Sewer rats
This is monstrous even for them.
For 34 days, investigators searched for 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts. Yesterday, an illegal alien, now charged with first-degree murder, led police to the cornfield where her body was found.
The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated. They are not alone. pic.twitter.com/BBskwHEJoU
— The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) August 22, 2018
This isn’t just an off-the-cuff Trump tweet; it’s from the official White House account and features official-looking video. It’s deliberate political messaging, meant to turn a case that had attracted nationwide attention for weeks into an opportunity to reiterate Trump’s very favorite rhetorical theme: that many immigrants, specifically unauthorized immigrants, are criminals who want to kill you.
The man arrested for Tibbetts’s murder is Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old farmworker. Authorities have told reporters that Rivera is an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico, and that he was able to work on an Iowa farm because he presented a stolen ID.
So Trump’s thugs howled with joy and rushed to capitalize on the news.
Some of Tibbetts’s relatives have urged the public not to focus on Rivera’s immigration status. Tibbetts’s aunt posted on Facebook that “Evil comes in EVERY color”; her cousin attacked conservative activist Candace Owens on Twitter for “generaliz(ing) a whole population based on some bad individuals.”
But the fact that Tibbetts (a photogenic young white woman whose disappearance was already a national story) was allegedly killed by an unauthorized immigrant is exactly what made the White House’s interest in the story inevitable.
Because one potential murdering unauthorized immigrant means all unauthorized immigrants are suspect, is that it? Well ok then: guess who the Nazis were. Germans! Guess who Trump’s grandfather was. A German immigrant! Let’s deport him to Germany right this second.
Most recently, in late June — as the Trump administration’s policy of family separation at the US-Mexico border was dominating the headlines — the White House convened a gathering of such relatives who had been “permanently separated” from their families, implying that the separation of thousands of families (many of them seeking asylum) was justified because it was an effort to save American families from seeing their loved ones killed.
It’s almost a cliché at this point for the White House to answer every criticism of its immigration policy, from its handling of DACA to its separation of families, with the fact that some unauthorized immigrants have killed some Americans. The use of Mollie Tibbetts as another excuse to hammer on this theme, despite the wishes of some family members, may seem callous.
But really it’s calculatingly disgusting beyond anyone’s ability to describe.
Oh gosh, we used to have a term for that thing where you smear all members of a race with the (alleged) wrongdoings of one… I forget what it was, because Republicans assured me it had been eradicated years ago…
I’ve seen this story elsewhere, and the conservatives were practically chortling with glee there too. Not-so-secretly, this was a godsend for them.
Perhaps it’s time to have some sort of accounting of all the young women who have been killed by white men born and raised here in the good old U.S. of A. The list would be long…too long. (And a lot longer than the list of young women killed by illegal immigrants).
There are bad people in every group. That doesn’t mean the entire group is bad (Well, maybe Republicans – that group is beginning to convince me that it is possible for an entire demographic to be totally evil).
Yes! Do it!
Wait…which side are you on again?
Merkel would only send him back. She doesn’t want him, either.