Patricia McCloskey and her husband, Mark, aimed firearms at BLM protesters who marched through their neighborhood
Kyle Rittenhouse who shot three men, two fatally, during the civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020 was acquitted at his trial in November 2021, after his defense lawyers argued he had acted in self-defense. Rittenhouse became a right-wing cause célèbre, he made guest appearances on the Tucker Carlson Show and several Turning Point USA productions and was even invited to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump.
Why Republi[con]? Partially out of laziness, I got tired of having to type out the full name all the time and there is no real shorthand for them like “Dems” or “Libs” so now they can be referred to as “Cons” as in conservatives, con artists, con men, conspiracists.
Then there is the matter of the “Democrat Party” epithet which goes back to the days of Joseph McCarthy and his cronies in the 1950s and Barry Goldwater in the 1960s but it fell out of favor after McCarthy was exposed for the liar and demagogue that he was, and after Goldwater lost in a landslide to LBJ. It was resurrected by Newt Gingrich in the late 1980s, and was then picked up in the 1990s by such reactionary luminaries as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Then in 2017, after becoming president, Trump started using the term, I’m assuming he was told by one of his toadies, most likely Steven Miller, that it was an insult, an “own the Libs” thing, he then gleefully started using it every chance he got. Although the epithet had been around before Trump it wasn’t until Trump started using it that its use became de rigueur amongst the faithful. And the press, out of ignorance or just plain laziness, just quotes them with no correcting or without any acknowledgment of the epithet’s history or meaning. I’m not objecting to the term’s use for any partisan pro-Democratic reason, quite the opposite, the objection is to its historically sordid use by anti-democratic reactionaries.
Trump, as usual, is full of shit, MS-13 originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s not in El Salvador, it is 100% homegrown American. He really is utterly stupid, You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.
With all the disinformation, and histrionics from the right, going on about Black Lives Matter I thought everybody should be clear as to the origins of the term. It originated from a facebook post by Alicia Garza on the day, July 13, 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin who wrote “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter…” Two of her friends, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, later came up with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter telling their friend that Black lives do matter.