Let’s all take a moment to bask in yet another example of North Carolina Senate candidate Thom Tillis being a terrible person. This time it’s over statements he made on the 2007 North Carolina joint resolution expressing regret over slavery. The good news is that he supported it (a rare concession even in this new millennium, apparently), the bad news is that his support for it seems to have been premised in the belief that voting for it would help him woo “conservative democrats” into voting against “entitlements and reparations,” which Thom Tillis seems to believe are the same thing.
“This resolution acknowledges past mistakes and frees us to move on,” Tillis wrote. “The following summarizes my perspective on concerns raised by some citizens who criticized the decision to support the resolution.” […]
“This measure does not obligate legislative members to provide reparations. A subset of the democrat [sic] majority has never ceased to propose legislation that is de facto reparations and they will continue to do so as long as they are in the majority,” Tillis said. “Federal and State [sic] governments have redistributed trillions of dollars of wealth over the years by funding programs that are at least in part driven by their belief that we should provide additional reparations.”
“I believe there are several conservative Democrats who are prepared join Republicans in OPPOSITION to measures that propose new entitlements and reparations,” Tillis added. “However, a vote against the resolution would most likely eliminate any chance that we would get support from more conservative members of the Democrat party members to oppose such measures.”
If you find that a bit difficult to parse, it’s because it radiates crackpottery. Tillis seems to think the federal government is “redistributing” wealth as part of an underground “reparations” effort, but supposes that maybe if North Carolina legislators announce an official Sorry, My Bad over the entire state history with slavery, we can “move on” to the more important issue of cutting “entitlements,” aka those things “driven by” reparation fever. (Sorry, Grandma, we can’t have Medicare anymore because it might help the black people.)
And move on he did, later that same year blocking a similar resolution apologizing for an infamous 1898 white supremacist riot that killed 25 black residents because it did not specifically praise white Republicans for opposing the murders.
Tillis went on to become Speaker of the House, no doubt as direct result of his brilliant insights into the demmycrat reparations conspiracy, where he has been doing a bang-up job making sure fewer people can vote (voting might lead to reparations), complaining over the insufficiently robust number of “traditional” North Carolina citizens versus the “African American” and “Hispanic” populations, demanding gay Americans stay in their proper place (or maybe someday they’ll want reparations too), and generally turning North Carolina into South Carolina with a different flag. Now he wants to be in the U.S. Senate. Of course.
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This year has certainly shaped up to be a strange one. It used to be that the Republican Party was generally content to elevate their more colorful crackpots to the House of Representatives, the Senate still being the supposed realm of people who were not supposed to be visibly driven by their own internal nests of bigotries and outright conspiracy theories. Not this year. Republicans aren’t even pretending to restrict the loonies to the House, they’re just chucking whatever plague-infected cow they can find over our national walls and hoping for the best.
Personally, I blame Ted Cruz.
