#wfld

Parker Molloy at The Present Age:

I used to live in Rogers Park, here in Chicago. I used to walk along the lakefront by Loyola University. I’ve walked out on that pier at Tobey Prinz Beach, the one where Sheridan Gorman was recently killed. Gorman was 18 years old, a freshman at Loyola from Westchester County, New York. On March 19, she was out with a group of friends near the beach around 1:30 in the morning. They’d gone to catch a glimpse of the northern lights. A masked man emerged and fired at them. Gorman was hit and died at the scene. It was the first homicide in the city’s 49th Ward all year. This isn’t an area people think of as dangerous. Rogers Park is a dense, walkable, genuinely diverse neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago. The lakefront there is full of joggers, dog walkers, students. Gorman’s murder was shocking because of how normal her evening was, and how safe the area generally feels. I know this because I lived there. I know this because I walked those same blocks.

Shortly after the shooting, 49th Ward Alderwoman Maria Hadden did an interview with Fox 32 Chicago. The anchor asked whether this was a targeted incident, whether residents should be worried for their safety. Hadden, relaying what police had told her, said it appeared to be random. She used the phrase “wrong place, wrong time.” The rest of the interview was grief, community resources, and support for a shaken neighborhood.

Within days, Hadden’s comments had been ripped from that interview, stripped of the question she was answering, repackaged by right-wing influencer accounts with words she never actually said placed inside quotation marks, and blasted across conservative media. Fox News ran multiple national articles. Megyn Kelly covered it for days. House Republicans held a press conference on Capitol Hill with photos of Gorman on display. Trump invoked the case in remarks about ending sanctuary cities. The narrative that took hold was that a progressive Chicago alderwoman had blamed a murdered teenager for her own death. Hadden had to close her ward office over safety concerns.

The phrase “wrong place, wrong time” is one of the most common expressions in the English language for describing random violence. Police departments use it. Families of victims use it. Local news stations across the country have used it in headlines. In fact, one of Gorman’s own friends, someone who was standing on that pier when the shooting happened, independently told the Chicago Sun-Times the exact same thing: “It seemed like he was there for a reason, and we were just [in the] wrong place, wrong time.” Nobody accused that friend of victim-blaming. Nobody built a news cycle around it. Everybody knows what “wrong place, wrong time” means. The people who turned it into a scandal know what it means, too. They just pretended not to. This is a thing the right does. It’s a formula I’ve been tracking for years, one I wrote about repeatedly when I was at Media Matters for America: take something a Democrat said, detach it from context, assign it the most absurd possible meaning, and then attack the meaning you invented. It works because it’s simple, because it’s fast, and because the people doing it understand that the correction never catches up to the lie.

[...] But the Hadden case goes further than any of those. “Wrong place, wrong time” isn’t even a figure of speech that requires charitable interpretation. “We kick them” is a metaphor. “Physical revolution” is a hypothetical. “Some people did something” is a deliberate understatement being used to make a rhetorical point. You can see, at least, how a bad-faith actor could grab any of those and run. But “wrong place, wrong time”? It’s not figurative. It’s not rhetorical. It’s just what people say when someone gets hurt by random violence. CNN ran an entire analysis piece in 2023 built around the phrase. It’s in police reports. It’s in obituaries. There’s nothing to misunderstand. You have to choose to misunderstand it.

[...] I’m not arguing that Hadden’s interview was flawless. Saying the students may have “startled” the gunman was clumsy, even in the context of relaying preliminary information from police. It put a piece of the causal chain on the victims’ actions, and I can see why that stung. But the gap between “clumsy phrasing in a live interview hours after a murder, before police had identified a suspect” and “Democrat blames murdered teenager for her own death” is vast. The entire right-wing campaign required collapsing that gap, and they did it by cutting a question, fabricating a quote, and pretending not to understand a phrase that every adult in America has heard a thousand times.