Rocker, right-wing polemicist, and Republican campaigner Ted Nugent has launched yet another racist tirade, penning a column in which he assails “Ferguson thugs” and a purported “plague of black violence” and demands that African-Americans stop supporting liberal politicians.
Nugent’s latest racist outburst – which comes after the entertainer called our first African-American president a “subhuman mongrel” and defended the South African apartheid system and the use of the n-word – arrived in the form of his column for far-right website WorldNetDaily.
He begins his column by noting that a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri was recently shot as he investigated a break-in. (Officials have said that the shooting was unrelated to protests over the August shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.) Nugent wonders why “the media have made it a point not to describe the suspect or suspects the police are searching for,” and then proceeds to draw his own conclusions about the suspects.
“Based on crime stats in Ferguson and elsewhere,” Nugent writes, “it would be a safe bet to assume the two thugs the police are looking for are black males between the age of 15 and 25.”
And because a right-wing rant about race would be incomplete without deploying stereotypes, he goes on to predict that “the two thugs being searched for were raised by a single parent, have criminal records, are high school dropouts, don’t have jobs and are very likely to be members of a gang.”
Nugent seizes on the episode to denounce the “plague of black violence [that] has infested our inner cities” (despite media hype, no such plague exists). The acclaimed sociologist then asserts that “Fedzilla’s welfare crack programs” are responsible for African-Americans’ grievances, since they’ve engendered “dependency.”
He chose not to dwell on police officers’ wanton shooting of unarmed black men; widespread, racially discriminatory policies like redlining that have cut African-American families off from resources, jobs, and social networks; or the persistence of economic and employment discrimination against black people. No, “killer” liberalism is the real problem, Nugent concludes, and only by renouncing it will African-Americans finally see their lot improve.
Such a blatantly bigoted analysis, which betrays a fundamental ignorance of how oppression works in 21st-century America, would be easy to dismiss as the asinine worldview of a marginal crank – if it weren’t shared by so many on the American right.
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