Neo-Nativist Twitter Is Flipping Out About the Katie Steinle Verdict: Enough With the Faux ‘Outrage’

By:
Dec 1, 2017
8:51 AM

With Thursday night news that a San Francisco jury acquitted José Inés García Zarate in the killing of Kate Steinle, reaction about the verdict trended globally on Twitter, with the vast majority of tweets showing how Steinle’s death has just become a dog whistle for flat-out racism and xenophobia. Here is just a sample of the top tweets:

Nonetheless, all this hysteria and fear was started by the Enabler in Chief, who took the time of Friday morning to make surehe riled up his base again:

You gotta blame someone and why not focus on an outlier in the debate, because in the end, Trump and his followers ARE winning the conversation because we as Americans are playing into the myth of the “criminal alien.” You don’t believe it? Just Google News Search the news about the Steinle verdict: there are plenty of mainstream outlets whose headlines paint the picture of the “illegal” getting freed. That is the narrative we are being exposed to daily, even though García Zarate’s situation is so rare, when it comes to actual statistics. But now we wake up to the lies that immigrants are terrorizing urban centers all over the country, because that is what sells. And by letting this happen (and Democrats are just at fault), we are allowed for the racialization and militarization of immigration to happen, just like we did post-9/11 for the war against terrorism.

This morning, immigrants are less safe on the streets of America because a President has made it acceptable for neo-nativism and racism to be the norms of our times. Steinle’s death is tragic, but what about the other deaths that we stay silent about? For example, just two months before Steinle’s death in 2015, a group of teens in Jupiter, Florida, decided to go “Guat hunting” and killed a Guatemalan teen. Where was the outrage then? Where was the anger? If we value life, shouldn’t we be consistent in all cases? Where are all the Onésimo Ramos-López tweets?

So forgive us if we step aside from the faux Steinle outrage and call it for what it is: a crass and disgusting political exploitation to justify anti-immigrant racism in the United States.