Wow. Case in point that racists have been emboldened by the current culture: Parker Mustian. He’s a high school student who made hate videos and shared them with his classmates. He happily expresses racist views, brandishes a rifle, and threatens to shoot up his school.
“Howdy, I’m Parker Mustian and I hate black people,” the teen begins in the first clip. “They’re the worst. They’re stinky and they just suck. They’re just bad people.”
Mustian proceeds to fire a weapon at what he claims are “a box of Jordans – the favorite pair of shoes for a black man.”
“I’m going to show you what I think of a black man,” Mustian says, unloading his weapon at the box of shoes.
“F*ck all n*ggers,” he says after firing.
Mustian is in South Carolina, which may contribute to his attitude…but he’s also wealthy and connected, so he apparently thought he was immune to all consequences.
Mustian is the grandson of Richard Quinn, the prominent South Carolina political strategist whose empire recently collapsed as part of a multi-year corruption probe. That probe is ongoing, in fact, as Quinn was arrested earlier this year and charged with eleven counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation.
Mustian is the son of prominent Columbia, S.C. attorney Ben Mustian, who is Quinn’s son-in-law.
Nice family you got there, Parker. It must be a strain to have to live up to their reputation.
The one good thing is that it used to be that people would think these same horrible thoughts, but they’d be reticent about announcing them in public. Not any more! Now we get to see shit for brains on display all the time.
A strain, maybe, but he seems to be doing a bang-up job keeping up with his dad and granddad in the Wonderful Human Being department.
?? <— I see a reference to one of the victims of the Walmart shoot. [see the posting about Monsters and Heroes]
I know I’m confusing it by not getting the conventional reference to Jordans
It’s not too clear from the OP what exactly happened to this former student.
The school he threatened to shoot up is called Cardinal Newman and with a name like that, you know it is Catholic.
You read about these mass shootings and wonder if and when it is going to happen to you.
And then go about your life and usually it never does.
The USA is a big place with 329 million people, after all.
Strangely enough, the police manage to stop some of these events.
A guy near where I live threatened to shoot up the local university.
He was reported to the police who put his name into a Point of Sale database.
He was arrested a few days later while buying an assault rifle at a local store.
The followup.
There isn’t any.
There was never a trial and nothing in the news about what happened to him.
I’m guessing he was given a psychiatric evaluation and sent to a secure care facility.
He may still be there.
During the summer I go to a few outdoor rock concerts, fairs, and festivals of one sort or another.
Nothing unusual and I’m sure most people do something similar.
I’ve noticed they all have heavy security now.
One event this weekend had the usual obligatory bag check as you go in.
The police had a command post already set up off to one side.
They weren’t just standing around looking bored either.
They seemed to be wearing tactical gear and just…waiting for something to happen.
There were a few small ambulances standing by also.
Welcome to the brave new world of 21st century USA.
Sorry PZ: PoC been knew about people like this, (not that this makes things any less hurtful). People who say such things never kept it a secret from us out of fear of repercussions, because they knew we were essentially powerless to do anything to them, and they didn’t care if we ostracized them. Thanks to social media and the internet, this is a revelation to those of you who may not seen this kind of thing up close before, or forgot this was a thing, because you hadn’t seen it in a while.
Raven, don’t bet on your nutcase getting much in the way of mental health care. Saint Reagan gutted that sector decades ago, and it has never recovered. My house was vandalized by someone completely off his rocker a few weeks ago. I went to attend his hearing, but it had been rescheduled. Because he’d been released pending trial, and he wandered into someone else’s house and vandalized it too.
I used to think it was helpful for bigots to be more open about it so you know what you’re dealing with. Now I have no idea. It is less likely to be discrediting than normalizing. I feel like we’ve gone back decades in just few years.
PaulBC @ 8
I used to think that as well. The now-dead civil libertarian in me really and truly believed that the “Marketplace of Ideas” would discard or quarantine horrific beliefs like racism, sexism because good and reasonable people would see them for what they were and reject them. Let’s them holler! Let them fume. The vast majority of people aren’t like this.
Then I discovered that the vast majority of people are anything but good or reasonable. I too am not entirely sure what to do about this problem, but I do know one thing: That it’s perhaps time we renegotiate the boundaries of “free speech” in our society.
Clearly we need to find out which videogames he’s been playing… /sarcasm
voidhawk@10 Maybe he has been playing “fort night” with a real pillow fort.
Is that like charging cardboard cutout models of windmills with a plastic spider whilst shouting “mommy, I needs a death star!”?
blf@12 Not sure, but it is a popular pastime with WSJ opinion writers: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-young-imagination-beats-videogames-11561415828 ‘Fortnite doesn’t hold a candle to my boyhood games of ‘fort night.’’
Will Trump appoint Parker Mustian to his cabinet, or the federal judiciary?
Read that the shooter in Ohio was in a band that sang about shooting women. Let me off the planet.
robertbaden@15 Found it: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/dayton-shooter-pornogrind-band
How is this even a thing people listen to? How is it not a massive red flag? This guy was a walking time bomb and a lot of people from his high school and elsewhere were aware of it.
Oh, and he’s wearing a mask. Nice. How long until wingnut media decides the whole problem is Antifa?
PaulBC @16:
They did that years ago.
microraptor@17 Well yes, but I meant specifically blaming the increase in gun violence on Antifa. Right now, the best guess in the wingnutosphere is that family breakdown, gay marriage, and video games are to blame. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/dayton-shooting-due-family-breakdown-gay-marriage-video-games-state-lawmaker-says/jf8XNJPSfKFl13yggzTFgM/?fbclid=IwAR3yvkNDwiX6KAooxBlbP3xPmJY7T_eT2hB9w6XkMcmiFggMXrlneU8sozY