A CNN commentator and former Bernie Sanders spokeswoman had a unique take on Mollie Tibbetts’s murder, telling a Twitter audience Wednesday that the Iowa college student was killed not by an attacker, but by “toxic masculinity.”
Mollie Tibbetts was murdered b/c she told a man to leave her alone while she was jogging. Her murderer happens to be undocumented. This isn’t about border security. This is about toxic masculinity. Mollie Tibbetts lost her life b/c a man couldn’t take her saying no. Full stop.
— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) August 22, 2018
Sure, sure.
Since the police haven’t made the alleged killer’s motive public, it’s actually difficult to know exactly why Tibbetts was killed. Earlier on in the investigation, police suspected Mollie’s killer was someone “familiar” with her who might have become obsessed with Mollie after a chance encounter, but that was before the alleged murderer reportedly led the FBI straight to Mollie’s body, ending a state-wide manhunt.
Certainly the alleged killer seems to be undocumented, but he was no more motivated by his immigration status than he was by some deep-seeded desire to murder women who turn him down rooted in the Y chromosome. There are plenty of men who get turned down for dates and don’t end up dumping the bodies of the women who reject them at rural intersections.
That’s a tough sell to Symone, though.
Her murderer actually might not even be undocumented. Regardless it is problematic for people to characterize an entire community based off the actions of one person. The majority of mass shootings in America are carried out by white men. So are we going to round them all up?…
— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) August 22, 2018
Well, no. We’re not. Because we understand that “being white” doesn’t make them mass killers, just like “being male” doesn’t necessarily make one likely to murder teenaged girls . . . but Symone’s logic gets weirder.
That logic is asinine, archaic and flawed. I’d love if we could have a real conversation about how women’s lives are literally in danger because some men do not know how to check their egos. How many more women have to die before we can address this?…
— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) August 22, 2018
Symone appears to be saying that the notion of rounding up certain groups of people to punish a single bad apple is “asinine, archaic, and flawed,” but then goes on to suggest that there needs to be a way to “address” violence against women committed by toxic men. That seems at odds with her earlier statements, but the plan probably isn’t to round up all men, but to re-condition them to behave more like . . . women? Maybe?