What If Donald Trump Was Running For President As A Black Panther?

Imagine Donald Trump as a black man, not a white man. Imagine Donald Trump running for president as a Black Panther, not as a Republican. Imagine that this imaginary Donald Trump spouted the same rhetoric as the real Donald Trump. Now imagine Donald Trump as dead, because if he were a black man running for president as a Black Panther he would be dead by now, especially if he carried a gun.

Killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark:

In Chicago, on December 4, 1969, two Panthers were killed when the Chicago Police raided the home of Panther leader Fred Hampton. The raid had been orchestrated by the police in conjunction with the FBI. Hampton was shot and killed, as was Panther guard Mark Clark. A federal investigation reported that only one shot was fired by the Panthers, and police fired at least 80 shots. Hampton was subsequently shot twice in the head at point blank range while unconscious. He was 21 years old and unarmed at the time of his death. Coroner reports show that Hampton was drugged with a powerful barbiturate that night and all indicators point toward FBI infiltrator William O'Neal as the source of the drugging. Former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen asserts that the Bureau was guilty of a "plot to murder" the Panthers. Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, his assistant and eight Chicago police officers were indicted by a federal grand jury over the raid, but the charges were later dismissed. In 1979 civil action, Hampton's family won $1.85 million from the city of Chicago in a wrongful death settlement.

Trump's closing SC argument: kill 'em all:

I have been writing Trump's torture and summary execution endorsements constantly since he first said it last fall. He is crazed on the subject. The mainstream press noted it in passing but didn't seem to see it as anything unusual.

They are taking note of it more lately since he is getting increasingly bloodthirsty and outrageous when he discusses it. But it's nothing new. This is about his last rally in South Carolina:

Trump repeated – favorably – an apparent myth about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerilla war against the occupying United States.

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”

The story appears to be a hoax spread via e-mail forwards, according to rumor tracker Snopes.com, with no evidence it occurred.

The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

Trump was unimpressed with waterboarding, a banned interrogation tactic that he has pledged to bring back against suspected terrorists, and supplement with far worse forms of abuse.

“Is it torture or not? It’s so borderline,” he said. “It’s like minimal, minimal, minimal torture.”

In a previous speech, Trump called his opponent Senator Ted Cruz, whose father was tortured as a young man in Cuba, a “pu**y” for not sharing his zeal for the practice.

Trump went on to boast how fears of terrorism had boosted him politically, including in South Carolina where he leads a number of polls by double-digit margins.

“When Paris happened, everyone started saying, ‘We want Trump!’” he said. “The polls came in, 60 percent, 70 percent, 72 percent. This is 72 percent with 17 people running. Now we’re down to 6, we got rid of all these people. It’s so great. It’s so great.”
[...]
Trump’s speech was a hit with the audience, which cheered throughout.

Trump supporter Eleanor Crume, 72, told MSNBC afterwards that she agreed with Trump’s stance on waterboarding because terrorists should not be “pampered.”

“We need someone who can lead the country because people are scared to death,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time before terrorists come and start chopping Christian heads off in the United States.”

South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Henry McMaster, Trump’s most prominent endorser in the state, set the tone for the event before Trump came on.

“How many of you feel real safe right now?”

“Nooooooooo!” the audience droned in response.

“We’re gonna change that,” he replied.

Hate speech:

In law, hate speech is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence...

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states that "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law".

Scalia explicated the fighting words exception as follows: “The reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey”. Because the hate speech ordinance was not concerned with the mode of expression, but with the content of expression, it was a violation of the freedom of speech. Thus, the Supreme Court embraced the idea that hate speech is permissible unless it will lead to imminent hate violence.

Is Donald Trump guilty of inciting imminent hate violence?

Now imagine Barack Obama as a white man...