Texas Governor Greg Abbott is embracing Fascism
The Texas Governor promised to pardon Daniel Perry, who killed a BLM protester - a further step towards open, state-sanctioned violence against "the left"
Army sergeant Daniel Perry was found guilty by a jury of his peers of killing Garrett Foster, a BLM protester, at a BLM rally in 2020. Perry hat shot and killed Perry, an Air Force veteran, who was legally carrying an assault rifle and pushing his fiancée’s wheelchair. Perry had Perry deliberately driven his car into the protest, and tweeted earlier that he “might have to kill a few people on my way to work.”
According to court filings, Foster had motioned with the gun for Perry to roll down the window of the car he was driving - Perry did roll down the window, and proceeded to shoot Foster four times before driving away. He told police later that Foster hadn’t aimed his rifle at him but that he had shot him anyways: “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me,” he said.
Similarly to the Rittenhouse case, Perry’s defenders - and he himself - are claiming that he acted in self defense because he feared for his life. Texas, like 28 other states, has a “stand your ground law” on the books - meaning there is indeed no duty to retreat from an attacker, or a perceived attacker, like in other states, before deploying deadly force against them. However, the use of deadly violence is not allowed if the person “defending” themselves, “provoked the use of deadly force that they are responding to.”
TIME quotes law professor Jennifer E. Laurin, who sums up the legal situation in Texas and the jury decision to convict Perry of murder like this:
“The state’s contention was that he deliberately drove into the protesters the victim was part of because he had a desire to essentially make trouble and use force against that group. While it is true that Texas has a strong stand your ground law, there are provisions of Texas law on self defense that were at issue in this trial that provide a plausible legal basis for understanding why the jury rejected the assertion of self defense here.”
From a legal standpoint, the guilty verdict the jury handed out was not controversial. Enter Texas Governor Greg Abbott. After the verdict, he took to Twitter to announce that he was working on securing a pardon for the murderer:
Mind you, Perry hasn’t even been sentenced - but Abbott has already signaled to him and every other right-winger with an itchy trigger-finger, that if you shoot a BLM protester in Texas, he will pardon you - even if you’ve been found guilty by a jury. This is, of course, not the first time, that prominent GOP figures have expressed their support for right-wingers who kill their political enemies: Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted by an overwhelmingly White jury, and George Kelly, an Arizona rancher charged with murdering illegal immigrant Gabriel Cuen-Buitimea in January of 2023, his trial is set to start in September. Kelly, like so many before him, has garnered the support of right-wingers who claim the US is fighting back an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants.
This would already be horrible enough. But there is more: Evidence has been made public that Perry, the man Governor Abbott has promised to pardon, had fantasized to friends about killing leftist protesters at BLM rallies before, along with a barrage of racist, White Supremacist talking points and memes.
He texted a friend “To bad we can’t get paid for hunting Muslims in Europe, posted an image that read “IT’S OK TO BE WHITE”, a meme about running people over with a car, a Facebook message that read “I am imagining standing on a roof top with a megaphone and a maga hat saying looters will be shot leave the area immediately and then count down to zero or when they start breaking down the front door just opening up like it is open season”. Perry sent one message to a friend which said: "I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.” In a Facebook comment, he wrote: “This is Texas I wonder why no looters have been shot yet.”
And there is more:
On May 31, 2020, he told a person on Facebook messenger: "I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex.” Perry told that person, “no protesters go near me or my car” and the friend replied, “can you catch me a negro daddy” and he replied “that is what I am hoping,” the filing said.
On June 1, 2020, Perry shared a Facebook status that said: “It is official I am a racist because I do not agree with people acting like animals at the zoo. I was on the side of the protestors until they started with the looting and the violence.”
On multiple occasions in 2020 he compared the Black Lives Matter movement to "zoo full of monkeys flinging their s---."
It’ no coincidence that Perry mentions running protesters over with his cars so often. Killing protesters with a car has been on the mind of right-wing extremists for a while - and they have already put these thoughts into action. A Neo-Nazi killed protester Heather Heyer with his car, she was protesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. But the thought of using cars predates even this murder - it was adopted by right-wing extremists straight from the ISIS playbook. Vehicular attacks on protesters have accelerated in the last couple of years:
On July 10, 2016—the same day a South Carolina fire captain threatened to run over BLM protesters who had shut down Interstate 126—an SUV driver in southern Illinois plowed through a group of BLM protesters after yelling “All lives matter, not blacks, all lives.” Two days earlier, a driver had accelerated into a crowd of protesters outside the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. In January 2015, a Minneapolis driver lurched into a Ferguson solidarity rally and ran over a 16-year-old girl.
“Run them over” has become a popular anti-BLM slogan on the Right - given, seemingly, legitimacy by so called “anti riot” laws, passed by GOP legislatures all over the country, which actually target protesters and protect drivers who hit them with their vehicles. It is a deliberate push to criminalize protesting, to install fear in those who are thinking about taking to the streets in the face of vehicular attacks.
In 2021, The New York Times noted in June:
G.O.P. lawmakers in 34 states have introduced 81 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session — more than twice as many proposals as in any other year, according to Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law,which tracks legislation limiting the right to protest.
Violence is at the heart of White Christian Nationalism. And no, it’s not surprising that the GOP, the self-described party of “law and order” is legalizing attacks on protesters, or that Greg Abbott wants to pardon a murderer, because he killed a protester (after announcing it to his friends) from his car - because “law and order” never applies to their own, only to those perceived as the other.
As Sam Perry and Phil Gorski write, the trinity of White Christian Nationalism is freedom, order, and violence. Freedom for the “real Americans”, order - “our” social order and “our” laws for everyone else, and violence as the god-sanctioned tool to bring all those in line who dare to resist or even disagree.
Abbott’s actions - he has not taken back his promise to pardon the murderer since his social media posts and texts have become public - is a step further in the radicalization of the Republican Party. Abbott is not a random Governor - he is someone with the ambition to run for President. And this is what the base wants. He is openly showing the GOP’s further descend into fascism: political, deadly violence of right-wingers on the streets against their perceived political enemies, supported and sanctioned by the state. Dark days are ahead.