This has gotten extremely ugly

Texas Governor Greg Abbot just gave an unconditional pardon to a cold blooded murderer, after he had served only one year of a 25 year sentence. Jonathan Last of The Bulwark provides the facts of the case:

 

On July 25, 2020 Garrett Foster—a retired Air Force veteran—was attending a protest in Austin. Foster was open-carrying a rifle, as is legal under Texas law. Daniel Perry was driving a car when he encountered this protest. He sped through a red light and accelerated his car into a group of protesters, one of whom was Whitney Mitchell. Mitchell—who was Foster’s fiancé—was in a wheel-chair. (She is a quadruple amputee.)

Foster approached Perry’s vehicle in an attempt to get him to stop ramming pedestrians. His firearm was in a safe position: Safety on, no round in the chamber, and pointed at the ground. Perry shot Foster five times. Foster died.The case had everything Republicans love: A peaceful protest with people exercising their First Amendment rights. A veteran lawfully exercising his Second Amendment right. And before the murder the killer had been searching the internet for young girls and sending sexually explicit texts to a minor.

The only problem was the protest itself: It was a Black Lives Matter protest. And so Daniel Perry—a groomer who was convicted of murder by a jury of his peers—became a conservative cause célèbre.

And yes, Perry is a racist. He had frequently talked about killing Black people and protesters. He talked about killing protesters that very day. He sought out the protest, ran his car into it, and murdered the first person he had a chance to kill. Read more of Last's account in case you think there is anything more to this, or any possible claim of self-defense or justifiability. The prosecution proved that this was pre-meditaded, absolutely indefensible murder.

What has happened is that Greg Abbot has declared that citizens of Texas have the absolute right to murder peaceful protesters, if they happen to be protesting the murder of Black people. BTW Foster was not Black, but remember that the Ku Klux Klan was particularly prone to killing white people who supported Black civil rights. It's the same old pattern. The Klan acted with impunity in the Jim Crow era, and now Greg Abbot has said that they can again. This is where we are headed. This is the platform of the Republican Party.