Politicizing tragic deaths: The Right versus the Left

In July 2015, a 32-year-old woman named Kate Steinle was killed in San Francisco’s Embarcadero district when a bullet was discharged from a handgun, struck the pavement some distance from where she was standing, ricocheted off the ground and traveled 78 feet before striking her in the back.

The gun was in the hand of Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant who claimed that the gun fired accidentally after he picked it up – wrapped in cloth – from under a bench where he was sitting.

In 2017, after five days of deliberations, Zarate was acquitted by a jury of all murder and manslaughter charges but was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

In that same year, Heather Heyer, also 32, was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by an alleged white supremacist neo-Nazi while peacefully protesting against a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The 20-year-old driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., was charged with hit and run first-degree murder and multiple counts of federal hate crimes after witnesses say he intentionally drove his Dodge Challenger at high speed into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters, killing Heyer and injuring 28 other people.

He pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a November trial.

Both deaths are tragic, and I will never attempt to diminish them in any way, because their families have lost loved ones under sudden and shocking circumstances and are left to suffer pain that will never go away. In that regard, both deaths are equally sad while very much the same. What’s different is the way they have been – and still are being – treated by the hard right and the mainstream media.

You see, Kate Steinle is back in the news this week because another woman was murdered in Iowa by another Mexican immigrant. Cristhian Rivera, 24, was arrested for killing University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, who had been missing for several weeks. 

Steinle’s death – and now Tibbetts’s – have become rallying cries from faux-president Donald Trump and his supporters in their demand for more border security, changes to our immigration practices, a crackdown on immigrants seeking legal asylum, the separation of children from their immigrant parents and Trump’s ridiculous demand for a multi-billion-dollar wall along our southern border.

Trump sees immigration as his strongest issue heading into the November mid-term election, and any death involving an undocumented immigrant translates into votes from his loyal base.

As if to put an exclamation point on the preceding paragraphs, I flipped on Fox News last night out of curiosity, just to see what Sean Hannity was moaning about in the wake of several courtroom scandals involving Trump, and the first two words I heard were “Kate Steinle.”

More than three years after her death, the Right Wing politicians and their media propagandists continue to weaponize Steinle’s name to mock and degrade their political opponents in the same way they still froth at the mouth over Hillary Clinton’s emails. With no solid platform to campaign on, and a president linked to a basket full of deplorable activities, they use emotional issues like the accidental death of a pretty young white woman and the shooter’s immigration status to feed red meat to Republican voters.

Meanwhile, Heather Heyer was killed by a “legal” American citizen who intended to cause harm to innocent people with opposing political beliefs, but no one is talking about her. Why is that, do you suppose?

Is it because the man who killed her is white and didn’t come from Mexico, or because he was one of those “very fine people” described by Trump who showed up to carry torches and chant racist and anti-Semitic slogans at the Charlottesville rally? You make the call.

And now we have Mollie Tibbetts, whose alleged killer is another one of those damned Mexican criminals who are streaming across our border to rape, pillage, plunder and murder our women, according to the faux-president of the United States. The suspect’s lawyer says he is working in this country legally, but those who want to exploit Tibbetts’s death are having none of that.

I guess the truth will come out eventually…or at least some version of the truth.

At any rate, you can expect to hear a lot more about Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts as we roll along toward the November election, even though Steinle's death was an accident and the Tibbetts family has asked the media not to use her death for political gain. That won’t stop the Hannitys and the Carlsons and the Ingrahams and the Trumps of the world from throwing those names around like campaign slogans, nor will it stop Trumpaloons from chanting “Build the Wall” at upcoming pep rallies in red states around the country.

Do not expect to hear the name Heather Heyer mentioned in those conversations, nor the names of any of the dozens of people of color who have been gunned down by white people for the crime of BWB – breathing while black. The fact that we don’t even know most of their names should tell us all something, and it’s not something good. It makes me want to take a symbolic knee. 

So since no one else will do it, I will say Heather’s name here in this space: Heather Heyer. Heather Heyer. Heather Heyer. I say it not to weaponize her name to sell my political agenda, but just because I refuse to forget it, and because you probably won’t hear it anywhere else...and because Heather deserves better than that.