You Can’t Have it Both Ways
If you listen to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and conservative media silos, like Fox News, black Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, who was called the N-word a “couple dozen times” by Confederate flag-waving insurrectionists, is crazy to believe the ‘hoax’ that white supremacy exists. The supremacy deniers would also have you believe that Donald Trump did not incite seditionists to storm the Capitol. Both things cannot be true. Either Donald Trump influenced, excited, and incited a crowd to murder—or the American streets are teeming with unhinged walking white timebombs ready to explode at the slightest utterance.
Senator Johnson seems to believe that Black Lives Matter or Antifa protestors wore the most elaborate Halloween costumes ever made.
“Although the crowd represented a broad section of Americans, mostly working-class by their appearance and manner of speech, some people stood out. A very few didn’t share the jovial friendly earnest demeanor of the great majority. Some obviously didn’t fit in.” Johnson went on to describe the mob’s four different types of people. “Plainclothes militants agents, provocateurs, fake Trump protestors, and then disciplined uniform column of attackers. I think these are the people that probably planned this,” said Johnson.
Nowhere in his comments was the accurate descriptor—White Supremacist. Sen. Johnson read into the Congressional Record the meanderings of what amounted to a blog entry written by J Michael Waller an analyst for the Center for Security Policy. As a follow-up to Johnson, enter one Tucker Carlson; the Fox News host outright denied the existence of white supremacists at the Capitol. “There’s no evidence that white supremacists were responsible for what happened on Jan. 6. That’s a lie. And contrary to what you’ve been hearing, there’s no evidence this was a, quote, armed insurrection,” said Carlson. Say that to the officer who had his eye gouged out or the one stabbed by a fence post, or the officer who lost fingers, or the woman who was trampled to death, or the family of dead Officer Brian Sicknick. I guess fascists Nazi paraphernalia, Confederate flags, the repeated use of the N-word and death were not enough to convince Mr. Carlson. There seems to be a misnomer among right-wingers that if you do not wear a t-shirt that reads “ I am a white supremacist racist” violence, beatings and killings are up for debate.
In this case, Carlson denied the obvious unless you doubt the word of Officer Dunn who said he was repeatedly assaulted with racial epithets. Some of you might ask if name-calling makes me a racist? Not on its face, but when racial profanity is used to dehumanize your fellow man, yes. Anyone can be a bald-faced liar or a low-life, but when words with a racially tinged identification are added, you may want to check yourself. The Republicans have offered no real defense for the former President’s actions on January sixth. They bob and weave, then confirm and deny the former President’s complicity.
I will be celebrating a birthday in a few weeks, coincidentally it is on the same day famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer died. If Rosa Parks was the soul of the civil rights movement Hamer was its’ beating heart. Hamer suffered permanent kidney damage from a beating she took, ordered by police, from inmates after being jailed in Mississippi in 1963. Fifty-two years later Sandra Bland a bright, energetic young black woman anxious to start her new career died in a Texas prison after a traffic stop; the more things change the more they stay the same.
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