. Free on bond, or perhaps his own recognisance.
I considered ironically posting this item in the 'Alt-Right' thread. That strain of ugly authoritarian bigotry is becoming more dominant on the right in the US--not so much 'alt' these days. This thread is more appropriate anyway. Spew hatred, rake in the dough. Hey, the president feels the same way.
On Friday, in a suburb of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Somali American couple was out shopping at an indoor mall when they decided to stop by Cinnabon. It’s not completely clear how the interaction with the Cinnabon employee first became heated, but the TikTok user who uploaded the video said her cousin, the female customer in the video, had asked for more caramel on her cinnamon roll. The worker, a white woman, responded by insulting the woman’s hijab, according to the TikTok user, saying the customer could see her “squeezing [the caramel] through that witchcraft bandana.”
The exchange that followed, as captured on video, turned uglier once the employee, Crystal Wilsey, noticed she was being filmed: “I am racist, and you are a n—r,” Wilsey says, while leaning across the counter. “I am racist, and I’ll say that to the whole entire world. Don’t be disrespectful.” Wilsey then extended her middle fingers to the customers, told them to “suck it,” and called the female customer ugly. “You know damn well you’re fucking evil fucks,” she said. Video of the incident went viral, and Cinnabon has since fired Wilsey.
In a normal world (or even in the world of a couple years ago), that would be the end of the story, or at least pretty close to it. Wilsey’s story is not particularly remarkable: We know there are proudly racist individuals living in the U.S. She’s also not a powerful figure—she certainly can’t set public policy—meaning her firing from a Wisconsin Cinnabon would hardly be newsworthy. A different video of the incident, later published by TMZ, showed Wilsey making irrational claims, accusing the customer of having come up to her earlier in a white-face disguise.
There also wouldn’t be much to debate: There was recently a near-universal consensus that racial slurs were to be met with condemnation. People could still deploy all sorts of dog-whistles to hint at their views, but slurs—and certainly the self-proclaimed racism—were relegated to the fringes of the discourse.
But these are not normal times, and that near-consensus is thoroughly broken: On GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform typically used for more conservative causes, “Stand with Crystal” has raised more than $113,000 in donations. A fundraiser for the Somali American couple’s legal fees, in contrast, has raised less than $5,000.
And on social media, large accounts have rallied behind Wilsey, portraying her either as a hero standing up for white Americans or as a victim of Black aggression. “Crystal, a hardworking White mom, was doing her job at @Cinnabon when a Somali couple decided to make her shift horrible with intimidation,” read one typical X post with more than 2 million views.
...
[Description of another bigot (Hendrix) yelling the same slur at a child on video. Hendrix has got $800,000 out of it so far.]
...
Both the Hendrix and the Wilsey incidents targeted Somali Americans. The latter occurred just a few days after President Trump made some of the most baldly racist comments recorded by a U.S. president, directed at Somali immigrants.
On Dec. 2, during a Cabinet meeting, Trump referenced a fraud investigation involving some Somali Americans to disparage the entire immigrant population. “They contribute nothing,” he said. “We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” He also accused Somali Americans of being lazy. “These are people that do nothing but complain,” he said. “When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country.” He also said Somalia “stinks.”
“Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars,” he said. “And they contribute nothing.”
