At first, it seemed like an ordinary, off-the-cuff Twitter post from the Democrat mayor of a midsize city.
That all changed within hours Monday night, when St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman's tweet "banning" presidential frontrunner Donald Trump from the city in the wake of Trump's call for banning Muslims from traveling to the U.S. was shared thousands upon thousands of times.
Kriseman was joking, of course; he can't really ban someone from visiting or moving to the city. He said in a later tweet he was fighting "ridiculousness with ridiculousness."
Regardless of his intent, the post had traction.
Most local media outlets picked it up immediately, followed within hours by those in other parts of the state. Soon, national and international outlets were posting about it.
He was interviewed on MSNBC as well as an Israeli paper (largely because of Kriseman's Jewish faith).
Scores of other major media outlets, including CNN and the BBC, also picked the story up.
It was kind of a surprise for Kriseman and his administration.
"We were certainly not expecting it to go viral," said Ben Kirby, a spokesman for Kriseman, via text message. "The mayor has said that the reaction to his tweet really shows how much people care about ensuring St. Petersburg and America can remain beacons of opportunity, and how angered they were by Mr. Trump's divisive rhetoric."
On Twitter, users from across the country were envious, and posted their desire to visit St. Pete because of the mayor's disposition (they should visit anyway; it's a wonderful place).
Sadly, the tweet also caught fire from scores of white supremacists, anti-Muslims and anti-Semites on social media, like one person who responded to CL's tweet on Kriseman's MSNBC appearance.
One Twitter user (it appears to be a throwaway account) even posted pictures of Kriseman's face photoshopped onto that of an Auschwitz prisoner, striped uniform and all.
We aren't going to feature that post, or any of a similar nature, here because such opinions don't deserve any sort of validation; we're only mentioning them to begin with as a heads-up to sane people that this mindset has yet to be weeded out of the gene pool.
