Like much of the nation, we've been following Thursday's hearings on one allegation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The twittersphere has been pretty much what one might expect in terms of confirmation bias, but one Minnesota interaction reveals a Big Lake Republican career politician's unfortunate affinities. State senator Mary Kiffmeyer--once upon a time Minnesota's voting-restricting Secretary of State (see Minnesota Montior/Independent timeline quoted here)--has done it again with some questionable sources.
As the screenshot of a tweet and replies reveals, Kiffmeyer RT and agreed with Sebatian Gorka, who was canned at the White House in late summer 2017, the Guardian reported in Controversial Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka out of White House job:
Sebastian Gorka, a fringe rightwing figure with questionable foreign policy and security credentials, is no longer working for the Trump administration, a White House official said on Friday.
The official said Gorka did not resign but would not elaborate on the circumstances of his departure. The New York Times reported that the president’s new chief of staff, John Kelly, had made clear that he no longer wanted Gorka in the White House, and forced him out.
Gorka, the deputy assistant to the president, advised Donald Trump on national security but his responsibilities were vague. He frequently appeared as a surrogate for Trump on cable news, where he appeared to enjoy stirring controversy during his months-long tenure.
Gorka has been seen in photos wearing a medal from Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian group with historical links to Nazi Germany. He claimed he only wore the medal to honour his father and has denied accusations of antisemitism. . . .
Most recently, Gorka's been quietly silenced at Fox's hard news shows, if reports like Fox News’ ‘Hard News’ Shows Have a ‘Ban’ on Sebastian Gorka in the Daily Beast are to be believed.
This isn't the first time Kiffmeyer's embraced authorities with questionable notions of race and power. In 2007, John Van Hecke of MN 2020 opined in The devil is in the details:
On December 14, the Minnesota conservative movement reared its naked, ugly, Voldemortian head, giving us a clear, unfettered glimpse of the right-wing agenda. It’s not a pretty sight, but don’t turn away. Progressives need to understand this perspective in order to counter it.
A new right-wing advocacy organization, Minnesota Majority, is running AM radio spots in which its executive director, former Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, attacks Democrats for supporting “socialistic” universal health care, likening it to a “welfare program.”
Socialistic? Wow. I didn’t think anybody trotted out that tired bit of red-baiting anymore. Perhaps they’re nostalgic for the late Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Writers’ Blacklist and the WWI-era Minnesota Public Safety Commission’s loyalty tests.
Although I had a vague sense of the conservative activists behind “Minnesota Majority” — for convenience’s sake, let’s call them “Minnie Maj” — I hadn’t visited their website or read their screeds.
I have now. Where to start?
Minnie Maj writer Dave Racer attributes Sweden’s and Japan’s lower infant mortality rates to racial purity. He writes, “Black women, for a variety of reasons, are more prone to underweight babies than are Caucasian and Asian women. It is not surprising that Sweden has a lower infant mortality rate, or that Japan has a longer life expectancy than the United States does. They are nearly racially pure; we are not.”
Confronted with this racist bilge, Kiffmeyer defends it. The St. Paul Pioneer Press quoted her as saying that health care and racial purity must be understood in context, that the phrase is simply descriptive. “That’s a genetic term … It does matter when you are doing medical studies.”
Race is a social construct, not a scientific one. I’m surprised that Kiffmeyer, a trained nurse, didn’t make that distinction. Defending a racist perspective under the guise of scientific inquiry is a little like saying that reading “Mein Kampf” in the original German makes it less objectionable.
Jeepers! As for genuine men, the notion brought us back to the time when Kiffmeyer's husband Ralph introduced a bill to ban dildoes in Minnesota in his one term in the Minnesota House. Indeed.
Screengrab: @marykiff's tweet and some responses.
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