Possible communist menace, I guess
When Minnesota resident Jeff Gullickson:
posted a doctored image of Mr. Obama’s famous campaign poster, instead showing the president with his head in a noose, his eyes closed and his neck appearing broken as if he had been lynched
... to Twitter in response to President Obama's first tweet from his brand-new account, he netted himself nationwide attention, a visit from the Secret Service, was fired from his automotive job, and permanently etched his own name into the pantheon of the internet's famous Obama-era racist nutcases.
This upsets him.
But the Plymouth resident insisted that his tweets were not racist.
“My only regret is being called racist when my opinion of the president has more to do with [Obama] being a communist as opposed to being black,” he told MPR News in an email.
There is probably a lesson to be learned in all of this, but unfortunately the sort of people who post images of the president of the United States hanging from a noose are not very good at learning those lessons. They spend much more of their time complaining about how they're being demonized now when they just wanted to make a simple point that they believe certain people really ought to be dead because they're probably communists.
For the kids out there, though: Yeah, maybe don't post pictures on the internet of people you don't like hanging from nooses. Famous people, not-famous people, black or white, whether they've got Secret Service protection or are just the neighbor kids who still won't stay off your lawn. We really shouldn't have to keep explaining this, so if you're the kind of person who's prone to doing things like that, do yourself a favor and write yourself a note reminding yourself not to. Ever again.