Potential Democratic vice-presidential candidate Stacey Abrams ripped Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson a new one on Sunday for defending President Donald Trump’s decision to hold the GOP convention in Jacksonville on the anniversary of the KKK attacking black protesters with ax handles.

Trump recently canceled his Tulsa rally after nationwide criticism because the rally was to take place on Juneteenth, the day slavery ended, in a city where white racists massacred black residents and burned down their homes and businesses.

Needless to say, the choice of city and day had to have been intentional. So Jacksonville also represents a problem for Trump and Republicans as it demonstrates that they are letting their racist flags fly ahead of a crucial election as mass protests against racial injustice continue.

But Carson defended Trump during an interview on ABC and suggested that black people and their allies need to “grow up.”

“You know, we’ve reached a point in our society where we dissect everything and try to ascribe some nefarious notion to it,” Carson whined. “We really need to move away from that. We need to move away from being offended by everything, of going through history and looking at everything, you know, of renaming everything. It really gets to a point of being ridiculous after a while. And you know, we’re going to have to grow up as a society.”

Abrams responded during her own interview by noting that Trump has a pattern of picking days to make announcements and take actions to make them more meaningful or hurtful.

“I think that is a fairly infantile response,” Abrams said. “To say that words don’t have meanings, that dates don’t have meanings, that dates don’t have power. This is from the administration that on the 4th anniversary of the Pulse [nightclub] murders of the LGBTQ community stripped away health protections for that community.”

Indeed, Trump is set to accept the GOP nomination on August 27th, the exact day of the attack by the KKK in 1960.

“This is the same person who had to be convinced that having a rally that has traditionally attracted people that do not care about black lives, that they were going to have this rally in Tulsa at the site of a black massacre and it took a week of cajoling to make him move,” Abrams continued. “And so let’s be very clear, this isn’t about growing up. It’s about taking responsibility and having accountability for the actions that have been taken by this country and by people acting on behalf of this country. And we do have a day of reckoning, and that day of reckoning is going to continue until we actually make change.”

Here’s the video via YouTube:

Ben Carson needs to stop making excuses for the Racist-in-Chief and start calling him out. But that would require a spine.

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