Earlier this week, the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky hosted a fundraiser that featured Jonathan Mattingly, one of the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor, as a speaker. Taylor, an African American woman, was killed when three white policemen broke down her door in a botched raid of her apartment and shot her numerous times. Taylor was unarmed. The group played body camera footage of the raid and broadcast it over speakers. The Republican Women’s Club defended the event by saying “Mattingly has a right to share his experience.”
What is wrong with Republicans? Why do they insist on making White people who kill innocent people, especially Black people, heroes? And why do they go out of their way to smear the victims of gun violence? Do they have no sense of empathy? They did it with George Zimmerman who killed Trayvon Martin and they’ve done it to Kyle Rittenhouse who killed two people during riots following the George Floyd murder. If the officer who killed Floyd had been acquitted, you can bet he would be on the right-wing lecture and media circuit. Same with those racists who killed Ahmaud Arbery.
Celebrating murderers has a long, sordid history in this country, especially in the South. For most of the 20thcentury, White people could kill Black people without worrying too much about consequences. When the White killers were arrested and tried, White defenders made them out to be the victims and, often, turned them into celebrities. Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-White jury and then went on to detail their crimes in a national magazine. Lynch mobs were rarely ever held accountable, but victims of lynching were smeared regardless of their guilt or innocence.
On the flip side, when Blacks killed Whites, they were more likely to end up at the end of a rope or in the electric chair. Justice was not color blind. The legacy of that era is the distrust many Black Americans have toward the justice system today.
About 25 years ago, I lived in rural Chatham County. One day, my neighbor’s cow was giving birth by the edge of the road. I stopped to watch and struck up a conversation. Somehow, the Martin Luther King holiday came up. My neighbor said, “We celebrate the day he was shot.”
Back then, hearing my neighbor say that was shocking. Even within the GOP, such sentiments were way outside of the mainstream, at least when they were publicly acknowledged. Today, Republicans openly hail killers of Black men as celebrities with little fear of rebuke from the leaders of their party. Some may quietly disagree, but their criticism will be muffled by the reality that they need the support of the people who hold those views.
Ironically, Black Republicans are the biggest beneficiary of these attitudes. The few White Republicans who might condemn Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz or Paul Gosar give Black Republicans like Mark Robinson a pass. When he calls gay people “filth” or says women can’t be leaders, few GOP leaders rebuke him and if they do, it’s in modest terms. Republicans want desperately to point to support for Robinson to say, “See, we’re not racists.” I hate to tell them, but that’s racist, though to be fair, the GOP has just about given up on accountability of any kind.
So what’s wrong with Republicans? Well, just about everything. It’s a party of sociopaths. They are no longer a serious party even if they may still have serious members. They’ve allowed themselves to be taken over by extremists and con artists. They allowed Fox News and talk radio to lie so long that they started to believe the dystopian right-wing narrative themselves. Now that the Tucker Carlsons of the world have constructed an alternative reality composed of alternative facts, they live in a world that can’t tell right from wrong, truth from fiction, dark from light, guilt from innocence, false prophets from ravening wolves. It’s downright pathetic.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
To Mr. Schaeffer: The history of the parties by label is a smokescreen; who cares? It’s where they are now that matters. And the fact that you refer to Obama as “Barry” is telling. Unless of course you also call Trump “Donnie.”
If you feel offended by my use of the name ‘Barry’ in reference to Barack Obama, that’s your problem. There is legitimate evidence, in the form of an Indonesian school record, that shows Barack Obama attended school there, and was registered as an Indonesian citizen and as a Muslim.
Obama was registered Jan. 1, 1968, under the name Barry Soetoro, with serial number 203, in Class 1B at the Catholic Franciscan Assisi Primary School in Jakarta, Indonesia. The records indicate young Barry attended the Franciscan school for three years, until Class 3. Now, I know you may be panicking over this startling revelation about your hero, but read on—there’s more!
School records listed Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961. That information is suspect, and remains a subject of conjecture to this day, despite the former Prez claiming otherwise.
His religion was listed as Islam. School documents recorded Barry’s father as Lolo Soetoro Ma, a worker in the director general’s office in the TNI Topography division of the Indonesian army. This gentleman was Obama’s mother’s second husband, and Soetoro renamed the infant. This is a matter of record.
The first husband was Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., who for all intents and purposes abandoned his wife and child when Jr. was only 6 months old. The senior Obama subsequently returned to Nairobi, Kenya, where he finally died in a car accident, likely because he was a drunk, and was not capable of holding a job.
Now, note this: Confirmation for Obama’s attendance in the Indonesian school, and of his actual name change, came with the surfacing of a 2007 Associated Press photograph by Tatan Syuflana, an Indonesian AP reporter and photographer. The photo showed Obama’s registration card at the Assisi school, and that photo can still be found online. None of this crap is made up; it’s all out there on the internet for you to find. Equally interesting, there is no record of Barry Soetoro ever legally changing his name back to Barack H. Obama.
So—I’ll just call him ‘Barry’; you can call him whatever suits you. Obama was–still is–and will always remain the quintessential fraud. Nothing new there, since the entire Democrat Party is clearly and provably predicated on fraud. Meanwhile, don’t hurt yourself clutching your pearls and gasping, “BUT … BUT… WHATTABOUT TRUMP….”
Wayne of course Obama was a Muslim by birth, which is how it works with the Muslim faith. But I suspect you are failing to grasp the historical facts. preferring to spew out false information developed by Fox for folks like yourself. I suspect we need to compare the facts surrounding Obama’s life and that of Trump. Obama a Harvard trained lawyer, editor of the Harvard Law Review, married in the Christian faith, attends Christian church services, no record of immoral behavior verses Trump, clandestine relationships with porn stars , phony organizations IE Trump University, Trump charities, Trump inspired attack on the nation’s capital, currently the subject of several investigations. The list goes on. I would say Trump clearly has surpassed Obama when it comes to unchristian behavior. So what difference does it make wither he is called Berry!
Unbelievable. What have we come to in these culture wars?
Thank you for writing this; unfortunately it needs to be said.
If Mills is serious about describing a political party as sociopaths, he is very clearly ignoring his own party—the Democrats! If ANY political party has become a den of sociopaths riddled with radical extremists, it would be the Democrats. If ANY political party has been co-opted by con men, shysters, and incompetents that are incapable of telling the truth, that would be the Democrat Party.
This article is awash in nonsense about the alleged deficiencies of the Republican Party. In recent times, it began with Barry Obama, and Hillary Clinton is the virtual ‘poster child’ of delusion about Republicans. Democrats constantly whine about Republican conservatism being a ‘threat to our democracy’, and that Republicans are irredeemably racist.
Given Mills’ obsessive fantasies regarding Mark Robinson, perhaps it’s time to set the record straight regarding which party is the party of outright racism. I understand that you might be a Democrat reader, but—try to read it thru. You might learn something.
In 1863 Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. In 1865 Lincoln was assassinated, and Democrat VP Andrew Johnson assumed the Presidency. Johnson opposed the notion that the slaves should be freed. Most especially, he opposed integrating them. Thus, after the Civil War, the militant Ku Klux Klan was formed by Democrats to oppose efforts by the Republican Party to integrate blacks.
In 1865, the 13th Amendment was passed declaring slavery illegal. Republicans supported the bill; Democrats opposed it.
In 1866 the 14th Amendment (guaranteeing citizenship and due process of law) was passed by Republicans. Democrats opposed it.
In 1870 Republicans passed the 15th Amendment, granting blacks the right to vote. Not a single Democrat voted for it.
In 1869, Democrats instituted vicious Jim Crow laws to legalize segregation. Democrats also opposed, or refused to support, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. History proves that those bills only passed because of Republican leadership. There are many more instances of outright suppression by Democrats, but one thing is clear: the Democrat Party has spent well over a century creating and perpetuating the notion of victimization among black Americans, and it is time that all American minorities recognize that they are simply being used by the Democrat Party as a useful prop.
Voters should be extremely mindful of this background when they enter the polls in 2024, remembering which party actually DOES seek to elevate all Americans to their greatest potential, and which party is soaked in a record of abject racism. The Democrats own history indicts them.
And then, in a flash, Lyndon Johnson, in 1964, forced through the Civil Rights reform, instantly converting hundreds of thousands of loyal, racist Democrats into…. (you guessed it…) Republicans, effectively purging the Democratic Party of most, if not all, of the racists of which you speak. This is sort of a “what have you done for me lately” sort of question – in this case, what Republicans have done for racism lately, far outweighs any of their efforts 150 years ago.
Thank you for this column.
I am at a complete loss to explain bad and criminal behavior such as that you write about in this column.
The Till murderers not only bragged about their criminality in a national publication (Look magazine), they sold their story for money. Checkbook journalism at its worst. Frankly, we have not come very far since then as a country.
The Republican Party has become a haven for violent people. The sooner we recognize that, the better off we will be.