After being recorded last week apparently admitting that she had hurled a racist slur at a 5-year-old Black child in a park, a white woman in Minnesota is being handsomely rewarded after conservatives turned her into a cause célèbre.
The woman is just the latest person to receive a groundswell of financial support via the MAGA-friendly crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo after facing widespread backlash. A GiveSendGo page, which identifies her as Shiloh Hendrix, says she’s trying to raise $1 million to deal with what she calls “great turmoil” in her life following the incident. As of Monday afternoon, the page showed her as having raised more than $670,000.
According to an NBC News report, the incident in Rochester, Minnesota, appears to revolve around the woman’s claim that the 5-year-old “took my son’s stuff.” A man recording the woman asks whether she thinks the child deserved being called the N-word, and she replies: “If that’s what he’s going to act like.” The man, Sharmake Omar, told NBC News that the 5-year-old has autism spectrum disorder and that his parents are from Somalia.
On Monday, local police said they have forwarded the findings of their investigation to city attorneys for possible charges. (NBC News reported that attempts to reach the woman in the video and verify her name have been unsuccessful.)
And she’s just one of several people to garner sympathy — and ample donations — through GiveSendGo.
Meanwhile, a combination of bigoted conservative influencers and some coverage in right-wing media have helped portray the woman as a sympathetic figure. And she’s just one of several people to garner sympathy — and ample donations — through GiveSendGo. (Although the platform is known for its popularity among conservatives, it’s not exclusively used by them — other controversial figures not linked to the MAGA movement, such as Luigi Mangione, have had pages made on their behalf.)
I previously wrote about pro-insurrection lawyer John Eastman using the platform to raise money to help fight charges related to his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (Eastman has pleaded not guilty.) I’ve also written about Arizona rancher George Alan Kelly benefiting from GiveSendGo donations after he was accused in the killing of an undocumented immigrant. (Kelly denied any wrongdoing, and a mistrial was declared.) And Daniel Penny, a white man who was accused of killing Jordan Neely, a Black man, on a New York City subway train in 2023, also raked in GiveSendGo donations en route to his acquittal in the case. The idea of doling out money, particularly in an economy as unstable as ours, to support a woman accused of blatant racism may seem absurd to some — and I certainly won’t argue against that framing — but the fact that conservatives are rallying around her speaks to the victimhood mindset that’s gripping today’s Republican Party.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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