Louisiana police officer Charlie Rispoli is out of a job for posting to Facebook his belief Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deserves to be assassinated. Officer Rispoli wrote the post after reading one of the countless fake news stories that are Facebook's stock-in-trade. The fake story, which originated on a parody but quickly took on a life of its own as a real story on Facebook, claimed that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought US military personnel were overpaid, which is false. Officer Rispoli shared the bogus story with the comment, "This vile idiot needs a round……and I don't mean the kind she used to serve," (referring to her previous job as a bartender). Another Louisiana officer, Angelo Variscom, liked Officer Rispoli's post so he was fired, too.
From Gizmodo:
Ocasio-Cortez was also singled out in a Facebook group comprised of current and former members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that was recently revealed by the news outlet ProPublica. One of the Facebook posts in the group showed a photoshopped image of President Trump participating in a violent sexual assault of Ocasio-Cortez. Last week, the congresswoman asked Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan about the posts in an opening hearing.
"Those posts are unacceptable," McAleenan said. "They are being investigated but I don't think that it's fair to apply them to the entire organization or that even the members of that group believed or supported those posts."
But the the image wasn't out of character for the group and it wasn't comprised of just a small minority of CBP. According to a report from the Intercept, the Facebook group was so normalized within DHS culture that Border Patrol chief Carla Provost was even a member.
What's in store for the fired cops? This New York Times article, titled "Cast-Out Police Officers Are Often Hired in Other Cities," is a good indicator.
