Jake Tapper's DMs, Today: We Had No Idea Marc Lamont Hill Was a Racist
Marc Lamont Hill, 2013: Watching Black Serial Killer Chris Dorner Murder White People "Exciting," Like "Django Unchained"

We'll have to wait for Dan McLaughlin to tweet Jake Tapper's response to this (without attributing it to Tapper).

Remember Chris Dorner? He want on a spree killing. His victims were cops.

And white.

Why did I mention white? Because Hill thought that made this "exciting."

CNN's until-today expert on racism Marc Lamont Hill thought watching his spree killing on TV was "exciting," like watching a black vengeance exploitation movie.

Now that the manhunt to catch accused murderer Christopher Dorner has ended, the ex-cop has become something of a martyr to thousands of supporters on social media.

Fueled by the action movie-style tactics he used in his war against the LAPD and claims of police abuse made in his manifesto, support for Dorner continues to grow. Just hours after he was apparently killed after an armed standoff in Big Bear, Calif., one of his biggest fan pages on Facebook posted, "The spirit of Chris #Dorner will live on forever in our hearts, as an eternal flame - symbolic of the will to stand up in an attempt to eradicate those who would seek to oppress us, by any means necessary, when no one else would."

A group of panelists on CNN tried to make sense of the phenomenon this afternoon.

"This has been an important conversation that we've had about police brutality, about police corruption, about state violence," said Huffington Post Live host and Columbia University professor Marc Lamont Hill. "They were even talking about making him the first domestic drone target. This is serious business here. I don't think it's been a waste of time at all. And as far as Dorner himself goes, he's been like a real life superhero to many people. Now don't get me wrong. What he did was awful, killing innocent people was bad, but when you read his manifesto, when you read the message that he left, he wasn't entirely crazy. He had a plan and a mission here. And many people aren't rooting for him to kill innocent people. They are rooting for somebody who was wronged to get a kind of revenge against the system. It's almost like watching Django Unchained in real life. It's kind of exciting."

Marc Lamont Hill is also a big supporter of the avowedly racist and antisemitic organization Nation of Islam.

He's generally supported cop-killers.

"So," Jake Tapper's DMs are telling me, "you can understand how CNN had no idea what it was getting with Marc Lamont Hill, and why Hill's racism and antisemitism should not reflect on the CNN Corporation at all, and especially not its musky, girthy afternoon anchorstud Jake Tapper."

As mentioned previously, CNN's only official statement on Hill's comments has been to promote Hill's own defense of himself and implicitly endorse that defense.

Asked and Answered:

It turns out: Yes, Sean, they will give Marc Lamont Hill lots of defensive cover.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:46 PM

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