Conservative media outlets could hardly contain their joy on Tuesday after President Obama used the term “thugs,” which is often seen as racially loaded, to describe the recent violence that broke out during protests in Baltimore.
Obama’s comments, made during a news conference earlier in the day, addressed protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained fatal injuries while in police custody, as well as violence that followed.
“My understanding is you’ve got some of the same organizers now going back into these communities to try to clean up in the aftermath of a handful of protestors — a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place,” Obama said during the joint White House news conference with Japan’s prime minister.
The Fox News show “Fox & Friends” was one of the first to seize on the quote.
BREAKING: President makes statement on #BaltimoreRiots, calls rioters “criminals and thugs”
https://t.co/WSq5WjvWmI
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) April 28, 2015
However, others were quick to follow suit. The conservative website Twitchy aggregated tweets about Obama’s use of the word in a post that was gleefully headlined: “‘DOG WHISTLE TOOT TOOT TOOT’! Obama calls #FreddieGray rioters ‘thugs.'”
David Burge of the Iowahawk blog used Obama’s comments in a tweet to “The Roots” frontman Questlove who had earlier posted that the word “thugs” was code for the N-word.
.@questlove hey, could you decode this for me? Thanks in advance.
https://t.co/NqkeBFoRyH
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 28, 2015
The Daily Caller also published an article about Obama’s word choice and Vince Coglianese, the executive editor of the Daily Caller, tweeted a screen shot of the article alongside an earlier tweet from activist and professor Marc Lamont Hill in which Hill denounced the use of the word.
Oops. pic.twitter.com/Dj4mHMUom8
— Vince Coglianese (@TheDCVince) April 28, 2015
Breitbart also couldn’t resist joining the fray with an article about Obama’s words that featured this headline: “PRESIDENT OBAMA: BALTIMORE ‘THUGS’ NEED TO BE ‘TREATED LIKE CRIMINALS.'”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…
In other news, movement conservatives are ecstatic when Obama uses words with 5 letters or less and fewer than two syllables.
The right wing stupidity is truly ceaseless. It’s not the use of the term thug or thugs in general. It’s when you use it repeatedly to describe everything from an Ivy league educated football player raising his voice, to an unarmed teenager murdered by a thuggish neighborhood watchman, to the president of the USA, to violent rioters, and when it’s used exclusively to describe black men whose behavior or mere words you dislike.
They just don’t get that Obama knows WHEN to use the word. In this case, the rioters are indeed thugs. But if a kid is wearing a hoodie or listening to rap music, he is not a thug.
I’m not sure how that got tied to race anyway. The Mob has thugs. They might wear nice suits, but they are still thugs.
There’s something very wrong with today’s conservative movement when the President using the word “thug” to describe actual thugs gives them an orgasm …