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WaPo: Mississippi Is Always Burning

I swear, the Washington Post has lots its damn mind over this Mississippi murder of an openly gay black politician. The other day the Post hosted a chat intended to explore the role Christianity played in the man’s killing, even though there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it played any role at all. Leading […]

I swear, the Washington Post has lots its damn mind over this Mississippi murder of an openly gay black politician. The other day the Post hosted a chat intended to explore the role Christianity played in the man’s killing, even though there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it played any role at all. Leading the Post’s website tonight is a story headlined:

IN MISSISSIPPI, DEATH OF POLITICIAN MARCO MCMILLIAN STIRS OLD CIVIL-RIGHTS FEARS

Really? Does it? Because the man arrested on charges of killing McMillian is black, and McMillian’s friends claim the dead man and the alleged killer were lovers. The Post writes:

A week and a half after McMillian’s body was found in the mud on an isolated stretch of levee outside Clarksdale, his death remains a mystery. It has roiled old suspicions and fears from Mississippi’s dark history of racial brutality, although both McMillian and the man charged with his murder are African American. McMillian was also gay, adding fire to demands by civil rights groups for the killing to be investigated as a hate crime. The FBI said this week that it is “monitoring” the investigation.

What “old suspicions and fears”? There is nothing in this story  to suggest that black people in Mississippi are suffering “old suspicions and fears from Mississippi’s dark history of racial brutality.” Seriously, read it: there’s nothing there. Except this:

In the wait for answers, the rest of the country tweets and speculates, posting grainy video of Nina Simone singing “Mississippi Goddam”:

Alabama’s gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.

Ah, see! “The rest of the country” just knows that the Klan must have killed Marco McMillian — even though the reporter in this very story quotes two anonymous official sources saying that the accused killer confessed, and showed law enforcement where to find the body. And even though there isn’t a single quote in that story claiming that this killing is related to white supremacy.

The Washington Post is still desperate to make this a story about either right-wing Christians killing a gay man, or troglodytic racist whites murdering a black man. Wanting it to be true does not make it true, Washington Post. This isn’t journalism. It’s a smear campaign against Mississippi and against Christians in that state.

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