Imagine a Democrat Had Done It
Lauri Carleton should not have died. But she did standing up to one of these too-frequent attacks from the right's foot soldiers, tools in an ideological struggle funded by the morbidly rich.
Travis Ikeguchi shot and killed Laura (“Lauri”) Anne Carleton last week because she confronted Ikeguchi after he spewed a fusillade of homophobic slurs triggered by the pride flag Carleton hung outside her Lake Arrowhead, Calif. shop, Mag Pi.
https://twitter.com/rothschildmd/status/1693803765416271972
After running from the scene, Ikeguchi shot at several sheriff’s deputies’ vehicles with an unregistered semi-automatic handgun before police killed him in “a lethal force encounter".
Let’s engage in a simple thought experiment.
Imagine it had been Carleton who confronted Ikeguchi about a MAGA flag, or, more specifically, since Ikeguchi was apparently a Robert Kennedy Jr. supporter, something showing support for the anti-vax conspiracy theory-promoting “Democratic” presidential candidate that has become the fair-haired blue-eyed boy of many on the right.
Imagine during this confrontation it had been Carleton shooting Ikeguchi and shooting back at police with an unregistered semi-automatic firearm.
Imagine the round-the-clock outrage on right-wing hate media about those “violent woke liberals”.
Yet a simple DuckDuckGo search finds the only right-leaning outlet that covered the incident is the New York Post.
Head over to the The Righting, a site dedicated to compiling recent right-wing hate media headlines, and there is nothing about it.
Instead, what we find are headlines like “Welcome to Ireland, the ‘Woke’ Capital of Europe”, “California University Ensures Your Cancer Doctor Will Be Trained by Whomever Is Wokest”, and “Maui Tragedy Makes a Strong Pro-Second Amendment Point”.
We could be expected to assume the reason right-leaning media is practically ignoring this heinous cold-blooded murder of a California small business owner standing in support of her LGBTQ+ customers is because the incident doesn’t conform to its typical narrative of bashing anything apparently compassionate and, dare we say, truly Christian, what the right disparages as “woke”. It’s too busy promoting BS like “Media Don’t Care About Maui Fires or Biden’s ‘Katrina Moment’” and “Biden Is Out of Touch with Hawaiians and All Americans” to take a step back and examine how Carleton’s killer (let’s not mention his name anymore) got to the point where shooting Carleton seemed like a noble act.
But Carleton’s murderer pulled the trigger precisely because of the rhetoric coming out the very media ignoring what it motivated him to do.
Case in point.
After the mass shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. in March, it didn’t even take right-wing hate media 24 hours to deflect away from the gun toward the shooter’s apparent gender.
Take a look at the headlines:
Breitbart: “Nashville Shooter Was Second ‘Transgender’ Female Killer in 4 Years”.
Washington Stand: “Transgender Activist Kills 6 at Christian School”.
NewsBusters: “CBS Blames Guns for Possible Trans Terrorist Shooting”.
Infowars: “Leftists Complain About Transgender Shooter Being Misgendered”
Rep. from MAGA-land Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted:
https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1640454996821934082
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted:
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1640520340630585345
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance added:
https://twitter.com/JDVance1/status/1640501236343382016
Confronted with so much stochastic terrorism, coming out of the GOP, no wonder Carleton’s murderer shot Carleton.
As Laura Clawson reported for the Daily Kos:
Ikeguchi isn’t alone in having these stances and going on to commit violence. The shooter who killed 10 people in a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022 embraced a white nationalist ideology often promoted by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Rep. Elise Stefanik. The killer in a 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, was motivated by anti-immigrant racism and was a supporter of Donald Trump’s immigration policies. The list goes on and on and on.
A friend and part-time employer of the man who attacked then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, last year, stated:
If you got him talking about politics, it was all over because he really believed in the whole MAGA, ‘Pizzagate,’ stolen election — you know, all of it, all the way down the line.
Godwin’s Law aside, an age-old technique fascists and their sycophants use is to demonize, dehumanize, undervalue, underestimate, and marginalize people they deem “enemies”.
Then they step back as people like Paul Pelosi and Lauri Carleton’s attackers act on that incitement, which is seldom specific.
We rarely hear, “It’s those Blacks,” or “It’s those Jews,” or “It’s those gay people.”
Instead it’s that “woke agenda” coming from “deep state” “globalists”.
Instead it’s “parental rights” against allowing students to access books that “teach them to hate America.”
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1680720347170058240
Instead it’s all about “protecting children” from those “Satanic elites who drink children’s blood and sell body parts from aborted fetuses”.
Nod-nod, wink-wink.
The dog whistles continue.
Lauri Carleton should not have died. But she did standing up to one of these too-frequent attacks from the right’s foot soldiers, tools in an ideological struggle funded by the morbidly rich who own the republican party so they don’t have to pay another half a percent in income taxes.