By pure luck, no one was killed at the Hindu temple in Aurora last week.
According to prosecutors, a rifle jammed. That is the difference between this email and a very different one.
I was there. I was watching my 80-year-old mother and 87-year-old father sing prayers on the first day of Navaratri. Countless people were there.
A 19-year-old with a rifle and a head full of hatred had come to our temple. Prosecutors say he tried to open fire. When it jammed, he went home, and, as I said at a news conference, he researched how to fix it. Then he told a coworker he planned to go back. That coworker picked up a phone.
I don’t know how my family and others escaped. I will never stop thinking about it.
This white supremacist shooter apparently plotted for two years, and nobody knew. His writings were full of hate for Indian Americans, and for Black and Jewish Americans too. It mirrors the hatred we see online every day toward Indian Americans, South Asians, and Hindu Americans, and so many others. Big Tech is profiting off of that hate.
I said last week that we cannot wait until innocent people are killed to take these threats seriously. I meant every word. So I’ll ask the question plainly: how many more people need to die before we do?
I’ve called on the FBI to investigate this as a hate crime, and I’m pushing for hate crime charges. I’ll keep fighting for the bipartisan Hate Crimes Commission I’ve championed for years, so we can finally understand what’s driving this and stop it.
The community at that temple is shaken, but it isn’t hiding. You have to be yourself, whoever you are, and practice your beliefs, whatever they are. This country belongs to all of us.
This has given me a new purpose. It’s why I started Equal Opportunity Now: to elect leaders who treat hate violence as a threat before it kills, who hold Big Tech accountable for profiting from it, and who will never again wait for a tragedy to act.
Help me build that Congress. Chip in $20 or $50 to Equal Opportunity Now today. I never want to write another email like this one.
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