Matt Gaetz Is a Big Dumb Racist

Matt Gaetz, who made headlines recently for revealing the existence of an adult son he had successfully kept hidden for years, appeared on Fox News over the weekend and said some truly dumb and racist shit, claiming that protesters are attempting “cultural genocide” right now in calling for statues of avowed racists to be taken down and comparing the Black Lives Matter movement to… the Confederacy.

Ostensibly appearing on Jeanine Pirro’s show to discuss “the debate over reopening schools,” Gaetz and Pirro quickly pivoted from that discussion after she asked him about the “toppling of statues.”

“They’re tearing down Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Frederick Douglass. So this isn’t about slavery or fascism or even race. There is an attempted cultural genocide going on in America right now, and it calls for patriots to stand up and say this is a great country, it is worthy of our pride and our defense.” Gaetz added, “The left wants us to be ashamed of America so that they can replace America.”

Cultural genocide!!!! It’s also, uh, interesting that Gaetz said that leftists want to “replace America,” which certainly seems like a nod to the chant “You will not replace us” warbled out by white nationalists in 2017 in Charlottesville, itself a reference to the white nationalist notion of “white genocide,” which I assume is the phrase Gaetz really wanted to say. As for the Frederick Douglass statue he’s likely referencing: While he and other idiots like Donald Trump Jr. have blamed the toppling of the Douglass statue in Rochester, NY on Democrats and “antifa,” officials still don’t know who took the statue down. But in a previous incident in which a Frederick Douglass statue was vandalized in Rochester, it was done by two white men who, according to one witness, were “screaming the N-word” the whole time.

“Well, what can we do to push back?” Pirro asked Gaetz, pointing to statues that are “spray painted red” and fretting about “looters” and “anarchists” who “just come out and decide they’re going to destroy something.”

Gaetz then made an incredible, truly breathtaking logical leap. “The great irony, Judge Jeanine, is that the organizers of Black Lives Matter who pledge allegiance to the destruction of America have a lot more in common with the Confederate generals that they hate than they would like to admit, because it was in fact the Confederacy that initially wanted to kick out federal officials, who wanted to destroy America and change it to something different,” Gaetz said, adding, “I think America was worth defending in the 1860s and she’s certainly worth defending today.”

Naturally, Donald Trump, another dumb racist, approved: