Two incidents made the rounds on social media recently.
First, a young student at UC Riverside was videotaped after confiscating a red “Make America Great Again” hat from a fellow student and evident Trump supporter.
In the video she’s seen holding up the hat and claiming, “This represents genocide.” And when the hat owner replies that he’s exercising his freedom of speech, she replies, “Your f***ing freedom of speech is genocide homeboy.”
Moments later, the owner states, “You don’t get to take people’s property.”
She replies, “You don’t get to take people’s lives away either.”
“I’m not taking anybody’s life.”
“No you actually are by wearing that hat.”
To this student, wearing a hat, equated to genocide.
The second incident was the terrorist shooting in Las Vegas that left 60 people dead and hundreds wounded.
While the sociopathic shooter’s motives are still, officially, mysterious at the time of this writing, a few things are clear: this was a premeditated, carefully calculated massacre.
The coward didn’t “just snap” as his brother would have you believe. His sociopathy was long ingrained.
He targeted a country music festival, which is a well-established destination for conservative music fans.
He could’ve picked any number of large gatherings in his premeditation, so it’s an important fact that he chose the Route 91 Festival with its distinct demographic.
Whether that vile bag of feces (the shooter) was a jaded Bernie fan or he was a recent convert to Islam or neither, his goal was to exact some violence on what amounted to a bunch of Trump supporters.
But don’t take my word for it.
As a (now-fired) CBS legal exec put it so coldly, “I’m actually not even sympathetic [for the victims of the Vegas shooting] bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”
And consider the somber/gleeful tweet from a liberal teacher who strung together the words, “Lots of white trump supporters in Las Vegas at route 21 watching Jason aldean. Pray only trumptards died”.
Another psychopath tweeted, “Shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas?! Looks like revenge on those Trump supporters”.
These aren’t ISIS jihadists jumping up and down in their burkas in Pakistan. They are regular middle class Americans.
They are the result of a culture that views words as violence and a hat as genocide.
When you ignore the old playground chant about sticks and stones and actually think someone is causing physical violence when they utter offensive words, it is a natural progression to support real violence in retaliation.
In these sick, twisted, neo-liberal minds, the slaughter of innocents is a sort of proxy self defense.
They have convoluted reality in such an intensely aggravated way that they confuse free speech with mass murder.
Of course, what these people wrote are just words as well. Their tweets don’t hurt as much as they indicate what depravity has befallen this country and it’s an eerie omen of the tumultuous future we have.
When dialogue fails, violence can’t be far behind.
Featured image: David Becker/Getty
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