Before America puts to bed the 787.5 million dollar settlement between Fox and Dominion Voting Systems, we should examine the words of Andrew Lester’s grandson, Klint Ludwig. Mr. Ludwig decried his grandfather’s fall into the right-wing rabbit hole, pointing the unlucky foot at Fox News, One America News, the NRA, and the atmosphere of paranoia on the right. The confluence of QAnon conspiracies, Covid-19 disinformation, and racism, “the warning signs were there,” said Ludwig. If Chaucer was correct and “familiarity breeds contempt,” then misinformation fuels hate.
The demarcation between the races, the young and old, male and female, was all on display last week. An older white man shot a black teenager in the head for mistaking his home for a house with the same numerical address a few blocks over. Another white man shot and killed a young white woman for turning her car around in his driveway. A Hispanic man shot and wounded a group of cheerleaders because an apology for accidentally opening his car door was not good enough. Finally, a black man shot and injured a white man and his six-year-old daughter for rolling a basketball into his yard. I am sure the excuses will start soon, and groups will defend the shooters feeling afraid or disrespected.
Places like Fox News will make up a scenario about wokeness like they did when it was revealed the Nashville murderer was a transgender man. The right wing will also not discuss the exaggerated myth of the law-abiding citizen with a gun. Three of the four men had no criminal records of note. Twenty-four-year-old Robert Singletary—the man who shot the father and six-year-old, was previously arrested for assaulting his girlfriend with a hammer. However, according to the right wing, not owning a gun would violate his right because of a domestic violence arrest. According to his neighbors Kevin Monahan, the man who killed Kaylin Gillis for driving up the wrong driveway had been increasingly annoyed by multiple drivers’ mistakes. In a world of anger and anti-woke, firing a gun is preferable to an iron gate, retrieving a basketball, or locking your car door.
Shootings, anti-Asian hate, anti-Semitism, and anti-black or brown hate are not a product of economic anxiety. They are products of too many guns and fear-based outsized hatred. Conservative gun advocates who fight so hard to remove subsidies from families who need food would happily give them a weapon instead of a chicken in every pot. Ralph Yarl, the teenage victim of Mr. Lester’s fears, was the result of the regurgitated diet of fears told his grandfather that members of the woke mob were out to get him; in this case, Black Lives Matter.
I had written in the past when Barack Obama was running to be the first black President of the United States in 2016; I wanted to set aside my racial and party pride and listen to the other side. Quickly I was slapped into reality by stories of madrassa schools, fist bumps—characterized as secret Muslin handshakes, a hidden Kenyan birth, and a ballyhooed secret Michelle Obama “whitey” tape. Fox using a source— touted by dirty trickster Roger Stone, the video eventually turned out to be a hoax spear-headed by Larry C. Johnson. The Obama(s) was the practice for the lies and unsubstantiated hoaxes that led to violence at the Capitol on January 6. So, before we are too quick to lock the barn door on Fox News and chalk it up to the station that cried woke, remember what happened to the sheep.
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