Feb. 22, 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, two Indian immigrants enjoying an after-work whiskey at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kan., were shot—one dead—by Adam W. Purinton, a white man who hurled ethnic slurs at them and suggested they did not belong in the United States.
Purinton, who witnesses said shouted, “Get out of my country!” before he opened fire, has been charged with murder.
Friday, Feb. 24, 2017, Donald Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference and to the glee of the band of mostly white Republicans, reiterated that “immigration officers are finding gang members, drug dealers and criminal aliens and throwing them the hell out.”
The CPAC audience cheered in excitement. Only hours before that speech, Trump suggested ridding the country of “illegal immigrants” would be a “military operation.”
Friday, Trump in his CPAC speech, did not spare a thought for Kuchibhotla, the 32-year-old Garmin IT engineer shot dead by a man using inflammable divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric that Trump himself has used throughout his campaign.
Instead, when asked about the shooting, White House representative Sean Spicer had the audacity to say it was too early to guess if the incident was racially motivated. And he quickly insisted it would be absurd to link Trump’s stance on immigrants to the attack.
Really? What is “absurd” is Spicer’s comments.
The Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group, is right to state that “the murder of Kuchibhotla is the first reported bias-motivated fatality in the U.S. after the bitter presidential election.”
They are also right to call upon the U.S. Department of Justice and local law enforcement to investigate this murder as a hate crime, stating that “anything less will be an injustice to the victims and their families.”
And Democratic strategist Shekar Narasimhan is right to state, “This president now has blood on his hands.”
Let’s for one moment imagine that it was the Indian immigrants who had opened fire at the bar, killing Purinton and injuring two other white men. Immediately, Trump would be tweeting and hosting a national news conference demonizing them as terrorists and reiterating the need to rid the country of the “bad hombres” and all immigrants.
Trump would have undoubtedly used his CPAC speech to again sell his alternative facts on the high percentage of immigrants committing crime in the U.S. and killing “innocent Americans,” while pushing his clear anti-immigrant, anti-foreign agenda.
Instead, because it was a white man who shot two immigrants, Trump has chosen to ignore it, and his merry pack of conservatives is all right with that.
The hypocrisy of the right knows no limits. And it is why the Republican Party will go down in history as the most racist, the most anti-immigrant and the most hypocritical band this country has ever seen.
The writer is CMO at Hard Beat Communications, Inc., which owns the brands NewsAmericasNow, CaribPRWire and InvestCaribbeanNow.