman, thanks for your time tonight. >> thank you. okay. so there's one part of the story we obviously need to talk about a little more. and it's the explanation that the male shooter was having a really bad day. obviously, i think that police officer if he could take those words back and phrase it differently now probably would. a really bad way to explain why seven women and a man are dead this evening. we'll talk about why that is right after this. see every delivery... every yikes... and even every awwwwwwww... wait, where was i? introducing self protection from xfinity. designed to put you in control. with real-time notifications and a week of uninterrupted recording. all powered by reliable, secure wifi from xfinity. gotta respect his determination. it's easy and affordable to get started. get self protection for $10 a month. i spoke with investigators, they interviewed him this morning and they got that impression that yes, he understood the gravity of it and he was pretty much fed up, kind of at the end of his rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did. >> even if you take the accused mass murderer at his word as relayed by police, that he was motivated to murder eight people at three different spas because of a sexual addiction on what police amazingly called a, quote, bad day, we're still talking about a suspect with an intense violent fetishizing and objectifying view of women, asian women specifically. blaming them, hating them for his own perceived failures before targeting them and murdering them. police say he told them he planned to go to florida to murder more people at businesses connected to the adult film industry. this attack was directed against women specifically, it seems quite clear. and the other inescapable context of this mass murderer is at least a year of rising anti-asian bigotry and rhetoric and acts. think about this. it was a full year ago at the very start of the pandemic, "the new york times" had this headline. reporting chinese americans were being quote spit on, yelled at and attacked. but even as various groups and media outlets sounded the alarm at the rise in anti-asian attacks data suggests the threat only intensified. to talk about what's happening two women who pay a lot of attention to these issues. margaret kwong, president and ceo of the poverty law center. and brittany cooper professor of gender and women's studies at rutgers university. margaret, let me start with you. obviously, it's just a brutally horrifying act that's been committed here. how have you been processing the after math of it and particularly the way the law enforcement spoke about it today? >> thanks so much, chris. i was outraged by what sheriff baker said in his press conference today. i think there's no question that this was a hate crime. it was a hate crime against women. it was a hate crime against asian women. and it's clear to me that the georgia law enforcement agencies needs some traning on what hate crimes are and how they need to do these types of investigations. >> britney, your response? >> you know, one of the problems we have with white supremacy is many white people don't believe it's racist unless a racial slur has been used. but this is clearly a targeted attack on asian-american folks and on asian women. one of the things we know is that rhetorical violence always precedes physical violence. and so the trump administration and president trump himself created a rhetorically violent environment for asian-american folks, blamed them for this pandemic, ginned up the public and created this context for things to be unsafe and now folks are acting surprised that it led to this kind of violence when it was entirely predictable. and that is extremely outraging. >> you know, margaret, spencer ackerman is a great reporter and he's reported a lot about the war on terror, has a book coming out called "reign of terror." and he made the point today drawing the parallel that like you know, foeft 9/11 when the u.s. and u.s. officials mobilized against this other threat out there, al qaeda and the muslim world, it led quite clearly, right, to increased levels of bigotry and hate crime and persecution among -- against muslim americans. and you really can see in the last year the rhetoric of not just the trump administration but america's foreign policy leadership, this increasing rhetoric about china as the kind of big enemy for the next century. like how much do you think that matters? how much does that reverberate through the society? >> i think there's no question, chris, that that is a main driver of the anti-asian violence we've been seeing across the country over the last year. it is the president's narrative, president trump's narrative, about the chinese virus, about kung flu, that has driven so many incidences of hate and discrimination and violence against asian-americans. and that rhetoric is still being perpetrated by members of congress today. you will still see members of congress making those same references, using that same narrative on the floor. we need elected officials to own responsibility for contributing to this problem and we need a shift in the narrative around these issues. >> you know, brittney, it's a very sick and disturbing part of life as an american journalist that you accrue a library of mass shootings with different details over the course of your work, which is true for me. i have covered a lot of them now. i thought about this piece today from "the new york times" from august 2019, a common trait of mass killers, hatred toward women. this has cropped up time and time again, which is a man with access to guns and hatred in his heart and often hatred toward women that ends up in this kind of situation. that's not just limited to mass shootings. that's a reality of violence in america every day. >> one of the challenges we have is that we don't speak intersectionally enough so we always think that because this is a white supremacist crime it is also a gender crime. it is a patriarchy crime. it has to do with the way that white men in particular think that their own particular challenges should become adjudicated through public violence. we see that over and over again. and it's not just about whiteness. it's also about a particular brand of violent masculinity which also reached heightened levels during the trump administration. this is a man who made it into the presidency after we learned of specific acts of gender violence he committed and bragged about. but we had already seen it in the country over and over again with white men getting angry and often they would kill their girlfriends and then they would go out and commit mass acts of violence against other people. this time we see these things being combined. but we have to be calling out patriarchy too because as many asian-american professors, activists, thinkers and the general public have said, this is also about a particular sexualization of asian-american women that is part of a violent fantasy that we're seeing being played out here too and it's a problem. >> yeah, margaret, i was thinking today about we are just getting details, right? about the victims here and these establishments. but these are not -- these are places where folks are if not at the margins of society, far from the centers of power. they're often establishments that have been targeted by law enforcement, depending -- i'm not saying specifically about these ones individually but as a group that has been the case in the past. and he folks that d