As much as Border Patrol officer Greg Bovino misread the American public while working as lead of the ICE agents in Minnesota, his resultant suspension of social media privileges may have been misassigned in view of this insult and cry of fading triumph on the White House Twitter account.
I shan’t embed it in this post due to its offensive nature, but it’s a poster of award-winning journalist Don Lemon, a black man, captioned that he was arrested for involvement in “the St. Paul Church riots,” with the commentary
When life gives you lemons…
and an icon meant to represent chains. It’s repulsive. Offensive.
And a bit pathetic.
Clearly written by a white nationalist, probably White House aide Stephen Miller or at his direction, it’s the sort of misguided chortling of someone who thinks the nation is plum-full of people who think like him and have been repressed ever since the Civil War; she or he is infuriated that racism has been successfully transformed into a socially unacceptable attitude, much like infanticide. After all, look at all my fellow racists I found on the Internet!… never thinking they may be robots designed to sow disorder.
At some point, such people can’t restrain their urge to crow, a signal to all that they’ve won! And so they identify themselves as racists, as folks who let hatred and xenophobia run their lives.
Of course, such a post doesn’t reveal relevant information that mitigates the impact of such a post, here helpfully summarized by Professor Richardson:
Jarrett Ley and Samuel Oakford of the Washington Post reviewed the video Lemon filmed at the church protest. They wrote that the video shows that Lemon identified himself as a journalist and followed protesters into the church. Inside for about 45 minutes, he interviewed four parishioners and five protesters. Eight of those nine exchanges appeared calm. The video does not show Lemon participating in the chants with which the protesters disrupted the service. A pastor asked Lemon to leave, and seven minutes later he exited the church.
Federal prosecutors tried to charge Lemon, his producer, and six others shortly after the protest, but a magistrate judge refused a warrant for Lemon and his producer, saying prosecutors had not shown evidence that would justify the arrests. The administration then asked a federal judge to overturn the magistrate judge’s decision. When he, too, refused, calling the request “unprecedented,” the administration rushed the case to the Eighth Circuit. It, too, refused.
At that point, it appears the administration went to a federal grand jury to indict Lemon.
I should think readers who become aware of this information will consider whoever wrote the White House social media post to be, well, I don’t think I know another word than pathetic, although I might add such modifiers as ‘hate-soaked,’ ‘un-Christian,’[1] ‘hypocritical,’ and other such terms which, when applied, lower the social standing of their targets.
But, if the Administration seeks to survive and pursue its goals, whatever they may be, they should probably suspend the governmental social media privileges of White House aide Stephen Miller and his minions. That’s the sort of post that gives otherwise disparate people reason to bond together and chase the murderous idiots out.
But, no doubt, these chuckleheads won’t figure that out.
1 Yes, yes, I am agnostic, no need to yell at the screen. Given the white Christian nationalist nature of the current Administration, it should be clear the comparison is to the supposed, if false, Christian nature of the Administration, not my own religious status, whatever it might be.
