Because of course you can tell someone is a “leader” when he has dozens and dozens of people following his lead.
Buzzfeed News has confirmed more than 50 incidents in 26 states where students have been harassed at school using themes they picked up from the Republican president’s campaign and administration.
“As the campaign heated up last year, I started to notice a pretty significant change among my kids,” said Amanda Mead, a 10-veteran English teacher in Spokane Valley, Washington. “They would say things that I have never heard kids in my school district say. Far more vitriolic.”
Most of those attacks have been directed by white students toward black or Latino classmates — who’ve been called slaves or subjected to chants of “build that wall.”
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Maybe a few of them truly were passionate about those beliefs, but the others seemed to just be doing it to incite a response, to see what will happen,” said Dylan Henderson, a high school sophomore from Atlanta.
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Students have threatened their classmates with deportation, chanted Trump’s name or “white power” at minority students, paraded Confederate flags and spray-painted racial slurs and swastikas at schools around the country.
And if you think the kids are bad, the adults are worse.
This is all in additional to a recent fatal stabbing by a so-called “Major Trump Supporter” over a political argument which took place at a bus stop.
Phillip Wade, 38, of Antioch was arrested for allegedly stabbing 57-year-old Anthony Johnson of Pittsburg multiple times at a bus stop in Oakley on Saturday afternoon. According to police, Johnson and Wade were arguing over sports and politics on a Tri Delta Transit bus.
The argument continued after both men got off the bus on Main Street near Charles Way.
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The incident marks the third stabbing in six years for Wade.
In March of 2011, Wade stabbed 23-year-old Justin Garza in the Brentwood BART park-and-ride after an argument on the train carried into the parking lot. Garza survived the incident.
Then in August of 2013, Wade fatally stabbed 49-year-old Kann Cendejas, a homeless veteran, at a Chevron gas station in the 3200 block of Delta Fair Boulevard in Antioch.
Antioch police did not return calls for comment on this case, but Wade’s friend, Gabriel Desta, said he was released after a few days.
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“The other day at Mel’s Diner, he told a waitress that he would stab a group of black guys there, saying they were talking bad about him, but they weren’t talking about him,” Desta said.
Wade’s Facebook page outlines increasingly hostile statements and threats towards Muslims and African-Americans. On May 19, Wade posted a threatening racist statement concerning former president Barack Obama along with the gun emoji and the emoji of a man wearing a turban.
Desta said that Wade could be prejudiced at times, but described him as “more of a follower,” who became a “major Trump supporter.
So we can expect Trump to talk ridiculous bullshit about the Mayor of London after a deadly truck and knife attack, and his son Don Jr. can talk shit about London needing to be “more proactive” in their anti-terrorist activities but when we have a repeated offender who had committed multiple knife attacks for political reasons — which is the definition of “Terrorist” — can we expect him to step forward and call for civility and making sure more vigilance in the wake of loud-mouth abusive knife wielding white guys?
Well, since he hasn’t yet openly admitted that the deadly knife attack against Muslim girls in Portland was Terrorism, somehow I doubt it.
Clearly, that’s not accidental as we saw with the reaction — or rather lack of reaction — to Dylann Storm Roof’s murder spree.
As the news of the shooting broke late Wednesday night, local and national news outlets immediately described Roof as “mentally ill,” even though the suspect was unknown and not yet in police custody. Though authorities knew he was a young white male, and Charleston police chief said it was a “hate crime”, many reporters and politicians quickly cautioned audiences to “wait for all the facts” before assuming that this mass murder was racially motivated. And several news outlets are still apprehensive or refuse to call Roof the “T-Word.”
While Presidential candidate Rick Santorum said that this was an “obvious crime of hate”, he basically avoided describing it as racially motivated, optioning to view the crime as a “larger assault on our religious liberty” and the killings as “indiscriminate.”
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When Black people or Muslims commit crimes or terrorism, we tend to describe the criminals in general terms speaking of the “inherent” negative qualities of their racial or religious group: moral bankruptcy, schadenfreude, cultural inferiority, pathology, evil, beastiality, and pack mentality (“thugs” or “terrorists”). This subconsciously conveys that “the crime is linked to ‘Blackness’ or ‘Muslimness’. He is ‘one of them’.” Describing the problem in this way allows us to justify locking them up or killing them, indiscriminately.
Critics who reject generalities or want to nuance the discussion surrounding the crimes committed are deemed knights of the “politically correct” crusade, or even more mistakenly, as sympathizers for criminals, killers, and terrorists. Asserting that “the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists or the vast majority of Blacks are not criminals” is called being an apologist.
But in the U.S., White crime is almost always individualized.
The petty crimes committed by whites are often described in ways that humanize the criminal. Phrases such as “he’s a good kid who made a mistake” are sure to be heard. But for the more extreme crimes like Roof’s, the criminal is literally dehumanized (mentally ill, psychopath, inhuman) and individualized (lone wolf) without knowing, lead alone assuming, lead alone questioning his motives or knowing if he had accomplices. This subconsciously conveys to the listener that “being white has nothing to do with this. He is not even a sane human being.”
Seem like when the bigoted political murderers are white, they’re just “random” isolated cases — but when their brown it’s part of a “clash of civilizations.” White killers are individuals, every one else is part of a “group dynamic” and are merely reacting to the influence of others -— like the rhetoric of the current White House Resident — and it’s not racist at all for people to think that way, right?