Republican Senator John Kennedy to Arab American Institute Executive Director: “You Should Hide Your Head in a Bag”
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Today the Senate held a committee hearing on the rise in hate crimes, and Republican Senator John Kennedy provided a perfect example of the kind of wretched people behind this dismaying trend. The Republican from Louisiana accused the Arab American Institute’s Executive Director Maya Berry of supporting Hamas and then ended his racist drivel with a quote that sent gasps throughout the room. Maya Berry’s thoughtful and heartfelt response to this racist attack is as good of an example as you will find of the vast gulf between the humanity of the right-wing and everyone else in America.
In Senate hearing on hate, Sen John Kennedy says Arab American Institute ED Maya Berry (only Muslim witness) supports Hamas, Hezbollah.
“You should hide your head in a bag.”Hearing strayed far from beginning which acknowledged Tree of Life victims & 6-year-old Wadea al-Fayoume. pic.twitter.com/d4Z0RTJXvy
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) September 17, 2024
These people are fucking racist, and it is long past time we stopped tiptoeing around this fact in polite company. If John Kennedy and all the other lunatics on the right-wing want to endanger the lives of vulnerable populations by spouting racist bullshit that professional liar JD Vance has already admitted are lies, then they must be given the respect they have earned, which is less than none. Unrepentant racists should be treated like the pariahs they would be in a civilized society.
As this depraved clip proves, alongside every nanosecond of these people’s miserable existence, is that we normal humans simply do not occupy the same physical reality as those like Senator John Kennedy and the army of lemmings behind him. He is so wrapped up in his racist and egotistical delusion, so dedicated to alienating whatever normal friends and family are left around him in service to this constant drum of old white male grievance politics, that he is babbling “you support Hamas” over “I don’t support Hamas.”
Every time these people come into contact with objective reality, their fragile egos explode in a fit of confused and childish rage. It’s hard to see Senator John Kennedy as anything other than a rotting sack of flesh who stopped maturing just before his balls dropped.
At Paste Politics I was fond of calling John Kennedy “Foghorn Leghorn if he suffered a traumatic brain injury,” but now I would like to apologize to the famed cartoon character. It’s one thing to be stupid, but the racist willing ignorance that defines the day to day lives of right-wingers today is an entirely different level of deluded, one which requires an abandonment of reality that few are untethered enough to reach.