On Monday, Joy Reid of MSNBC asserted that Republican Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, and other members of the Republican party are reviving the practice of lynching, following Abbott’s public support of an army veteran who was found guilty of killing a participant of a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
According to Reuters, Daniel Perry, aged 37, was found guilty of killing 28-year-old Garrett Foster in Austin, Texas, in July 2020. Perry was driving on a street that had been occupied by rioters when he encountered Foster and other protesters. Foster, who was allegedly carrying an AK-47, along with a group of demonstrators, approached Perry’s vehicle. Perry’s attorneys contend that he fired in self-defense, resulting in the fatal shooting of Foster.
On Saturday, Abbott took to Twitter to express his efforts to pardon Perry, stating that he was working within the framework of Texas law to do so. Abbott maintained that Perry had the right to defend himself.
“You might recall that Abbott also posted a celebratory tweet when Kyle Rittenhouse, who used his semiautomatic rifle to shoot two men dead after a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was declared not guilty,” Reid said. “This feels like a pattern to me. You have Republicans in multiple states, including Florida, passing and pushing laws that will allow people to hit Black Lives Matter protesters or any protesters they like with their cars. This was after the Charlottesville murder by car of a white woman who was a Black Lives Matter protester. They seem to have gotten back into lynching, hanging, all sorts of other draconian 19th century fare.”
“What is going on with Republicans that they seem to like be bringing back the lynching vibe?” Reid asked Matthew Dowd of MSNBC.
In the view of Dowd, if Perry were a Black man, Abbott would not have intervened.
“This is all – it all is integrated, this is another attack on our democracy, and I don’t think people fully understand what that means. They think attacks on our democracy are only like taking away somebody’s vote or what happened on January 6th. This is an attack of a jury, which is in our Constitution, in the seventh amendment, the right to jury trial, that basically takes the power of citizens away to hold anybody accountable. That’s what a jury is. It’s an integral part of our democracy.”
“[Abbott] decided he knows better than 12 average folks sitting in Austin, Texas, to make this decision. Again, it’s another attack on our democracy.”
“Fascism has many features. And one of them is this sort of lust to be able to harm or kill your political opponents. And it feels like across the board on the right, there is this kind of, sort of, lust for that,” Reid replied.
