This meme is a fascinating look at how the modern left’s mind works.
▪️For years, it’s been known that the Matthew Shepard (not Shepherd) murder was over drugs, not a random anti-gay hate crime. Both of Shepard’s assailants were on a week long meth bender prior to the murder, Shepard himself was a meth addict and dealer, and reportedly had a sexual relationship with one of his attackers, who was bisexual.
▪️After his brutal murder, the assailants headed to Shepard’s house to finish the robbery, but got sidetracked and ended up brutally assaulted two other young men, which is where they were arrested.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behind-americas-most-famous-gay-hate-murder-matthew-shepard
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=277685&page=1
▪️Yet the initial hate-crime narrative stuck in left-wing activist’s minds, and they never updated their priors, like in so many similar cases. They still think the Shepard murder was a result of some rednecks attacking a kid because he was gay, so this meme make sense in their minds.
▪️Even though Laramie isn’t a small, conservative town. It’s the 3rd largest city in Wyoming and the most liberal, the University of Wyoming is there. Which doesn’t exactly make it Berkeley, but it’s not your stereotypical small town.
▪️Additionally, Laramie residents were horrified at the murder and the assailants were immediately arrested and convicted of first degree murder. The defense even tried using the gay panic angle in hopes of finding sympathetic jurors (which helped fueled the false hate crime narrative) but it backfired. Later, one of the murderer’s girlfriends admitted it was false, she only said it because she thought it would help his case.
▪️So the “small town” of Laramie acted with swift justice against the murderers. This meme makes no sense on any account if you know the facts, but it does make sense in left wing activist’s heads because of the narratives they’ve constructed. It’s instructive to understand this.
It’s funny to see the left use the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the right did a year ago regarding the jobs numbers being downwardly revised. So many on the right, who knew nothing of how the jobs numbers are calculated or why they revise them, were convinced the downward revisions were a conspiracy to help Biden win.
If people want to have a debate about the birth death model or the survey methods, ok, but that’s not what’s happening here. Most people are under the delusion that the BLS report is the govt reporting every job created and lost, and are thus easily swayed it’s rigged when it suits their political ends.
This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 ...
