Even I, the Gallant Pelham, the same dude who has been railing about America\u2019s disgraceful treatment of the \u201cother\u201d for over 150 years (if only recently on the Internet!), can hardly believe that President Trump, not to mention a sizeable contingent of the Republican Party, is using Mollie Tibbetts\u2019s murder by an illegal Mexican immigrant to stir up his \u201cbase\u201d and gain support for his ridiculous border wall. I\u2019ve often spoken about moneyed interest stoking the flames of racism to distract people from the source of their true grievances (more often than not, the moneyed interests!), but blaming illegal immigrants for crime, especially the most terrible, violent crime, is beyond the pale. The statistics simply don\u2019t bear it out. As per usual, Trump\u2019s claims aren\u2019t true, he\u2019s lying. He lies and he lies and he lies. And unfortunately his base, overwhelmed by grievances they are powerless to address, is all too ready to believe his lies. Talk about the WORST angels of our nature! If they could only see they were falling for the oldest ploy in the book\u2014the use of racism to maintain power.<\/p>\n
Do not think for one minute that I do not grieve for Mollie Tibbetts, her family, and all those she left behind. But like the murder of Kathryn Steinle a few years back, which was also exploited by the right-wing, it is based on a deeply ingrained cultural fear\u2014white women, especially attractive, young white women, being sexually victimized by men of color. It\u2019s been over one hundred years since t his perverted mythology was vividly depicted in D.W. Griffith\u2019s The Birth of a Nation, in which a seemingly sexually crazed black man (actually a white actor in black face) chases an innocent young white girl until she throws herself from a cliff rather than fall victim to the black devil himself. And it\u2019s the same irrational fear that led to the lynching of thousands of black men during the Jim Crow era. If you ask me, it\u2019s high time that white America face up to its demons!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Even I, the Gallant Pelham, the same dude who has been railing about America\u2019s disgraceful treatment of the \u201cother\u201d for over 150 years (if only recently on the Internet!), can hardly believe that President Trump, not to mention a sizeable contingent of the Republican Party, is using Mollie Tibbetts\u2019s murder by an illegal Mexican immigrant to stir up his \u201cbase\u201d and gain support for his ridiculous border wall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":208952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"President Trump and the Republican Party are using Mollie Tibbetts\u2019s murder by an illegal Mexican immigrant to gain support for his ridiculous border wall.","_seopress_robots_index":"","pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1609"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208953,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1609\/revisions\/208953"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}