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Following the 2012 murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer George Zimmerman, the Black Lives Matter organization was formed. With the sole purpose to re-build the black liberation movement, the national chapter based organization has merited praise from many, and harsh criticisms from conservatives as well as African-Americans.

READ Sybrina Fulton: Still Healing. Still Standing. Still Marching Until Justice For All

Last week, Minnesota OfficerJeronimo Yanez was found not guilty in the July 2016 shooting death of Philando Castile. The verdict was a slap in the face to his surviving family and many across the country as Castiles death was streamed live on Facebook. Marches erupted across the country calling the verdict another miscarriage of justice that often befalls black men and women when it comes to police brutality.

Over the weekend, Stevie Wonder attended a peace summit in St. Paul, Minn. The community gathering was a response to the violence taking place in the area, and also just so happened to coincide with the Castile verdict. Wonder, a 29-time-Grammy Award winning musician, addressed the crowd and insisted that black people in this country should begin loving and respecting themselves more.

It is in your hands to stop all the killing and all the shooting wherever it might be, because you cannot say black lives matter and then kill yourselves, Wonder said. Because you know, weve mattered long before it was said.

READ Former Black Panther Party Chairwoman Says Black Lives Matter Has A Plantation Mentality

A few members in the audience clapped in agreement with the entertainer before he explained what he thinks needs to be done to reduce the crime within the black community. Watch the video below to hear Wonder offer his explanation.

Read more:
Stevie Wonder: You Cannot Say Black Lives Matter And Then Kill Yourselves - Vibe

The following is an opinion piece and does not necessarily reflect the views of The Clarion, its staff or the institution. If you would like to submit a response or an opinion piece of your own, please contact Editor in Chief Abby Petersen at ajp87848@bethel.edu. Samuel Krueger |Columnist

Four years ago, the scab over the supposedly healing wound of racial prejudice in America was torn off. A man was shot in Sanford, Florida. Two names emerged to the forefront of American media: Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

Shortly after the incident, Black Lives Matter was formed and relative unrest in the aftermath of the use of deadly force from police has been pervasive ever since.

There are two sides in these circumstances, those who side with the police, or perhaps the murderer, and those who side with the criminal, or perhaps the victim. Because of the polarizing nature of these events, Blue Lives Matter emerged. I preface with this because I generally consider myself very trusting of the police, therefore, I am solidly under the Blue Lives Matter hashtag. I believe that our police officers are often times put in positions that are dangerous, scary and complicated. I also believe that the prominent culture in many black neighborhoods and a continued lack of communication between law enforcement and African American communities perpetuates an atmosphere of unsafe circumstances for people of color and police officers alike. This puts both sides in positions to do unreasonable and uncalculated things.

Generally, I am relieved when an officer in this position is acquitted. However, the circumstances of the Philando Castille case were different. Castile was killed only miles from where I live. Minnesota is my home. This didnt happen in some far away state. I pictured the faces of some of my closest friends, people of color, in Castiles position. Until that morning, I never understood what it was like to be afraid for someone I love from a group of people I trust to keep me safe.

I want to move beyond the fact that this shooting was unjustified. To me, that much is obvious. I want to talk about the lack of response from the National Rifle Association.

The NRA has always been the first line of defense for our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. They have spent millions and millions of dollars to lobby the government and have mobilized millions of people to march, demonstrate and vote to protect our rights. The NRA is possibly the most powerful advocacy group in America, boasting a membership of more than 5 million active members.

I regularly see stories on their social media of the concealed carrier who stopped a bank robbery, the elderly person who scared off a mugger or the woman who shot her would-be rapist. The NRA plays a big role in cases such as these. Even when someones life is in danger, and a shooting is justified, the legally armed citizen is still generally tried in court. These are the people that the NRA has always stepped in to protect. Providing legal and even financial support for the people who legally and rightfully defended themselves and others. However, the NRA was silent over Castiles murder.

Now, I cant say whether this is because of racism or simply because these situations are always complicated and any judgment at all would be met with criticism, but I believe the NRA should have spoken on this issue. This situation is far less complicated than others before it. Castile was legally licensed to carry that gun, he had no warrants, no drugs in his car, he was not backed into any sort of corner and therefore had no reason to even reach for the gun he was legally carrying. Because of this, I do not believe that the officers account adds up. We have video of the encounter. If the officer shot Castile for reaching into his pocket, why did he not shoot the passenger when she reached for her phone? That day I expected Black Lives Matter and the NRA to both be protesting outside of the governors mansion.

Black lives really do matter and I think that the NRA should be at the forefront of this issue. I have always believed that these issues are rooted in culture rather than in the color of someones skin. The same ways we prevent injuries in the sport of hunting can be used to fight gun violence at a community level. We should start by teaching people about basic safety around firearms. The NRA and hunting advocacy groups also teach about one very important aspect of owning and using a gun. They teach that life is sacred and that guns arent just toys, they are tools as well. The NRA should also use their lobbying capabilities to push for better training in police departments. I understand that the police have a difficult job, but they should always respect a persons right to bear arms. This division between people of color and the law enforcement community can be healed if the culture of violence on both sides is changed. The NRA should lead this effort.

In the end, Castile was legally carrying a firearm and his second amendment rights were infringed upon during his encounter with the police. This should have been a rallying cry to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of more African Americans, who should be in the NRA. If the NRA really cares about reaching out to an often disenfranchised community with a complicated past when it comes firearms and violence, they should run to the protection of any American who is legally carrying a firearm, regardless of their race.

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Original post:
Philando Castile: What we haven't heard from the NRA - Clarion

University of Michigan students held vigils for victims of police brutality after Minnesota police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted on Friday of all charges in the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile.

Yanez had been charged with second-degree manslaughter and endangering safety due to discharging a firearm in the shooting.While Yanez testified that he believed Castile was reaching for a gun when he fatally shot him, Castiles girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds in the passengers seat at the time of the shooting said he was merely reaching for his identification.

Postdoctoral fellow Austin McCoy, who attended a vigil for Castile in downtown Ann Arbor on Saturday, wrote in a Facebook post that he believes his passion for political activism is driven by the helplessness he feels due to the current state of systematic oppression within the country.

Im probably not alone when I say this, but I was reminded tonight at the vigil for Philando Castile that my politics and activism grows out of my struggle with intense feelings of helplessness that developed at an early age, or my fight against those feelings, he wrote. This struggle has driven my activism and it has shaped my rather radical politics.

McCoy related his emotions toward the Philando Castile case to what he felt when George Zimmerman, the man who shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, was acquitted in 2014.

There was something about learning about the not guilty verdict in the Philando Castile murder on Friday that brought some of the helplessness that I felt in 2014 back, he said. I dont know if its just our current political moment, watching the merry-go-round of injustice spin around, or my continuing education about the intransigence of our criminal justice system, but, as we were observing Philando Castile and Aura Rosser last night, I felt like we were back at square one.

According to the Facebook event, the vigil hoped to "(g)ather together with others tonight on Liberty Plaza commons to share your thoughts, sorrow, anger, and other emotions about Philando, and how to move toward a world in which police are obsolete, in which we love and protect each other, in which black lives matter. Bring candles, flowers, and signs, but mostly, simply gather and commune with others."Many victims, including Castile and Martin, have been Black or African American.

Many University students felt similarly upset. Public Policy junior Denis McGrath said his opinion on the acquittal is divided because he can understand where both parties were coming from leading up to the fatal shooting.

On the one hand, Castile was a model citizen, beloved by his family and the children he worked with, yet he was shot dead while following police orders, he said. To be quite frank, he in no way deserved to die. On the other hand, I have to sympathize in some part with Officer Yanez. Yanez had no way of knowing Castile was an incredible human being; he thought Castile resembled a wanted robbery suspect, he smelled marijuana and he knew that Castile had a weapon. Unfortunately, due to this cocktail of misperceptions, stereotypes and guns, a model citizen was left dead, and a city rioted.

McGrath further explained that he believes the United States has a problem with racism, as well as a problem with underfunded police forces, and nothing will change until citizens take action to fix these problems.

I believe that the United States most certainly has a race problem and a police problem and the two, when combined, are a recipe for disaster, he said. I think what bothers me most about these shootings/killings of Trayvon Martin, Sam DuBose, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Eric Harris, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile the list goes on and on for far too long is that we as a society fail to take any action to remedy these issues.

University alum Joe Shea, former Cental Student Government Communications Director, wrote in a tweet that he hopes Castile is never forgotten.

Shea explained that last October, University graduate students held a vigil for victims of police violence and brought in pictures to commemorate men like Castile and Garner. The display remained inside the Ford School for the whole year.

Some grad students organized a vigil way back in October for Dia de los Muertos and people brought pictures of Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and I think one other person, he said. It ended up being this very nice display on the second floor, right outside the academic office on a table and had some candlelight and decorations and they left it up for, I think, the entire academic year.

More:
City, University students hold vigils for victim of police shooting following officer's acquittal - The Michigan Daily

President Donald Trump announced he was running for office on June 16, 2015. The following day, white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire in a historically black church located in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people in the hopes of launching an all-out race war.

Of course, those two events aren't directly linked. "But its certainly symbolic,"Heidi Beirich, director of Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project, tells Newsweek.

"There doesnt seem to be a single marginalized population that was left out of the emboldened reaction to this election,"she said. "There has been a massive explosion of violence across the country, and an increase in the number of hate crimes against virtually all minority groups. The numbers are definitely going up in 2017."

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Two years after Roof sat in on a bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, before taking out his gun and shooting the local parishioners, reports of hate crimes against black, Muslim, LGBTI, Sikh, Jewish and Hispanic communities have only continued to surge. Meanwhile, groups like SPLC and the Human Rights Campaign say battling the rise in hate-based violence will largely take place online in the coming years, where racists and those prone to committing attacks against minorities feed off of radicalized content and fake news.

A church youth group from Dothan, Alabama praying in front of the Emanuel AME Church on the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting on July 17, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. John Moore, Getty

When looking at the data, it becomes immediately clear that spikes in hate crimes and racial tension havent only impacted black communities, like the Episcopal Church. There were at least 1,314 reported cases of anti-Muslim bias in 2014, according to the FBIs annual Uniform Crime Report. By 2016, that annual figure soared to 2,213.

Anti-Semitic incidents also rose in 2015, the latest year the Anti-Defamation League has data on, rising three percent to 941 total incidents nationwide.

Of all the hate crimes carried out that year, over 48 percent were committed by whites.

"We know that the normalization of violence, particularly against marginalized people, creates a culture of complicity and acceptance of hate based violence,"Sarah McBride, national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, tells Newsweek. "We also see that the political climate fosters violence. As anti-transgender measures are introduced across the country and the rhetoric is turned up, we are hearing from the community an increased vulnerability of harassment in their daily lives."

In total, hate crimes rose from 5,479 reported incidents in 2014 to 5,800 the next year, when Roof made his decision to act on a months-long quest he had documented at length across the web and on his racist website, TheLastRhodesian.com.

Roof, who wassentencedto death on Jan. 10, 2017,was reportedly an avid reader of Daily Stormer, a hate-mongering website loaded with racial conspiracy theories, fake news and anti-Semitism. The sites readership also included James Jackson, who penned a suicide manifesto before driving from Baltimore to New York to kill a random black man with a sword, as well as Thomas Mair, an extremist loner who murdered BritishParliament member Jo Cox.

The 23-year-old also searched on Google for information about the case of Trayvon Martin, in which George Zimmerman shot and killed the 17-year-old black teenager, and more broadly about information on crime statistics.

"I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up it was obvious Zimmerman was in the right," Roofwrote on his site."But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words 'black on White crime' into Google, and I have never been the same since that day."

His search led him first to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a right-wing group documenting black on white crime and publishing gruesome content online. Roof says the information he absorbed online led him to believe there was a much deeper issue of violence targeting whites than the widely-reported Martin case, even though all of the data across the country supports the opposite notion: the United States is dealing with a racially-based crime issue of whites attacking blacks and other minorities.

To this day, fake news sites like Daily Wire appear on a Google search of "black on white crime"before the FBIs fact-based statistics.

A Google search for "black on white crime" shows misleading sites like Daily Wire ahead of fact-based data published by the FBI on June 16, 2017. Chris Riotta, Newsweek

"Theres been a general loss of civility in online discussions on race, gender and religion,"Beirich said. "Maybe if Google displayed factual results for Dylann Roof instead of misinformation at the top of their news pages, we wouldnt be here, facing the anniversary of his massacre."

Though there arent statistics to indicate broad trends in hate crimes throughout 2017 yet, violence against marginalized communities is seemingly continuingto soar, specifically against trans women of color, the LGBTI community and Muslims. The SPLC reported 1,372 reported bias incidents between the November election and early February, just after Trump was sworn in.

"We have to as a society understand the urgent crisis and epidemic of violence that we find ourselves facing, and we must not tolerate the kind of hate, discrimination and violence that is all too common,"McBride says. "Hate breeds discrimination, discrimination often times breeds violence. These are all connected to one another. We cant tolerate hate, we cant allow hate to foster in our laws and in our hearts. Thats why its on all of us to take action to stand up to speak out."

See the original post here:
After Dylann Roof Shooting, Hate Crime Rates Are Soaring Because of Fake News - Newsweek

First of all, its not like this is really a new argument theGOP has decided to put forward following this shooting. Just a few days prior, Eric Trump railed about the hate that has been heaped on him and his father following a report that The Donald had been skimming money from Erics charity foundation directly into his own pockets.

In reviewing filings from the Eric Trump Foundation and other charities, it's clear that the course wasn't free--that the Trump Organization received payments for its use, part of more than $1.2 million that has no documented recipients past the Trump Organization. Golf charity experts say the listed expenses defy any reasonable cost justification for a one-day golf tournament.

Additionally, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which has come under previous scrutiny for self-dealing and advancing the interests of its namesake rather than those of charity, apparently used the Eric Trump Foundation to funnel $100,000 in donations into revenue for the Trump Organization.

Erics response to this report, which came from that dirty rotten hippy publication Forbes,was to argue that All Morality is gone and these are not even people. But its actually more telling to listen to what else he said because he made this not just personal, but into a specific target attack on the entire Democratic agenda in general.

Asked by host Hannity, Dont you wish you went to Washington so you could deal with this everyday? the presidents son sneered at Democrats.

Ive never seen hatred like this, he responded. To me, theyre not even people. It is so so sad.

Morality is just gone, he continued. Morals have flown out the window. We deserve so much better than this as a country. Its so sad you see the Democratic Party and they are imploding. Theyre imploding, they have no message. You see the head of the DNC who is a total whack-job. Theres no leadership there. And so what do they do? They become obstructionists because they have no message of their own.

Democrats are obstructionists because they have no message of their own? Frankly, the Republicans and the president havent even taken the first steps to try and reach out to Democrats on anything. Demsactually do have some fairly specific proposals on healthcare, but instead congressional Republicans passed a bill without their inputdespite a horrible CBO score and now the Senate Republicans are doing the same thing almost literally under the cover of night using a secret bill that no one has even seen.

I would argue that our agenda is to remain part of the Paris Climate Accord, to further investments in, and support of, clean and renewable energy sources rather than gut them, to retain and repair the Affordable Care Act rather than repeal it, to strive to make college affordable if not free, to address the opioid crises by increasing access to treatment rather than cutting that funding, to increase mobility for workers whove lost their jobs by helping them retrain for newly emerging industries rather than cutting that funding orgutting worker safety rulesand that stating that position or pointing out Trumps legal and ethical failings doesnt come from a place of hate. It comes from a place of truth.

Most peopledon't criticize Donald Trump because they hate him, its because they love America and seriously fear what he seems intent on doing to it, and to the rest of the world.

But now, after lastweeks shooting we have ongressional Republicans complaining that their constituents have come up to them and angrily said that theyre trying to get people killed [by repealing the ACA.] They argue thats not fair, and thats just so so mean.

Yeah, well, math, facts and commonsense show that between 25,000-36,000 people per year will likely die if ACA is repealed without a viable replacement:

Uninsured adults are at least 25 percent more likely to die prematurely than adults who have private insurance. See state-level breakdowns of the 26,100 people between the ages of 25 and 64 who died prematurely due to a lack of health insurance in 2010.

Nearly 36,000 people could die every year, year after year, if the incoming president signs legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act.

This figure is based on new data from the Urban Institute examining how many people will become uninsured if the law is repealed, as well as a study of mortality rates both before and after the state of Massachusetts enacted health reforms similar to Obamacare.

So when people say this, they arent beingmean,theyre being factual. This is not hate speech, thisis criticism. Fact-based criticism.

Civility is generally a good thing. But something I thinkbeing more civil isnt whats really being asked here. Yes, of course, we should focus and be critical of theissues and, where reasonable, refrain from demonizing any particular faction or group. But IMO thats not what these Republicans are asking for.Whats being asked isfor liberals to simplyshut up, and then all will be well.

I dont speak for anyone but myself, but I can pretty much guarantee thats. not. gonna. happen.

After the many previous mass shootings that have plagued the nation, the complaint from the right has typically beenNow is not the time to make things politicalwhen people mention that perhaps the reason so many people are getting killed by guns, might have something to do with the prevalence of guns themselves. In response, theyve often argued that this critiqueis an attack on everyones SecondAmendment Rights. Asking for trigger locks is too much. Asking for comprehensive background checks is too much. Our rights are clearly more important than the lives lost.

It doesnt matter that America averages 33,000 deaths per year as a result of firearms.It doesnt matter that over 60% of those deathsare suicides by people who are perfectly legal gun owners, not criminals, not gangbangers, not terrorists. Itdoesn't matter that the Alexandria shooting was the 154th mass shooting so far this year, and not even the only mass shooting to occur that same day.It doesnt matter that this particular shooter was a legal gun owner, who had a history of violence against women and perhaps that has as much do with his final actions as anything specifically political. We maynever really going to know for sure what his motivations truly were.

But none of that matters because we have to protect our rights, damnit.

Now were told that the real problem isnt that we have more guns in the nation than we have people, its because some people have the nerve to use their First Amendment rights totalk too much and that theyare just too vulgar.

Talking with Fox News, Gingrich pointed fingers at left-wing hysteria that he says has exploded ever since President Donald Trumps election last fall, as evidenced by Kathy Griffins latest stunt in which she held up a likeness of Trumps severed head.

The intensity on the left is very real, Gingrich said. Whether its a so-called comedian holding up the presidents head in blood, or its right here, in New York City, a play that shows the president being assassinated. Or its Democratic leading national politicians who are so angry they have to use vulgarity because they cant find any common language.

Right, so Kathy Griffins joke-failwiththe fake Trump head that hadblood coming out of his whereveris why a guygrabbed a gun and went after Republicans?

Remind me exactly who was it that invited Ted Nugentwho once said Barack Obama and Eric Holder needed their heads chopped off and Hillary Clinton should be hangedto the White House for dinner again?

Then again, maybe its all the fault of Shakespeare?

[Don] Trump Jr. retweeted a report about those witness claims, and he also approved another tweet by a conservative commentator linking the shootings to a recent production of Shakespeares Julius Caesar that depicted the presidents assassination.

Because its not like somebodythought to do the same thing, a modern day version of Julius Ceasar including the assassination of the head of state, when Obama was president.

Except that they did in 2012.

While Delta Air Lines and Bank of America have dropped their sponsorships of New Yorks Public Theater over a President Trump-inspired staging of Shakespeares Julius Caesar, corporate sponsors at the Guthrie Theater had no public reaction to a 2012 staging that featured a black actor in the role of Caesar.

Caesar is stabbed to death in the middle of the play.

I am a person that believes that hateful rhetoric can sometimes inspirenegative outcomes, so Im not ignoring the center of their concern.But I do think theres a difference between strong rhetoric and violently dangerous hateful rhetoric. Theres a difference between strong speech built on facts and hate speech built on lies, and I have my doubts that many ofthe Republicans really know that difference at all.Theyre just using this tragedy as an opportunity to attack the First Amendment rights of those they oppose while taking no responsibility of their own.

For example, there was the time this guy showed up a pizza parlor because someone was promoting a totallyfalse story that Hillary Clinton and John Podestawerelinked to a child prostitution ring. And Imnot just saying he was there because of thatstory.He said he was there with a gun because of that story.

A North Carolina man was arrested Sunday after he walked into a popular pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington carrying an assault rifle and fired one or more shots, D.C. police said. The man told police he had come to the restaurant to self-investigate a false election-related conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton that spread online during her presidential campaign.

I for one do not recall Republicans criticizing the deliberate spreading of this false story and finding fault with the media outlets that pushed it without having a shred of proof.But now, today we have this:

Fox News anchor Melissa Francis then played a clip from Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL) who said some of his best friends are Democrats and that the House passes a lot of bipartisan legislation, but its the major issues that lead to political discourse that has in my opinion, led to such an uptick in just hateful, hateful rhetoric of all sides, and I stand here today and say stop. We have to stop.

BERGMAN: I agree with Rodney wholeheartedly in that the hateful rhetoric serves no positive purpose. In fact, today it served a negative purpose. But unfortunately, and Im looking at all the media in the eye when I say this: friendships and cordial relationships dont make good news. So I can tell you, especially as the president of the freshman class of Republicans, we are united along with our Democratic freshman counterparts to bring civility back to the 115th Congress.

FRANCIS: So you think its the medias fault?

BERGMAN: I think the media is complicit if they keep inciting, as opposed to informing.

The media areinciting instead of informing? You mean inciting like telling people what the CBO score for Trumpcare is?Yeah, okay.

I just have to say Im skeptical of Republicans who claim they really want to stop all the hateful, hateful rhetoric on all sides.Its not like we heard all this Kumbahyah talk when it was suggested that somebody may have helpedincite violence against dozens of congressional offices by using a map placing targets on their districtsI didnt hear Republicans saying people shouldnt do that.

Gabrielle GIffords is who said it.

On April 23, 2010, an angry phone call came into a congressmans office in Tucson, Arizona. The voice on the line was a male, on the young side, brimming with fury over immigration. The caller announced he was going to come down there and blow the brains out of the congressman and his staff, an aide later recalled. Then the caller said he would do the same to Mexicans crossing the border. Minutes later, police evacuated the offices of Rep. Ral Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat whose congressional district sits immediately to the west of Gabrielle Giffords. [...]

As several media outlets reported, the door to Giffords Tucson congressional office was vandalized last March after her vote in favor of the health-care bill. But the event that ratcheted up the violent chatter was the April signing of Senate Bill 1070, an Arizona law that gave local police broad powers to discover illegal immigrants.

As shown by the above video, it was Gabriel Giffords herself who brought up the issue of the crosshairs map before she was ultimately shot in head, and fiveothers persons were killed, by a crazed shooter in Tucson later that year.

But rather than denounce rhetoric that actually did promoteviolence and vandalismat the time, instead what we heard back then was Blood Libel.An argument based on the ideathat Giffordsherself pointingout the incitement, was itself asource of the incitement.

To his credit Rep. Steve Scalise himself had much better things to say about Giffords than Palin did.

Still as a result of all this, I dont take these fresh newplatitudes all that seriously. I reallydont think theyre sincere because there have been plenty of chances for that sincerity to be shown, and repeatedly they have failed.

We didnt hearthis call for civility and unity from the GOPafter Sandy Hook which Trump-pal Alex Jones says was a false flag and Paul Ryan said Obama was only talking about it to distract from his failed policies,not after the Holocaust Museum Shooter who was planning to target David Axelrod, or the Knoxville Unitarian Church Shooter,which was an attack on liberals inspired by a book from a frequent OReilly guest, or Dylann Roofs murder spree in Charleston in reaction to the trial of George Zimmerman and right-wing rhetoric about excessive black violencepushed by the CCC and oftenshown on Bill OReillysprogram, or the attempted attack on the Oakland ACLU and Tides Foundation inspired by the overblownrhetoric of Glenn Beck about those organizations, or the Las Vegas cop killers who were from the Bundy compoundand said they wanted to spark a revolution against the government, orthe attack on Planned Parenthood inspired a by phony video by right-wing anti-abortion activists, or the Alt-Reich Nation killer who knifed ROTC Cadet Lt. Richard Collins to death earlier this year, or the Sikh Temple shooter who mistakenly thought the worshiperswere Muslim, or last months terrorist in Portland who killed two bystanders with a knife after harassing a pair of Muslim girls, or the more1,000 Hate crimes that sparked up immediately after Trumps election.

Im not holding my breath that things are suddenly gonna get all unity-like because Rep. Scalise was shot in the hip.Hopefully, he and all the rest recoversafely.But Im terribly sorry I just cant take empty meaningless platitudes like thisseriously.

Or this.

To which I say...

Sure Im a skeptic, but Im not a cynic. Im not saying theres absolutely no hope.If the GOP can take responsibility and apologize for their ownparticipation in this escalating rhetoricthe way that Kathy Griffin apologized within hoursI just might believe them. Maybe.

I might believe the GOP was sincere about harsh rhetoric if it had came up when Trump was saying "KNOCK THE CRAPOUT OF THEM!" tohis rally crowds.

I might believe the GOP was sincere aboutharsh rhetoric if it came up when Trump was saying "I'll pay for your lawyers fees" to beat protesters.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoricif it came up when Trump said 3-5 million illegal votes were cast against him.

I might believe the GOP was sincere about harsh rhetoric if they didn't lie about "Voter Fraud" while gerrymandering and suppressing the Democraticand minorityvote.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoricif it came up when Trump said Judge Curiel was too racist a Mexican to make a fair decision.

I might believe the GOP was sincere about harsh rhetoric if it came up when Trump said Gold Star Father Khazir Khan was allied with ISIS.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoricif it came up when Trump said Mexicans were rapists, killers and criminals. And some, a few, were good people.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoric if it they had ever said the same thing to #AltRightbigoted so-called free speech championtrolls like Miloor Richard Spencer.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoricif it they ever recognized a terrorist when he's a white guy andhis victims are liberal, black or Muslim.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoric if, when Russia wageda CyberWar against America, they wouldnt stick their heads in the sand or else#BlameObama for something he once said to Medvedev.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoric if they didn't call the findings of all 17 intelligence agencies and the investigation of18 different mysterious contacts with Russians a "witch hunt."

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoric if people likeJason Miller werent calling Senator Kamala Harris "hysterical" for asking Jeff Sessionstough questions.

I might believe the GOP was sincereabout harsh rhetoric if it came up when Eric Trump was saying his fathers critics were"not even people."

I might believe the GOP was sincere about harsh rhetoricif so many of them hadntsaid Barack Obama was an illegal alien with a falsified birth certificate, anillegitimate president, a secret Muslim, an Arabthe anti-Christ, a communist, a socialist, a liar, a criminal, a drug dealer, a welfare thug-in-chief, a food-stampPresident, was incompetent, a fraud,aradical black liberation theology Kenyan Mau Mau revolutionist anti-colonial who simply wasnt smart enough to get into Harvard or become editor of theHarvard Law Review without affirmative action, who neededBill Ayers to ghost-writehis own best-selling book about his own life and fatherbecause hereallyhated America and all it stood forandwhen they werefeeling boldwas a nigger.

But none of that has happened. Not yet. We havent heard an apology for any of it either. Im not expecting we will.

As a result I have no intention of backing off the Republicans or Trumpwith what I have to say about them or their policies one iota.I will not be giving them an inch. The state of my dangerously factual liberal rhetoric will remain strong, and it will remain loud.

And to be honest, I lied, Im not sorry about it at all. Not even slightly.

Read the original:
The state of my dangerous liberal rhetoric will remain strong and loud - Daily Kos