After spending days enthusiastically applauding Trump’s freakish act of imperialist aggression to oust the president of Venezuela on the grounds that he is a murderous tyrant, Republicans in the United States are falling all over themselves to justify the cold-blooded murder of a mother of three by an ICE officer in Minneapolis.
The shooting was caught on video from multiple angles, and from every angle it looks completely unjustifiable by the standards of any normal human being. The officer will probably get off using the usual “feared for his life” defense claiming that he believed the woman was going to run him over with her car. But when you’re repeatedly firing your pistol into the side window of the vehicle, you know you’re not in any danger of being run over. He tracked her head with his gun well after he was out of harm’s way and pulled the trigger anyway, firing at the side of her head from the side of the vehicle.
As one libertarian commentator noted, it was “Less a ‘she did X so I have to shoot her,’ and more of ‘she did X so I get to shoot her.’”
And yet this killing is being treated as a partisan issue, with leftists and Democrats denouncing the actions of the shooter and rightists ferociously defending them.
The president himself took the time to weigh in on this one, falsely claiming on Truth Social that the woman “ran over the ICE Officer” and that “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” Anyone watching the videos can see this is a lie.
As Brad Reed notes for Common Dreams, “Eyewitness videos taken at the scene of the incident, however, do not show the officer getting run over at all. In fact, the officer can be seen walking around after discharging his weapon, with no signs of any injury. In fact, the video Trump posted on his Truth Social that he claims shows the officer being run over does not at all show the officer being run over, but rather stepping safely out of the way as the car starts moving forward.”
American conservatives are such gross frauds.
They pretend to oppose tyranny but start frantically licking boots whenever there’s a police shooting.
They pretend to oppose war and applaud Trump’s warmongering.
They pretend to be Christian and ignore most of the New Testament.
They pretend to support freedom of speech and then support Trump stomping out speech that is critical of Israel.
They pretend to support the rule of law and then applaud when Trump openly kidnaps the president of a sovereign nation to steal its oil.
They pretend to oppose big government and then applaud trillion-dollar military budgets and the expansion of government departments to flood the streets with armed thugs.
It’s not that they’re hypocrites. It’s that they’re liars. They’re groveling, power-worshipping bootlickers, and then they make up a bunch of fake stories about themselves to make them feel like they’re actually decent people.
They are not decent people. They are genocidal warmongers with their tongues firmly inserted into the anuses of the most powerful people on the planet. They are everything they pretend to hate. They are everything that is wrong with this world.
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Caitlin Johnstone 