Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), racially oppressed victim
Rep. Mo Brooks is not backing down from
his claim that there's a "war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party." On the contrary, the Alabama Republican is doubling and tripling down, unleashing a torrent of nonsense that truly boggles the mind. The man just cannot shut up.
Monday afternoon:
"We should not be dividing anybody based on national heritage or race. Rather, we should be bringing us all together. That's what the melting pot ideal of America is all about. A person's skin pigmentation is something acquired at birth that has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the person of how one should vote."
Except maybe to the extent that one party's policies consistently target people with certain skin pigmentation, and we can see in everything from immigration policy to arrest and incarceration rates to the workings of the economy that "the melting pot ideal of America" is not a reality.
"The Democrats do it on a regular basis and you can see it in the campaign appeals that they make based on skin color. I don't know of a single Republican who has made an appeal for votes based on skin color. I don't know of one. The Democrats routinely make appeals based on race and they get away with it. It's repugnant to ever make an appeal based on race."
Riiiight, and Republicans never do that. Leading Republican operative Lee Atwater never described
the Southern strategy—except that in reality Republicans are still following it to the best of their ability today. For that matter, this man is in the House with Rep. Steve King, whose race-baiting moments around immigration are legion. With Rep. Todd Rokita, who as Brooks was making headlines for his "war on whites" comments, was implying that Central American refugee children
might bring Ebola into this country.
No, the fact that African-American and Latino and Asian-American people overwhelmingly vote for Democrats doesn't say nearly as much about Democratic race-based appeals to those groups as it does about Republican race-based appeals to white people.
Brooks is still talking, as of Tuesday morning. I guess it's the Rove strategy, accusing your opponents of the thing you're actually guilty of by way of pre-emptive defense? Or Brooks is just truly in his heart so threatened by the idea of black and Latino voters backing Democrats that he has to turn it into a giant racist conspiracy against white people? But whatever Brooks thinks his motivation is, there's an awful lot of disingenuous racial paranoia operating here.