Kim Taylor, a Republican state delegate who you had not heard of until a few days ago, is trying to make Democratic Party gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger talking about “rage” into being the reason a rando sent Taylor a threatening message.
“She told supporters to ‘let your rage fuel you,’ and now she wants to pretend she didn’t mean it. Sorry, Abigail, you don’t get to walk it back,” Taylor told Fox News Digital.
Of course it was Fox News Digital who gave Taylor the vine here.
The MAGA candidate’s campaign said it received a message last week from a guy named Michael Ray Strawmyer, 33, of Dinwiddie County, in which he threatened to kill the lawmaker and ranted about MAGA Republicans “ruining” the country.
The part about MAGA Republicans “ruining” the country: true.
If the guy, in fact, threatened to kill Taylor, who is caught up in a toss-up race in a Democratic-leaning House district with challenger Kimberly Pope Adams, that’s obviously very wrong, and he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“This is the same violent rhetoric we’ve seen from Democrats for years, and Republicans have paid the price: Steve Scalise nearly killed on a baseball field, President Trump targeted by an assassin, Charlie Kirk murdered in cold blood,” Taylor told the Fox News folks, who did their jobs, acting as stenographers for the person on their team.
Other violent rhetoric from Donald Trump and his stooges – for example, raging at “far left lunatics,” threatening “funding streams” for ICE protests – has its own body count: the former Minnesota House Speaker and her husband, the dozen people shot on Saturday in North Carolina by an ex-Marine who claimed to be targeted by “LGBT supremacists,” the victims in a horrific attack on a Mormon church in Michigan on Sunday perpetrated by a hardcore MAGA who called Mormons “the antichrist.”
ICYMI
- ICE shooting | MAGA doesn’t really want to tone down the ‘rhetoric’
- ‘Good vs. Evil’? | MAGA rap/country duo n-words their way through song on lynching
- Charlie Kirk murder | The latest victim in the war we’re waging with ourselves
Spanberger’s “rage” isn’t of the violent type. She has used the phrase “let your rage fuel you” the way anybody familiar with the self-help book genre would.
Spanberger attributes the phrase, which she calls “sage advice,” to her mother.
“Every time we hear a new story, we let it fuel us. Every time we turn on the news, we let it fuel us. Every time something bad is happening, we say, Oh, that’s motivation,” Spanberger said this summer.
This isn’t hard to understand, but it’s not like Kim Taylor is being honest in trying to make “let your rage fuel you” into being a call from Spanberger to “far left lunatics” to threaten to kill MAGAs.
Let’s be honest here: Abigail Spanberger is about as milquetoast a Democrat as she can be.
One of her bragging points is that she was among the most bipartisan members of Congress during her time in DC; and when you consider what it means to be “bipartisan” in the current era of good vs. evil being predominant on both sides, you’ve got to try extra hard to find common ground.
“Abigail has a long record of working across party lines to get things done, and she will continue to bring people together as Virginia’s next governor,” her campaign said in a statement on the “rage” matter.
Personally, I want to see more of her “rage” against the Trump machine than I’m seeing.
There’s no “working across party lines” to find common ground on Trump sending troops to blue cities, using masked federal agents to disappear brown-skinned people, withholding education funds because school districts teach about slavery or evolution.
I think we need less “bringing people together” and more “bringing some people to some sense of reason,” but that may be just me.
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Chris Graham
