The ConWeb’s obsession with James Comey’s “86 47” post got us to remembering when they all loved a certain right-wing “street artist.”
We’ve detailed how Sabo, the “street artist” in question, had a habit during the Obama years of making all-caps tweets like “IT REALLY WOULD BE A CRYING SHAME IF SOMEONE CALLED TO REPORT A MAN WITH A RIFLE IN THE AREA ON THIS NIGHT,” as well as “DEAR GOD! I PRAY YOU MAKE ZOMBIES REAL AND THE FIRST ONE I HOPE REANIMATES IS OSWALD. – THANK YOU GOD.” Twitter eventually suspended his account. Yet Sabo was so revered in right-wing circles that he loved making things for Ted Cruz, and it got to the point where Sabo had his own page in the Cruz campaign store. (Cruz eventually pulled the Sabo store after the heat got to be too much.)
WND’s pseudonymous artist columnist, Marisa Martin, defended Sabo in a 2015 column, calling his work “crude, vulgar and tasteless, but not a threat by any means” — but she didn’t mention that Sabo had prepared for his encounter with the Secret Service over those tweets by plastering his apartment walls with posters bearing the name “Oswald.” In another 2015 column, Martin gushed that Sabo “has ‘come out’ as a proud Republican on his websites and shown his face for CPAC 2015,” then conducted an interview with him.
The Media Research Center also praised Sabo as well.
- A May 2015 post by P.J. Gladnick touted Sabo’s “hilarious street art” in mocking “the George Stephanopoulos Clinton Foundation scandal in which ABC’s This Week host failed to disclose that he donated $75,000 (plus lots of time) to that organization.”
- A November 2016 post by Sarah Stites gushed that Sabo made a “Moving to Jupiter Election Day Sale” for Cher after she delared she would “leave the planet” if Donald Trump was elected president.
- An October 2017 post by Kristine Marsh cheered Sabo responding to a “gun control tirade” by Jimmy Kimmel by making posters that “featured an image of Kimmel crying, made to look like Johnny Depp in the 1990 movie Cry-Baby, with the text, ‘The Jimmy Kimmel Estrogen Hour.'”
- Another post that month by Gladnick hyped “infamous street artist Sabo” having “placed a rather, um, unique door hanger at many homes in [Reese] Witherspoon’s neighborhood” that read, “Do Not Disturb. Gavin’s Boning Your Wife. Gavin for Governor.”
None of those posts mentioned Sabo’s threats against Obama.
Newsmax got in on some of that Sabo action as well. An October 2014 article touted how “A politically conservative Los Angeles street artist is papering a strip of Tinseltown this week with Oz-like flying monkeys bearing “Hillary 2016″ signs, just ahead of a Hillary Clinton-headlined fundraiser.” A December 2017 article helped Sabo fret about new Twitter rules, complaining that “Twitter gatekeepers will treat theirs and other conservative points of view with a jaundice eye while giving a pass to other so-called extremists groups like BLM and Antifa, which are regularly associated with violence and destruction of property. Neither article mentioned Sabo’s threats against Obama.
This ConWeb embrace of a “street artist” who loved to threaten Obama makes their manufactured freakout over Comey look even more hypocritical.