The black-hating, neo-Confederate Republican called “Roy Moore Lite” seeking to become the next Senator from the State of Mississippi visited MSNBC on Friday and in just under 2 minutes, managed to defend the Confederate flag, explain how rap music turns black people into murderers and told African Americans why they should be tired of begging from white people.
Imagine if David Duke had a nice head of hair, a genteel southern accent, the heart of an ethnic cleanser and a mouth that could dog whistle at a pitch only discernible to Caucasian ears.
This is Mississippi State Senator Chris McDaniel.
Everyone knows Chris McDaniel is racist. He’s so racist, he doesn’t even deny it himself and will only counter charges of racism by bringing up Ronald Reagan to remind voters of the fact that they ”called him a racist,” too.
McDaniel is in a hotly-contested race for the Mississippi Senate seat left vacant by Sen Thad Cochran’s (R-Miss.) retirement. What is interesting about the race is that polls show the Democrat, Mike Espy, is tied with two Republican contenders who all face each other in a November 6th special election. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two contenders would face each other in a runoff, opening up the almost unthinkable possibility that Mississippi could send a black Democrat to the Senate.
So on Friday, McDaniel appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and was asked by Eddie Glaude Jr., a Mississippi native who chairs Princeton’s Center for African-American Studies, about his history of racism. Glaude pointed out the fact that McDaniel supports the Confederate flag, has spoken at neo-Confederate events, supports Robert E. Lee, disparages African American voters and said rap music causes violence.
McDaniel first responded with some gobbledygook saying that people in Mississippi voted to keep the Confederate flag. According to McDaniel, it’s not so much that he wants to make sweet, sweet love to the Stars and Bars banner in a candlelit room with a mixtape of Hank Williams and George Strait songs playing in the background, he’s just representing the voters.
As for rap music, McDaniels said he was only citing a Berkeley study that “links hip-hop to violence,” which is true. Although the 12-year-old study does show that people who listen to hip hop tend to drink more and had a slightly higher rate of violence, it did not say that hip-hop causes violence, just as living in Mississippi does not cause racism.
But Glaude pressed McDaniel on how he planned to represent the 38 percent of the Mississippi population that is African American, asking: “How do you convince black folks in this state that you’re not a danger to them? ... How do you speak to those 38 percent?”
“I’m going to ask them, ‘After 100 years of relying on big government to save you, where are you today?’” McDaniel responded. “‘After 100 years of begging for federal government scraps, where are you today?”
The crowd started booing immediately and the white people on the panel looked so uncomfortable that host Scarborough jumped to another topic as if someone had brought up slavery at the Kardashian-West Thanksgiving dinner.
I’m pretty sure, if you checked, racism is Mississippi state flower and its number one export so public figures like McDaniel using racism to reach their base is par for the course. If America is a classroom, Mississippi is the student in the back of the class passing notes to South Carolina and cheating off Alabama’s paper.
Perhaps that’s why Mississippi ranks 50th in health care, 46th in education, 49th in jobs and #1 in people still worshipping a 150-year-old war in which the traitors and enslavers got their asses handed to them.
I would ask the nice white people of Mississippi: After 100 years of white supremacists like Chris McDaniel, where are you today?