The front page of Thursday’s New York Times featured a story by White House correspondent (and MSNBC contributor) Annie Karni, “Republicans Take After Trump With Bigoted Attacks on Foes.” Karni strung together partisan insults from the week to condemn the entire party as a historically racist menace.
This is how you know that a newspaper is a Democratic Party organ.
Given that the left and its media allies have labeled every Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater as either racist or pandering to racists, this latest smear can be ignored, but the details make for entertaining (or enraging) reading. They put these on Page One:
When Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, stood on the House floor this month to announce her proposal to censure the only Somali-born member of Congress, she said she was seeking punishment for “Representative Ilhan Omar of Somalia -- I mean Minnesota.”
Earlier that same week, Representative Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas, called the Black husband of another Democratic woman of color, Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, a “thug.” He then said Ms. Bush, who is also Black, had received so many death threats because she was “so loud all the time.”
Note the sad Times capitalization of “Black” (there’s no “White” or “Brown”) mandated by its woke style guide.
By example #4 in her litany, Karni was really scraping the barrel of racial bias.
Around the same time, House Republicans released their report on impeachment charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Cuban-born homeland security secretary who is the first Latino to lead his department. Using unusually loaded language for a committee report, the panel described its action as “deporting Secretary Mayorkas from his position.”
In private, the language was uglier. During a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the panel’s chairman, referred to Mr. Mayorkas as a “reptile with no balls” because of his refusal to resign from his post, according to Politico. A White House official condemned the statement, noting that Mr. Mayorkas is Jewish and that the comment echoed an antisemitic trope.
And that was all in the span of a week.
Karni is either being deliberately oversensitive or unwittingly dense. “Deporting” a cabinet secretary in charge of securing the border is wit, not racism. And is “reptile with no balls” really an antisemitic trope? At least the leftists at Raw Story loved her expose.
Of course, there is no parallel investigation rounding up actual anti-Semitism from the Democratic “Squad” in Congress, or of Democrats claiming a particular Republican represents Israel.
The racist discourse by Republican members of Congress, both in casual comments and in official statements, has become so commonplace that it now often slips by without any real condemnation from the G.O.P. Democrats frequently call for apologies but no longer expect any response, and those futile denunciations quickly disappear into a morass of polarized content on social media.
“Journalist” Karni found a Democrat to conveniently encapsulate and spout back the exact same Democratic talking points she was running with.
“The nature of Trumpism is to embolden extremism,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, a Black Democrat from New York. “Whether it’s badgering an Asian witness about his ethnic loyalties, or dehumanizing a cabinet secretary, or accusing a Muslim woman of treason, or describing a Black man as a thug, Republican members of Congress are crossing lines that should never be crossed.”
Karni found it shameful that Republicans couldn’t meet the high moral standard and surely not-politically motivated concerns of a Democratic politician.
If Republicans on Capitol Hill have similar concerns, they rarely air them publicly. The office of Speaker Mike Johnson had no comment on the recent incidents.
The Republican Party, which for decades has relied primarily on white voters, has long exploited fear and prejudice to energize its base, whether it was Barry Goldwater vocally opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or George H.W. Bush’s use of the Black convict Willie Horton in a 1988 presidential ad.
Oh please. Goldwater was not racist. His controversial stance was born out of his principled limited government beliefs. “Black convict Willie Horton,” doing life without parole for murder, committed rape and armed robbery while out on furlough from prison in liberal Massachusetts, a fact the Times has gone to amazing lengths to elide from the historical record.
Karni ended on a pathetic note:
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Mr. Nehls’s “thug” comment was “shameful” and “clearly peddled in racially inflammatory language.” He demanded an apology.
None came.
