When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled. Whenever someone would tear down the flag, owner Laura Carleton would raise another one.
But after someone complained about the flag on Friday, the encounter turned deadly.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Carleton, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Community members have since rallied around Carleton’s store, placing Pride flags, flowers, candles and photos of Carleton in front of it. Matthew Clevenger of Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ said Carleton was a strong ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“She was a fierce protector of everybody being who they wanted to be,” Clevenger told The Washington Post.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website. After graduating from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Carleton worked at a retail store before joining Kenneth Cole in the 1980s. Carleton worked for the fashion company for more than 15 years as an executive.
In 2013, Carleton founded her clothing store, Mag.pi, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Calif. She added a second store in Cedar Glen in 2021. While she built her career, Carleton married her husband and took pride in their blended family of nine children, her store’s website says.
Carleton was one of the largest donors to Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ and attended the organization’s Pride boat parade in June, Clevenger said. A section of Mag.pi was dedicated to rainbow-colored products, and she displayed rainbow candles by the cash register, he said.
Carleton helped create a culture in which the LGBTQ+ community felt accepted, Clevenger said. But some community members were still resistant, he added, and took down Mag.pi’s Pride flag multiple times.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department. He was holding a handgun when deputies found him on a nearby road, where he later died, officials said.
What are we supposed to do? Seriously.
Congress is a logjam in both chambers.
The military would split if you tried to force red states to stop being shitty.
Most of our top weapons are in those red states.
So what’s the solution that doesn’t lead to half the country dead?
Plus, on the world stage, a “United” United States protects countries like Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, etc. What happens when we’re gone? China becomes dominant and just starts enslaving people in the lands it takes? The Saudis take over parts of the world and bring their shittiness with them? Russia fucks up more of Eastern Europe?
So what’s the answer here to some really complex questions?
The answer is not to lose the 2024 elections and even exceed what we did before. That starts at the local leveling and volunteering with voters rights groups and getting the youth registered to vote. And we must do this the next election. And the next. Until we can close loop holes to prevent further coups by Republicans.
I am as anti-republican as I can possibly be, but even so I realized that the current MO of the democratic party is not to overthrow the Republicans or stop them from doing horrible shit because they're profiting immensely from it.
They get so much grassroots support because they are not the bad guys that they don't even have to try to be the good guys anymore.
With that being said, they have actually done some good and I'm not against the democrats. I'm just not satisfied with their commitment to the cause and I really wish they would step it up, and any Democratic candidate that is closer to my ideal will get my vote over any establishment candidate.
Unfortunately it's going to take time now to get more desirable candidates. Trump did so much damage to the country that we'll be undoing it a while.
We need to be the change we want to see. Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez weren't recruited by the Democratic Party. They ran and won as Democrats often much to the chagrin of the National Party. They won't make it easy. And they will absolutely try to recruit people to run against candidates that don't play ball with them. But they can still lose no matter how hard they try.
This is your answer. The change we want isn't going to happen at the federal level only. The DNC has had a really terrible leader up until recently, but even so, they don't have a good pulse on the left-electorate. They can't seem to figure out that the country isn't center anymore.
The reason we didn't have a "red tsunami" at the midterms, which going on historical trends should have happened, is because of the extremely hard work of grassroots orgs that mobilized the voters on the left (typically low-turnout voting bloc) in local, state, and federal races. And they did all that on a shoestring budget, with little to no help from the DNC.
The change is going to have to be from the local level up. That's how the GOP got to their "minority rule" status, and it's how we'll win back true democracy.
Contrary to what people believe, the US military has a fairly good cross sectional representation of the American populace. It is most certainly not right wing. I've known more than a few active duty military members and actually most were moderate to liberal on the political spectrum. And fairly intelligent.
Yeah, it’s a good cross section, but that still means there are a LOT of neo-Confederates in the military. A new civil war would be devastating.
So like, what happens when one side gets a hold of nukes?
That’s what I’m worried about and why I reject these calls from super-leftists for a new civil war. Do you want NYC, LA, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Portland nuked? Because that’s what happens when the hillbillies in Iowa and the Dakotas get their hands on the nukes that are stored there.
We’ve built the most powerful military the world has ever seen, along with the most powerful single weapon, and guys like the one I initially responded to just want to go ahead and shatter that with a civil war where the neo-Confederates WILL use that against Blue cities.
Why are you only rejecting the "super-leftists" and not the right wing who are carrying out evil acts and actually openly calling for civil war, and have been declaring we've been in a civil war for years?
Don't you dare use my words to try to serve some political agenda.
Man, reading comprehension is NOT your strong suit, is it?
I’m this thread, I was responding to another leftist calling for, as he put it, “R E V O L U T I O N”.
Of course I’m also against shitty neo-Confederates ALSO calling for a civil war, but you already knew that, didn’t you, you condescending little sealioning fuckhead? Instead, you need to turn this into yet more whatabiutism.
I don’t want a new civil war. It’s that easy. If one starts, I simply don’t see a way that it doesn’t turn devastating and nuclear. Calling for a revolution is dumb: our military will likely split, and then two sides of the same super powerful weaponry are fighting in my homeland. No thanks!
Judging from your post history, you're just lying. There's no evidence of you ever confronting the right with their behavior, only the left. Therefore the only conclusion is that you are biased. Judging from your responses in other threads, this is because you support the status quo and fear losing it. A status quo degenerating into fascism and genocide, of which you are enabling.
The left is not calling for civil war. They call for revolution which is fundamentally different. You're purposefully trying to lie to weasel out of admitting you are wrong. And you are very, very much in the wrong.
And you have the nerve to use my words to serve your agenda, which you still haven't apologized for by the way.
What are the steps to a revolution without a civil war?
And wow, you looked at all, what, 25 Lemmy posts I have? Wow. Genius fucking detective here.
I don’t support fascism, you stupid fuck, but because I ALSO don’t support just murdering all the Republicans in the country, somehow that means I’m for the status quo.
I have zero to apologize for. You’re a dumb fucking teenager who thinks that we should have a revolution that somehow doesn’t devolve into a civil war, as if you can just say some magic words and red states, which have been a problem for this country since its foundation with all of the shitty compromises that had to be made to even FORM the United States, are somehow going to say “Oh, shit, this kid on the internet is right! Let’s accept what the left wants now!”
We agree that American conservatives are shitty humans who SHOULDN’T have power, but one of us doesn’t want millions of people to die to take power from them.
If I could wave a magic wand and take all military assets out of Confederate states while also getting every non-fascist out and to the better part of the US, then expel those shithole states, I would. But there’s no magic. There’s no way forward without war until at least until the geriatrics in charge die of old age. Unfortunately, the right has also weaponized new media, so GenX and a lot of my fellow elder Millennials have fallen for their shit, but fortunately it’s far fucking fewer than the Boomers and the self-glossed Greatest Generation.
I’m not willing to start killing Republicans, but it sure as fuck sounds like you are. About as far as I’d recommend is to slap anyone at your middle school who listens to Andrew Tate or Joe Rohan.
I'm kinda new here, so I don't have much of a posting history, but let me set this up immediately.
Calls for a war of any kind in a nuclear-armed country is hella-damn dangerous. I don't care what kind of war it is. Civil War, Revolution, whatever, the bottom line is that even if we don't get mushroom clouds out of it, there are plenty of dirty bombs worth of nuclear material that could be employed by ideologically and hate-blinded assholes with an agenda and the unbending but quite wrong notion that they are not only RIGHT but are backed by their concept of goodness itself, the Almighty. And while I agree with the other poster that the entire US military isn't a seething pool of Neoconfederate fucksticks, that doesn't mean there aren't enough to appropriate and attempt to launch nuclear weapons against 'dins of sin' as they might call large, liberal cities.
I'm not going to go dig through some poster's posting history. You wanted DadWagonDriver to say he's against righties calling for war? You got it in the post you're replying to. Bam. There, he's on record now for saying the Neoconfederates should fuck off already. That should be good enough for you, and that should be enough to set you straight. Enough with the calls for naked warfare. The way to fix our country is in the ballot booth, not on the battlefield. War always has been and always will be the weapon of last resort. Be ready to protect yourself, but don't be looking for a fight. Why? Because wars rarely lead to the outcomes you want. Look at Iran when they overthrew the Shah. The Left then quibbled amongst themselves while the religious fanatics that were the Left's ally during the war stole the reins of power and then outlawed being a leftist, among many, many other things.
Oh yeah, and in closing? The battlefield of today is a thermonuclear battlefield, and the thing about Thermonuclear War is that it is a most strange game to play. The only winning move is not to play!
That is just a lie he told to disarm anybody reading and it clearly worked on you. He doesn't feel that way, otherwise he would have been doing it in the first place. You need to learn to read context and really think about other people's actions, approaches in debates, and what they're really saying.
Just because you agree with him doesn't make him or you right, and it doesn't change the fact he's manipulating you, is acting with ulterior motives and you're falling for it.
Heh. One of my favourite pasttimes is TTRPGing, and one of the settings I made to explore my disdain for the hard-right was a setting that featured the destruction of San Francisco by nuclear weapons by Conservatives. I could totally see a 'Christian States of America' nuking a liberal city...
Don't get me hard, the annihilattion of America AND a few degrees off off global warming? I like this.
Honestly, vote. They think they can act like this because of Trump giving them the go ahead. Move the Overton window.
I’d guarantee you and bet that the military is overwhelmingly in favor of supporting the left should it come to it.
Otherwise, they’d have to admit that they stand against the entire purpose and cause of the military.
I just don’t see that happening. Either I have too much faith in the intelligence of our armed forces, or I’m wrong, but this is how I see it going down.
I agree that most of the military would favor the Union again, but there’s a significant enough amount of neo-Confederates that it would cause BIG problems.
Your country does just as much damage on a global scale as those you’ve mentioned as the bad guys. Please don’t forget that.
Yeah, but I’d generally take our shittiness over Saudi or Russian shittiness. As a note, my family escaped Russia when the Bolsheviks took over, so I’m HIGHLY biased there.
China… I’m not sure about. I studied Chinese history in college, but that was 20 years ago so I kind of stopped paying deep attention around the time of Hu Jintao. Xi seems much more forceful and willing to expand China’s power via dominance and enslavement.
There are no GOOD superpowers, but I think the US is the least bad.
I do kind of agree, but let's not forget to all our shittiness in Latin America. Here's a top 10.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/10-of-the-Most-Lethal-CIA-Interventions-in-Latin-America-20160608-0031.html
Yeah, we screwed up Latin America terribly and are dealing with the consequences now.
Still: I’d take it over the other superpowers.
We have to stop playing within the system
I honestly thought I was on lemmy.ml. I didn't realize I was amidst liberal redditors, but I'll spell it out for you.
R E V O L U T I O N
We can't fix the current system.
And again, what do you do about the consequences of those actions?
Revolution? Do you know where B-2 bombers are based? How about B-52s? Where are most of our young troops sent to train? All three: The South.
You want revolution, but have no plan for it.