At least one member of slain 20-year-old University of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts’ family has proclaimed that she doesn’t want Tibbetts’ tragic death to be politicized and to sow further racial division and xenophobia. Tibbetts’ aunt wrote on Facebook:
Please remember, Evil comes in EVERY color. Our family has been blessed to be surrounded by love, friendship and support throughout this entire ordeal by friends from all different nations and races. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
But that kind of message isn’t useful for the unelected, illegitimate, craven — and yes, treasonous — Pussygrabber regime, which, after yesterday’s bam-bam-bam news (of former Pussygrabber campaign chairman Paul Manafort being convicted of multiple finance-related felonies; of former Pussygrabber personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleading guilty to multiple felonies, including campaign-finance-related felonies; and of current Repugnican U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, the second supporter of Pussygrabber’s “presidential” campaign in the House, being indicted for financial fraud [Pussygrabber’s first supporter in the House, Rep. Chris Collins, also has been indicted for financial fraud]), truly needed a diversion.
Team Pussygrabber was, I am certain, delighted to learn that the accused killer of Mollie Tibbetts, who disappeared on July 18, is a 24-year-old apparently undocumented immigrant from Mexico named Cristhian Bahena Rivera. Here is his booking photo:
Rivera’s employer, a dairy farm, reported that he was a good employee for years who never was suspected of being capable of something like murder.
But that’s not a politically useful narrative, either, so the occupied White House tweeted this today:
For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first-degree murder, led police to the cornfield where her body was found. The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone.
The nauseatingly shameless tweet — only further tarnishing the name of the White House and the office of the presidency — is accompanied by a lovely, even more nauseatingly shameless video in which all white people claim that their loved ones were killed by “illegal aliens,” causing them to be “permanently separated” from them. Subtle!
This Goebbels-level propaganda accomplishes several things at once. There is the offensive, dehumanizing use of the hateful term “illegal alien.” No one is “illegal” and no one is an “alien.” You are a human being or you are not a human being. You may or may not have broken a law, but you are not “illegal” or “an illegal,” and only to a xenophobe and/or a white supremacist are you an “alien.”
Then there is the sick attempt, in one fell swoop, to try to wholly discount the detrimental affect that inhumanely — and, per our federal court system, illegally — separating families at the border has had on thousands of human beings by pointing out that the relative handful of those white American citizens who have had family members killed (unintentionally or intentionally) by undocumented immigrants are “permanently separated” from their family members (Oh, snap!).
It’s comparing apples to oranges (picked only by “illegal aliens,” of course), but it’s not like Pussygrabber’s mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing, Tiki-torch-carrying followers make such distinctions.
Most of all, of course, is the blatant, hit-you-in-the-face-like-with-a-fucking-shovel appeal to white supremacism and racism.
How about Chris Watts, the white American citizen in Colorado who is accused of just having killed his pregnant wife and his two young daughters and disposing of their bodies rather unceremoniously, as Rivera is accused of having done with Tibbetts’ body? Is the Pussygrabber regime going to emphasize this crime and tragedy?
Of course not — because an “illegal alien” (of the brown-skinned type, of course) wasn’t accused of having committed it, and it’s perfectly OK to murder even your entire family — if you’re a white guy and a U.S. citizen. (Well, at least we won’t draw any attention to it, but will ignore it until it goes away…)
The Washington Post today notes:
Immigrants do not commit violent crimes at a higher rate than native-born Americans, according to federal and state crime statistics. A study published in February by the libertarian Cato Institute examining 2015 criminal data in Texas found native-born residents were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants in the country legally or illegally.
More information (you know, actual facts to counter the “alternative facts”) on this topic was posted by Vox.com as well.
So, you (a U.S. citizen) are much more likely ever to be killed by a fellow U.S. citizen than by a non-citizen, but, again, that’s not convenient to the fascist Pussygrabber regime’s Nazi-like message that the “illegal aliens” are the new Jews.
Mollie Tibbetts’ murder is tragic. Her family must be reeling, and it’s spine-chilling to imagine what she went through in her last moments of life, and it’s a supreme injustice that anyone should have his or her life taken from him or her, perhaps especially when that young.
But for a bunch of neo-Nazis to cravenly use the occasion of Tibbetts’ death as an opportunity to try to score more Brownie points with their base of white-supremacist Neanderthals only adds to the tragedy all around.
Thankfully, just as has happened here in California, where Repugnicans are an endangered species in no tiny part because of their sustained racist and xenophobic attacks upon Latinos, we can expect to see this effect grow on the nationwide level in the years to come as more and more Latinos exercise their right to vote — and they don’t tend to vote for the Repugnicans who savage them as an entire group of human beings because the Repugnicans need an endless supply of convenient scapegoats for their own endless crimes.
Good riddance to the MAGA-cap-wearing Neanderthals. Evolve or disappear.
We — those of us who reject your hatred, your racism, your xenophobia, your bigotry, your ignorance, your selfish divisiveness — will replace you. We already are replacing you.
Robert's Virtual Soapbox 