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A suspected white supremacist in Michigan has pleaded guilty to separate federal hate crime charges for threatening to kill people who showed support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced in a press release on Tuesday that Kenneth Pilon “pleaded guilty in federal district court to willfully intimidating and attempting to intimidate citizens from engaging in lawful speech and protests in support of Black Lives Matter.”
That’s putting it mildly, as the devil is in the details. Pilon, 61 of Michigan, even went so far as to menace two Black people with a noose, a longstanding symbol of racist hatred that has its roots in slavery.
From the DOJ:
Pilon pleaded guilty to two hate crime charges. Specifically, he pleaded guilty to count 1 of the filed information, which charged him with violating the law by calling nine Starbucks stores in Michigan and telling the employees answering his calls to relay specifically racial threats to Starbucks employees wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts. Pilon threatened to kill Black people, using a racial slur to refer to his intended victims.
Pilon also pleaded guilty to count 4 of the filed information, which charged him with violating the law by placing a noose inside a vehicle owned by R.S. and D.S. Attached to the noose was a handwritten note, reading: “An accessory to be worn with your ‘BLM’ t-shirt. Happy protesting!”
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division suggested that Pilon pulled from the “Jim Crow” playbook of racist intimidation tactics.
“The defendant levied racially-motivated death threats against multiple Black people wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts,” Clarke said in a statement. “The defendant also used a noose, a vile symbol of hatred and violence that harkens back to the Jim Crow era, to convey a threat of racial violence. Racially-driven threats of violence simply have no place in our society today, and the Department of Justice will continue to prosecute any individual who engages in this type of threatening conduct.”
Pilon is scheduled to be sentenced in March.
The news about Pilon came one day after the DOJ released information regarding its plans to fight the rise of hate crimes in America.
The Justice Department also gave a detailed list of things done in the past two years to combat a rise in hate crimes and hate incidents in the United States.
One of these actions was aggressively investigating and prosecuting hate crimes. The department said, since January 2021, it charged more than 60 defendants in over 55 different cases and secured more than 55 convictions of defendants.
Pilon is surely included in that equation.
This is America.
SEE ALSO:
Cross-Burning White Supremacist Pleads Guilty To Federal Hate Crime
White Man Who Threatened To Kill Black People In 4 States Pleads Guilty To Hate Crime
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