In 1970, the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of peaceful, unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine more. A Gallup poll conducted a week after the shooting found that 58% of Americans blamed the students for the massacre, with only 11% blaming the guardsmen. Many students who were present at the massacre were shunned by their own families, some were even disowned, and some were told that even more students should have been killed to teach them a lesson.

The students, for their part, couldn’t even comprehend what was happening at first. Many of them thought the soldiers’ weapons were loaded with blanks, that they were just trying to intimidate them. After the massacre, many of the students wanted to reassemble and continue peacefully demonstrating, in defiance of the guard. One of the professors convinced them to disperse, by shouting at them that all of them would be killed.

How was it possible for the public to see it that way? Because of how the media spun it. Even before the massacre, they were saying that the protests were full of “outside agitators” and claiming that they had been doing things like lacing the water supply with LSD. Of course, it eventually “came out” that these claims were complete bullshit based on nothing. So, once the moment had passed, they quietly printed retractions.

All that shit still happens today. It happens every single time a cop murders someone, whether it’s Renee Good or George Floyd. The right wingers immediately start digging for any possible way to spin it and if they can’t then they simply lie, and if the lie falls apart it doesn’t matter, by that point people will have forgotten and moved on.

Yes they will kill you. They’ll put people down like dogs and worry about how to justify it later. People want to believe the world is just, and that often means blaming the victim. They’ll do it and they’ll get away with it too.

Buy a gun.