Republicans keep crafting their own disasters. This week, as a lawsuit he filed against Twitter because anonymous accounts dared deride him proceeded, a video emerged of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) defending conservative protesters’ use of the n-word to deride Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who is black. The protesters were demonstrating against the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, and Nunes launched the defense during a conversation on C-SPAN back in 2010.
He told the host:
‘I think when you use totalitarian tactics, people begin to act crazy, and I think there’s people that have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone, they can do it — it’s not appropriate, and I think I would stop short of characterizing the 20,000 people who were protesting that all of them were doing that.’
BREAKING: Video of Devin Nunes pathetically defending protestors who yelled the “n-word” at US Rep John Lewis: “I think people have every right to say what they want. If they wanna smear someone, they can do it.” Dug up @TheDemCoalition. From 2010. pic.twitter.com/FNbhxJ9xPw
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) March 21, 2019
In other words — even if he wouldn’t engage in the behavior personally, he has no problem with people who take efforts to open access to health care as “totalitarian tactics” drawing on hundreds of years of violent racism to make their case. Pairing the two makes the intent behind the whole operation pretty clear — many of those against the ACA, at least in that protest crowd, were seemingly there because they were angry about government services being used for minorities’ benefit. In a very tangible sense, the racism and rabid opposition to Obamacare went hand-in-hand.
The connection was exemplified on plenty of other occasions all those years ago in the emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement within the GOP’s ranks, which routinely used racist imagery to deride then-President Barack Obama. A 2012 study found that “old-fashioned” racism — in other words, a willingness to openly assert that blacks are lazy, unintelligent, and so on — was a “significant” predictor of being a member of the Tea Party among southerners.
Apparently Nunes is fine with that and thinks their anger is justified, which doesn’t make him much different from those willing to explicitly call black Americans stupid as a rule.
The case is similar to one that unfolded after the recent terror attack targeting New Zealand Muslims that left 50 people dead, at which time Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) asserted that the shooter should have gone through the judicial system for their grievances, as if they had any legitimacy whatsoever to begin with. Gohmert’s office has claimed that he knew nothing of the shooter’s white supremacist motives when crafting his statement, but what he jumped to in the face of dozens of dead Muslims remains there for all to see anyway.
This is the face of the Republican Party — a casual acceptance of racism and insistence on saying maybe “both sides” have a point, a stance perhaps most infamously expressed by President Donald Trump himself after white supremacist-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Their nonsense has other expressions too — like Nunes’ recent lawsuit against Twitter seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages in light of two parody Twitter accounts that have gone after him — including “Devin Nunes’ cow,” which now has hundreds of thousands more followers than the Congressman himself.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
