The White House invited me to join @realDonaldTrump during his visit to El Paso. My response was clear. I requested a phone call with him today in order to share what I have now heard from many constituents, including some who are victims of Saturday’s attack.
My message would’ve been that he needs to understand that his words are powerful and have consequences. Using racist language to describe Mexicans, immigrants and other minorities dehumanize us. Those words inflame others.
The domestic terrorist who came to El Paso to kill innocent people had his sights set on Hispanics and immigrants. He took 22 lives, injured more than two dozen.
I have publicly said [Trump] has a responsibility to acknowledge the power of his words, apologize for them, and take them back because they are still hanging over us. I asked for a call so I could say this to him over the phone and ask for a dialogue that could lead to healing.
I was told that @realDonaldTrump is “too busy” to have that conversation.
I declined the invitation because I refuse to be an accessory to his visit. I refuse to join without a dialogue about the pain his racist and hateful words & actions have caused our community and country.
Tomorrow, I will again be spending time with fellow El Pasoans who are dealing with the pain and horror left in the wake of this act of domestic terrorism fueled by hate and racism.
Trump has no business being “too busy” to talk to her, especially since we all know he’s not “too busy” to watch hours and hours of Fox News and to spend more hours tweeting his rages and resentments and racist insults. He has plenty of time to talk to her, he just doesn’t want to, because he’s all hat and no cattle.
David Gorski Notpology. You didn’t really apologize for what you said. You just apologized for not realizing how badly it would be received, which is an entirely different thing. do better.
Kavin Senapathy You’re *just now* learning that facts presented without crucial context can be “true but unhelpful,” which shows that you haven’t learned the lesson you need. Anyone with the most basic google skills could have “offered up” a list like this–it reads like something a dime-a-dozen smart-ass account with a handful of followers would tweet, not at all something that “would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America,” as you say. People doing the work to save lives in America not only have access to available facts, but know to appropriately contextualize them within the flawed systems that allow for preventable deaths. It wasn’t only offensive, it was poorly-executed and not at all contextualized among all of the other relevant “facts.” You haven’t apologized here for your actions, you’re “apologizing” to those who took offense, as if it’s on them–it’s not.
tl;dr: Your “facts,” presented so callously, were not only not helpful during a time of tragedy, but could never be “helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America,” no matter when you presented them.
Jean Kazez Seriously bad response. The problem with your tweet wasn’t the unanticipated reaction, it was your bad reasoning. There are good reasons why mass shootings like the ones over the weekend upset people more than accidental deaths from disease and the like. They make us unsafe in formerly safe places. They are evidence of extremely sinister attitudes in our fellow citizens. We are doing nothing to prevent them, where we do a lot to prevent the other tragedies in your list. You didn’t think this through. That’s the problem, not people’s reactions.
Mine:
Good grief. “I’m sorry you misunderstood me” is not an apology at all, it’s a passive-aggressive insult.
And you’re the one who missed the point here. We KNOW there are other causes of “preventable deaths” but that’s not the entirety of the issue, to put it mildly. Even other shooting deaths are not a complete parallel. There really IS something special about people going to schools or Walmarts or bars in order to kill as many people AT RANDOM as possible. Add the fact that the intent appeared to be racist and that the president of the US incites racism every chance he gets, and it becomes pretty obvious why we pay extra attention.
Neil deGrasse Tyson bestowed a Facebook post on us yesterday, explaining that he’s sorry we’re too stupid to have understood his profound tweet on Sunday.
Yesterday, a Tweet I posted in reaction to the horrific mass shootings in America over the previous 48 hours, killing 34 people, spawned mixed and highly critical responses.
If you missed it, I offered a short list of largely preventable causes of death, along with their average two-day death toll in the United States. They significantly exceeded the death toll from the two days of mass shootings, including the number of people (40) who on average die from handgun homicides every two days.
Here it is again for us literal-minded peasants:
In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.
On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…
500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun
Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.
Back to Tyson’s explanation of how too stupid we are:
I then noted that we tend to react emotionally to spectacular incidences of death, with the implication that more common causes of death trigger milder responses within us.
Oh but that wasn’t the only possible implication. That’s part of the problem. It wasn’t particularly clear to me what the implication was, for instance. Was it that we’re just big stupid crybabies who don’t know how to count? Was it that we’re so clueless we don’t realize that more than 34 people die every day? Was it that everybody dies so what’s the big deal? Was it something to do with road safety? Was it an accusation that we pay attention to mass shootings only because we’re drawn to “spectacle”?
Those are a few of the possible implications, and there are more. The implication was far from clear. That’s not our fault.
My intent was to offer objectively true information that might help shape conversations and reactions to preventable ways we die.
But mass murder is not just another preventable way we die. My god. What a stunningly dense thing to say. If a woman close to him – a friend, a relative, a colleague – is raped, would he tell her there are many preventable ways we are injured?
Let me spell it out even more clearly. Murder is more than just a preventable way to die. That’s why it’s called “murder” and not just “death.”
So, cool about the “objectively true information,” but not so cool about the way it was framed or the timing of offering it or the general air of inhuman indifference accompanying it.
Where I miscalculated was that I genuinely believed the Tweet would be helpful to anyone trying to save lives in America. What I learned from the range of reactions is that for many people, some information –-my Tweet in particular — can be true but unhelpful, especially at a time when many people are either still in shock, or trying to heal – or both.
Ya think?
Yes, Virginia, some information can be true but unhelpful. I would say that’s the case not for “some” people but for all of us. I think possibly even Neil Tyson would see it that way if he had just accidentally chopped a finger off and a companion decided to take that moment to tell him how to get from Kensington to Peckham by tube.
So if you are one of those people, I apologize for not knowing in advance what effect my Tweet could have on you.
And that is just outright insulting. It’s “I’m sorry you’re too stupid to get my jokes.” It’s also…well it’s frankly kind of Trumpian in its failure to consider his own possible incomprehension. It’s a jeer at the idea that one could ever possibly suss out how a given remark might affect people – which is a jeer at the whole idea of checking what we say for the potential to hurt or shame or anger or frighten others. Neil Tyson is way too adult and accomplished to be that mind-blind.
I am therefore thankful for the candor and depth of critical reactions shared in my Twitter feed. As an educator, I personally value knowing with precision and accuracy what reaction anything that I say (or write) will instill in my audience, and I got this one wrong.
That sounds more as if he did see the point, but given what went before…I doubt it.
Toni Morrison, who didn’t publish her first book until she was almost 40, penned roughly a dozen novels, most lauded among them 1987’s “Beloved,” about a former slave who kills her baby to ensure it is never enslaved. “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her books gazed unflinchingly on the lives of African Americans and told their stories with a singular lyricism. Her talent for intertwining the stark realities of black life with hints of magical realism and breathtaking prose gained Morrison a loyal literary following.
Themes such as slavery, misogyny, colorism and supernaturalism came to life in her hands.
It seems slightly odd to say “roughly a dozen” but I’m guessing it’s because she did some genre-crossing, so it depends on what you count as a novel.
“I didn’t become interested in writing until I was about 30 years old,” she later said. “I didn’t really regard it as writing then, although I was putting words on paper. I thought of it as a very long, sustained reading process — except that I was the one producing the words.”
Reading and writing can be very intertwined. I read with a spiral notebook always at my elbow, because sometimes – often – I need to write something down. I have more than fifty of them. I recommend the practice.
“I remember reading ‘Song of Solomon’ when I was a kid and not just trying to figure out how to write but also how to be and how to think,” Obama said at the ceremony, referecing to Morrison’s 1977 novel.
“Did George Bush ever condemn President Obama after Sandy Hook. President Obama had 32 mass shootings during his reign. Not many people said Obama is out of Control. Mass shootings were happening before the President even thought about running for Pres.” @kilmeade @foxandfriends
“It’s political season and the election is around the corner. They want to continue to push that racist narrative.” @ainsleyearhardt @foxandfriends And I am the least racist person. Black, Hispanic and Asian Unemployment is the lowest (BEST) in the history of the United States!
He’s not the least racist person.
Obama didn’t have a “reign” and neither does Trump.
Bush didn’t condemn Obama after Sandy Hook (that I know of) for a simple reason: Obama had done nothing to incite Sandy Hook. Obama had not done rally after rally after rally screaming hate-mongering shit about school children or Connecticut children or white children.
Trump has made it very very very clear that he despises the people who live south of the US border with Mexico, that he despises and hates and rejects them and wants to prevent them from coming to the US at all. El Paso is on that border. Most of El Paso’s population is Hispanic.
We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.
Yes we should. Looking squarely at you, Donald Trump.
Good morning. My fellow Americans, this morning, our nation is overcome with shock, horror, and sorrow. This weekend, more than 80 people were killed or wounded in two evil attacks.
On Saturday morning, in El Paso, Texas, a wicked man went to a Walmart store, where families were shopping with their loved ones. He shot and murdered 20 people, and injured 26 others, including precious little children.
Then, in the early hours of Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, another twisted monster opened fire on a crowded downtown street. He murdered 9 people, including his own sister, and injured 27 others.
The First Lady and I join all Americans in praying and grieving for the victims, their families, and the survivors. We will stand by their side forever. We will never forget.
That’s what makes it worse than clumsy. It’s a pack of lies. He won’t stand by their side forever; he’ll forget about them the instant he stops talking. He doesn’t join all Americans in praying and grieving – he can’t, because it’s not in him. He will forget, because he’s a trivial stupid shallow sack of wind.
These barbaric slaughters are an assault upon our communities, an attack upon our nation, and a crime against all of humanity. We are outraged and sickened by this monstrous evil, the cruelty, the hatred, the malice, the bloodshed, and the terror. Our hearts are shattered for every family whose parents, children, husbands, and wives were ripped from their arms and their lives. America weeps for the fallen.
And that’s even worse. It’s so false. Trump loves cruelty and hatred and malice. Trump performs cruelty and hatred and malice all the time, right in front of us. His heart is not the least bit shattered and he doesn’t weep for anyone.
This is something his people really ought to take on board. They shouldn’t try to bullshit us to this extent. Trump is a mean, angry, spiteful, belligerent man, so they shouldn’t put words in his mouth that try to invoke the opposite of all that. It’s wrong, it’s not appropriate, it’s not honest, it’s not even respectful to the people mourning. He doesn’t mean any of it and we know he doesn’t mean any of it, so making him say it is just insulting to all of us.
We are a loving nation, and our children are entitled to grow up in a just, peaceful, and loving society. Together, we lock arms to shoulder the grief, we ask God in Heaven to ease the anguish of those who suffer, and we vow to act with urgent resolve.
We’re not. We’re especially not now, since he took office. We’re not a loving nation. He’s made us a far more hating nation than we were three years ago. He’s a torrent of hatred, and he’s been spraying it all over us.
The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul. We have asked the FBI to identify all further resources they need to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism — whatever they need.
Again – he’s the wrong person to say that. He can’t sell it, he can’t put it across, he can’t convince us he means it. His people should write a different kind of statement for him, because a pack of flagrant lies just does not cut it.
President Donald Trump has pledged the federal government will provide “whatever is needed” to help El Paso, Texas, recover from a mass shooting Saturday that killed 22 people.
“The Trump campaign has not paid the invoice as of yet,” El Paso spokeswoman Laura Cruz-Acosta confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity late Monday morning.
Well. You know. That’s Trump money – money to promote Trump’s interest in getting elected again. He said the federal government will provide, not that he will. He’s there to make money from being president, not to give it away, or let his Elect Me Again campaign give it away.
How much do they owe? $569,204 plus change. Half a million; lunch money.
In all, at least 10 local governments — from Mesa, Arizona, to Erie, Pennsylvania — are still waiting for Trump to pay public safety-related invoices they’ve sent his presidential campaign committee in connection with his political rallies, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation in June. In all, the bills total $841,219.
Listen, he didn’t get rich by paying people the second they sent the invoice.
It’s worth noting that strangulation is an almost uniquely gendered crime. A large majority of victims are women (often intimate partners of their attackers) and the vast, vast majority of perpetrators are men.
It’s one of those areas where the size and strength advantage is relevant.
[P]olice said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.
Nothing at all?
High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault.
Oh, that.
The entire paragraph reads:
High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a “hit list” of those he wanted to kill and a “rape list” of girls he wanted to sexually assault. The accounts by two former classmates emerged after police said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the .223-caliber rifle with extended ammunition magazines that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar.
I would have led with the nothing in the background part, myself.
CNN has more:
Another former high school classmate, who asked not to be identified out of concerns for his privacy, also recalled being summoned to a school administrator’s office and being told he was “number one” on the list of students Betts wanted to kill.
He said the list was separated into two columns: a “kill list” for boys and a “rape list” for girls.
Chivalry is not dead.
A fourth person, who also asked not to be named for privacy reasons, said, “All I know is there was a list of violent actions and a list of names including mine.”
She said some of the names were female students who, like her, turned him down for dates. She said Betts often simulated shooting other students and threatened to kill himself and others on several occasions.
“He loved to look at you and pretend to shoot with guns, guns with his hands,” she said.
Another former classmate, who was not on the list, said he met Betts through a “friend of a friend.” He said whenever they hung out, Betts would talk about violence and use harsh language about women, like calling them “sluts.”
President Donald Trump tried to blame a lot of things Monday for a series of horrific shootings over the weekend. What he didn’t do was take any of the blame onto himself or pledge to change his rhetoric.
Well. This is Trump. Has he ever in his life taken any blame for anything?
I don’t know for a fact that he hasn’t, because I wasn’t there, but I think if he ever had we would have been told. From everything we’ve been all too able to see, he never does and he is incapable of ever doing so. He’s incapable of it in the same sense I’m incapable of speaking Mandarin. I’ve never learned Mandarin, so even if you put a gun to my head and told me to speak it or get the bullet, I wouldn’t be able to. Same with Trump. He’s never learned donaldtrumpcanbewrong, so he can’t speak it even if you try to force him.
Reading from a teleprompter at the White House, the President sounded nothing like the Trump who goes off-script when he tweets or is whipping up crowds of political supporters at campaign rallies.
Indeed. He sounded like someone reading Mandarin phonetically spelled on a teleprompter, with a wad of cotton in his mouth and a severe head twitch.
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said Monday. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”
It’s Mandarin to him. He doesn’t understand a word of it.
Amy McGrath is his Democratic opponent. That’s her name on the tombstone in the lower right corner. She tweeted this morning:
Hours after the El Paso shooting, Mitch McConnell proudly tweeted this photo. I find it so troubling that our politics have become so nasty and personal that the Senate Majority Leader thinks it’s appropriate to use imagery of the death of a political opponent (me) as messaging.
As far as I can tell it was the campaign account that tweeted it rather than McConnell himself, but that’s a minor distinction, especially since the tweet is still sitting there.
But please, tell us more about the role of video games.
One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice loses nutrients due to rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised potentially serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize press coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.
Will there be anyone left by January 2021?
Last week, an intelligence analyst at the State Department said he left his post after administration officials blocked his testimony to Congress about the wide-ranging national security implications of climate change. A National Park Service employee also stepped forward, alleging she lost her job after refusing to scrub mentions of human-caused climate change from a peer-reviewed paper that was set to publish.
It’s so crazy. What do they think is going to happen? Climate change will be rough for poor people but it will leave rich people alone? That their children and grandchildren will be just fine because they’ll have enough money to deal with it?
Ziska, in describing his decision to leave, painted a picture of a department in constant fear of the president and Secretary Sonny Perdue’s open skepticism about broadly accepted climate science, leading officials to go to extremes to obscure their work to avoid political blowback. The result, he said, is a vastly diminished ability for taxpayer-funded scientists to provide farmers and policymakers with important information about complex threats to the global food supply.
Well, the less we know, the freer we are to make colossal mistakes.
Ziska and another leading researcher at USDA, Naomi Fukagawa, who is the director of USDA’s Human Nutrition Research Center in Beltsville, had collaborated for more than two years with scientists at the University of Washington, University of Tokyo, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Southern Queensland, in Australia, and Bryan College of Health Sciences, in Lincoln, Neb., on what they considered a groundbreaking achievement. The paper looked at how an atmosphere increasingly rich in carbon dioxide could affect rice, which some 600 million people rely on for the majority of their calories, particularly in developing Asian countries.
600 million people is a lot. Their nutrition would seem to be important.
The study found that rice not only loses protein and minerals, which confirmed earlier research, but they also for the first time found that key vitamins can drop.
The journal editors anticipated that the paper would attract international press interest, so they asked the researchers to have their institutions help prepare a press packet. USDA officials initially wrote their own press release to tout the findings, but ended up spiking the release at the last minute because they said senior officials within ARS had concerns about the paper, according to emails obtained by POLITICO from one of the study’s other co-authors.
A communications official went as far as to call the University of Washington and suggest the university reconsider its plans to promote the paper.
Ziske asked for a meeting with the senior officials. No response.
“That’s when it occurred to me,” he said. “This isn’t about the science. It’s about something else, but it’s not about the science.”
Trump says this could be GREAT. It’s up to us. We can do this! We can make it GREAT! Make American mass-murder great again! MAMGA!
We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain. Likewise for those so seriously wounded. We can never forget them, and those many who came before them. Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying……..this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!
Come on, kids! Make it GREAT!! It’s in your hands!
Trump gave a “statement” this morning. I tried to watch it but it’s too unbearable, watching him try to pretend to care, try to pretend to be shocked and sad, try to pretend to be an adult.
Trump issued a statement on the attacks in El Paso and Dayton in which he blamed violent video games and mental health-care, among other things, for mass shootings.
Condemning the “barbaric slaughters,” Trump called on the nation to reject racism. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said.
But he then pivoted to any number of other subjects — including violent video games, access to mental-heath care and the federal death penalty.
Criticism was prompt.
Trump’s statement on the shootings was quickly criticized for downplaying the role of white supremacy and lenient gun laws.
Although the president called on America to “condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” he avoided any mention of his own role in fueling such rhetoric. One political scientist put it this way:
Brian Klaas✔@brianklaas
Sure, it’s good to finally use the words. But let’s be clear: no figure in modern American history has done more to encourage and embolden these hateful ideologies than Donald Trump. It defined his campaign. It has defined his presidency. A reluctant sentence changes none of that https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/1158380246749650944 …
Jim Sciutto✔@jimsciutto
“In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy”, says Trump. He also calls the violence “domestic terrorism”. These are both firsts since the shootings.
His focus on violent video games and mental-health care also enraged commentators who emphasized that Trump avoided outlining any specific action he would take to reform gun laws.
Democratic presidential candidate Tim Ryan, who represents Ohio’s 13th District in the House, slammed Trump for confusing Dayton with Toledo in his statement this morning.
As Trump was concluding his remarks, Trump accidentally offered his condolences to the victims in Toledo, which is roughly 150 miles from the shooting site in Dayton.
“It just shows the level of disengagement,” Ryan told CNN, arguing that Trump’s mistake reflected his “diminished mental capacity” to deal with America’s pressing problems. “It’s a slap in the face to the people here in Dayton.”
In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.
On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…
500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun
Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.
?????
Dude, we know lots more than 34 people die in the US every day. We know. But when one person with a big gun kills a lot of people in seconds, yes, we pay attention. We pay attention and we have emotions about it. We ought to have emotions about it.
I wrote a Free Inquiry column some time back quarreling with his claim that “Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” Same problem: he left out emotion. You can’t leave emotion out of policy, because policy is all about what we care about. If we don’t care, evidence is just a pile of meaningless facts.
In the waning days of Barack Obama’s administration, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a set of grants to organizations working to counter violent extremism, including among white supremacists. One of the grantees was Life After Hate, which The Hill has called “one of the only programs in the U.S. devoted to helping people leave neo-Nazi and other white supremacy groups.” Another grant went to researchers at the University of North Carolina who were helping young people develop media campaigns aimed at preventing their peers from embracing white supremacy and other violent ideologies. But soon after Trump took office, his administration canceled both of these grants. In its first budget, it requested no funding for any grants in this field.
Because? We want more violent white supremacy?
“Under this administration,” says Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, “there’s been a precipitous decline in the dedicated staff and program funding devoted to combatting ideologically motivated violence.”
This decline can’t be chalked up to general budget cuts. Although Trump has slashed funding for many domestic departments, he increased Department of Homeland Security spending by more than 7 percent in his first budget and another 4 percent in his second. The cuts stem instead from two biases. First, in keeping with their law-and-order mentality, Trump officials would rather empower the police to arrest suspected terrorists than work with local communities to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place, as the Office of Community Partnerships did. Second, they believe the primary terrorist threat to Americans is jihadism, not white supremacy. The Office of Community Partnerships committed the sin of working on both.
The first one makes no sense at all. It’s better to let people shoot up Walmarts and then punish them than it is prevent them from wanting to shoot up Walmarts in the first place? Even if you love punishing people for its own sake, there are still the victims of the shootings to consider, not to mention everyone who will miss them.
In 2017, the FBI concluded that white supremacists killed more Americans from 2000 to 2016 than “any other domestic extremist movement.” But Trump advisers have shrugged off these inconvenient facts. In an interview in 2017, White House Deputy Assistant to the President Sebastian Gorka declared that there “has never been a serious attack or a serious plot [in the United States] that was unconnected from isis or al-Qaeda.” When critics cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Gorka responded, “It’s this constant ‘Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.’ No, it isn’t.”
Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke slam Trump in wake of El Paso massacre, face backlash for politicizing tragedy
I stare, I blink, I stare some more.
For politicizing? What, because in fact it was just a random natural event, like a volcano burping? It was a Tragedy but not at all a political act?
Come on now.
The “tragedy” is political in so many ways. It’s political because the NRA is political, and the NRA is why we can’t have any restrictions on gun ownership. It’s political because El Paso is on the border, and mostly Hispanic. It’s political because the US grabbed Texas from Mexico in 1845. It’s political because Trump has been spewing racism at Mexico since the day he announced his candidacy. It’s probably political because the suspect is alleged to have left a racist manifesto to help us understand his reasons. It’s political because Trump is deliberately and with maximum venom and ill will verbally attacking every brown person he can think of. It’s political because Fox treats Trump as the best thing since lynchings. It.is.political.
