Maine
Governor Says People Of Color Are ‘The Enemy,’
Implies They Should Be Shot
By Casey Quinlan
August 27,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Think
Progress"
- In a Friday press conference following his
homophobic
remarks about a state lawmaker, Maine Governor
Paul LePage (R) called people of color and people of
Hispanic origin “the enemy” and implied they should
be shot.
“A bad guy is
a bad guy. I don’t care what color he is. When you
go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses
in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red,” he
said. “You shoot the enemy. You try to identify the
enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming
majority of people coming in are people of color or
people of Hispanic origin.”
The
governor has offered a veritable potpourri of racist
and homophobic remarks over the years. In his
voicemail to state Rep. Drew Gattine (D) on
Thursday, in an apparent attempt to convince people
that he is not a racist, he said, “I want to talk to
you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve
spent my life helping black people and you little
son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker.”
On Wednesday,
he
called Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen Muslim
soldier, a “con artist.” During a town hall on that
same day, he said
nearly all of Maine’s drug dealers are black or
Hispanic. “I don’t ask them to come to Maine (to)
sell their poison, but they come,” he said. “And I
will tell you, that 90 percent-plus of those
pictures in my book — and it’s a three-ring
binder — are black and Hispanic people from
Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”
LePage grabbed
national headlines earlier this year when he
said men named “Smoothie, D-Money, and Shifty”
were dealing drugs in Maine. He added,
“Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a
young, white girl before they leave, which is a real
sad thing because then we have another issue that
we’ve got to deal with down the road. We’re going to
make them very severe penalties.”
Among his
other comments, he
told the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” accused asylum
seekers of
bringing the “ziki fly,” and
told the president to “go to hell.” LePage is an
enthusiastic supporter of the Republican nominee
for president, Donald Trump.
“Make sure he knows before he leaves here that we
have picked a winner,” LePage
said of Trump when he joined him at a campaign
event in Maine last month.
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