A GOP lawmaker made a series of racially derogatory remarks on his former radio program, including that black people have an “entitlement mentality” and that “there’s trouble” at predominately black events, a new report says.
Rep. Jason Lewis’, R-Minn., racially derogatory comments were made on his syndicated radio program, “The Jason Lewis Show,” and were provided to CNN’s KFile by Michael Brodkorb, former deputy chair of the Republican Party of Minnesota. The show ran from 2009 to 2014.
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“There’s a cultural problem in the African-American community that is leading to this,” Lewis said during a show in in 2012. “You’re a victim. It’s OK to hate women, beat up women. It’s OK to hate gays. All this, we’re just sort of feeding this to people who are very lost because of the breakdown of society to begin with.”
In another clip, Lewis argued that violence often emerged at primarily black events.
“I happen to think actually that the modern welfare state has really devastated African-American communities, minority communities by making certain that young black males are raised by one parent, not holding fathers accountable,” he said in August 2012. “You’ve added sort of gasoline to the fire of poverty. Now you’ve got young men with no way to express themselves in a proper way, so violence begets violence and the cycle keeps going on and on and on.”
“You simply can’t say the same thing about other groups,” he added. “But when there is a festival, a gathering, call it what you will — June ninth, Juneteenth or urban weekend in Miami Beach or Myrtle Beach and Indianapolis. When there is a predominately black festival, there’s trouble.”
Lewis additionally accused the media of “ignoring” black on white crime, although the Bureau of Justice statistics shows that black on white crime and white on black crime from 2012 to 2015 produce similar rates of violence.
“Now, no one can discount the horrible legacy of slavery,” he said in December 2012. “No one can discount the sin of America’s past — but the chances today, and I want to be clear about this, I know it’s provocative, but I want to be clear — the chances today of a gang of KKK members beating up a black kid are remote compared to the opposite. A gang of black on white crime.”
In a segment from April 2012, he also connected outrage over stringent voter ID laws to “the same sort of hyperventilation that has brought Florida to the edge of a race war.”
Lewis’ office pushed back and said that unearthing the comments was “an orchestrated attempt at making anyone who supports reducing illegitimacy or crime in minority communities, Voter ID laws and work requirements for public assistance back off their public policy positions.”
The comments come after KFile reported on Wednesday that Lewis once bemoaned that women couldn’t be called “sluts” anymore on his program.
Lewis is up against Democratic candidate Angie Craig in the 2018 midterm election in November.
