Screaming, Indeed!

Somebody Is Shooting — Strike That — *Killing* Minnesota’s Democratic Lawmakers, Dressed As A Cop by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Well, here is some fucking news. Read on Substack

Melissa Hortman has died. John Hoffman and his wife have survived surgery.

Here is a fast post before I take a breath, make my signs, and go outside to scream my head off.

Someone or someones dressed as law enforcement — or law enforcement! with ICE covering their faces, there’s really no way to know anymore who is who! — has gone and shot Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota. The Minnesota House is split 67-67, and the Minnesota Senate has a plus-one majority for Democratic-Farm-Labor. These are targeted assassinations.

Sen. John Hoffman (DFL-Champlin) and Minnesota House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman of Brooklyn Park are reportedly in grave condition. Reportedly, both of their spouses were shot too. Update 10:50 eastern: KSTP is reporting that Hortman and her husband Mark have died.

Update 11:00 eastern: Per an officer at the press conference above, officers responding to the shooting at Hoffman’s house asked Brooklyn Park officers to go check Hortman’s house — out of a vague foreboding. Those officers found the fake cop coming out of her house, when he immediately shot at them and went back inside.

Update 11:30 eastern: NOWHERE in this CNN story on the “politically motivated assassination” does it tell its readers that the victims were Democrats. Why do you suppose that is?

Everything is escalating. Nothing is all right.

The last time someone tried to kill Democrats, it was a lunatic who bashed Nancy Pelosi’s octogenarian husband in the head with a hammer. This was considered very hilarious by our president, Donald Trump.

Here is Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz a day ago.

https://embed.bsky.app/embed/did:plc:kkowgxq2se4x5lo4zyipch6a/app.bsky.feed.post/3lriop3puf22w?id=18887764160362552

Jesus Fucking Christ.

“Is the Cold-Blooded UnitedHealthcare CEO KillerGetting This Much Love Because He’s a White Man?

There’s just no damn way a Black man would get the same treatment.

(This is a valid POV. Also, if you go ahead and click the links, you’ll get simply the embed you clicked on. If you click the link above, you can see the whole story with the embeds. The whole story is here, with the embed links.)

By Lawrence Ware

The response to UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson being shot and killed in Manhattan last week has been…interesting, to say the least. Dude, whose identity remains unknown and is probably somewhere cooling in Istanbul while the Feds and everyone else continue searching for him, has turned into a something of a pop culture icon.

The online reactions of Black folks to the killer and Thompson himself have run the gamut, from outright hostility, like this guy…

https://www.theroot.com/embed/inset/iframe?id=twitter-1864466388993118617&autosize=1

…to intellectually nuanced and dense articulations of why they are unmoved about the killing of this white man who theoretically became rich off the back of the misfortunes of the sick. (Let’s call this intellectual hostility.)

https://www.theroot.com/embed/inset/iframe?id=twitter-1864769446000165218&autosize=1

What’s most surprising is the amount of love this hoodie wearing, N95-masked gentleman who used a silencers to kill a man in broad daylight in the heart of New York City is receiving. There has not been this much adoration for a white man since Channing Tatum took his clothes off dancing off beat in Magic Mike. I mean, there’s already been a lookalike competition:

https://www.theroot.com/embed/inset/iframe?id=tiktok-7445767917418876190&autosize=1

There are even folks thirsting over this dude like they have been walking though the Mojave desert and homie is a glass of water with some liquid IV:

https://www.theroot.com/embed/inset/iframe?id=tiktok-7444948595327077678&autosize=1

https://www.theroot.com/embed/inset/iframe?id=tiktok-7445058509198101803&autosize=1

But let’s be clear. Even though the NYPD (shockingly) said here that the killer is “light skinned:”

https://www.theroot.com/embed/inset/iframe?id=twitter-1864777454025351253&autosize=1

…ain’t no damn way a Black man would get this kind of love if he pulled the trigger. I’m quite positive that there are white people in the sundown town of Cullman, Ala. who are fine with a white man doing this crime but would pull out their big ass trucks with a Confederate flag on the front to find the perpetrator if he was Black.

Denzel Washington could have pulled the trigger, and folks would have thanked him for the years of joy he brought to their lives and thrown his ass under the jail.

The response to this murder (I refuse to call it an “assassination” because Thompson could have caught some lead for something as simple as sleeping with the nanny and her boyfriend pulling out the .44 on him.) is at once expected in our society and, well, pretty nonsensical.

And like all things that make no sense anymore, I blame this on Donald Trump…and that dude hasn’t even moved into the White House yet. I’m just glad the killer wasn’t a Black man, because we’d all be face-down in handcuffs getting profiled throughout the damn country.