Mark Zuckerberg Continues To Suck
While Twitter limited the ability to view a Trump tweet from May 29 wherein he threatened to execute American citizens in the streets without due process by saying "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," Mark Zuckerberg just left it there, untouched. Zuckerberg thinks Trump's echoing of the "looting and shooting" line wasn't a racist dog whistle. And he's right. It's not. It's a goddamn racist bullhorn.
In leaked audio from an internal call with Facebook employees, Zuckerberg claims that after researching the history of the "looting and shooting" line he's determined that it's maybe a tad too racially aggressive a message, maybe just a skosh over the line, "but," he said, "it has no history of being read as a dog whistle for vigilante supporters to take justice into their own hands." A cursory Googling demolishes that theory so thoroughly that I can only conclude that Zuckerberg is either stupid or a lying sack of shit.
The phrase harkens back to 1967 when supremely racist Miami police Chief Walter Headley used it during a news conference talking about civil unrest in Florida City, an area about 40-minutes southwest of Miami. In this same talk, he also casually mentioned he was "declaring war" on criminals, conveniently skimming over the implication that he's going to war on American citizens, as is often the case with fake tough guys whose solution to every problem is to beat it until it can't sue you for using excessive force.
The Miami Herald dug into what Headley meant, exactly, when he said the line Trump repeated over 50 years later. They found that Headley wasn't speaking in flowery metaphor. He was literally telling his officers to kill black people in the streets if they wanted. Headley was a bigoted dick that bragged about hiring black police officers so he wouldn't look racist in the public eye, but then wouldn't allow them to be called "policemen." (That term was for white officers, black ones got labeled "patrolmen".) He was a vile, disgusting human who said a flagrantly and violently racist thing that Trump, as president of the United States, repeated with the same intention.
If Zuck couldn't figure that out after he supposedly did his own research into it, then maybe he's too much of a morally corrupted dipshit to run one of the most powerful forces the world has ever seen. But, really, what were we expecting from the guy who started a website to rate Harvard women based on their looks that eventually grew to become the world's most effective destroyer of democracy.
Luis can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Catch him on the "In Broad Daylight" podcast with Cracked alums Adam Tod Brown and Ian Fortey! Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. Listen to the first episode on Youtube!
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