Nixon aide, actor, and right-wing commentator Ben Stein has some thoughts about race in America.
Stein, you may remember, recently made headlines for his charge that President Obama is attempting to "racialize all politics," making him "the most racist president there has ever been in America." (We can safely assume, then, that Stein wasn't in the room when his old boss espoused his own ideas about race.) Asked about the controversy surrounding those remarks and the state of race relations in America during a Monday appearance on Newsmax TV, Stein stepped in it again, railing against the "beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass."
"You would think if you read the liberal mainstream media the main problem with race in America was poor, innocent black people being set upon and mistreated by the police," Stein said. "That’s just nonsense. The real problem with race in America is a very, very beaten-down, pathetic, self-defeating black underclass that just can’t seem to get its way going in the way that blacks were able to before the scourge of drugs and the scourge of gangs."
"It’s an amazing thing," he added. "Blacks were on their way in this country even after the horrors of slavery and then drugs came in, the destruction of families came in, and the crisis in the black community is just absolutely unbelievable. And that, it seems, is something Mr. Obama could have addressed and he has ignored it completely."
Actually, President Obama has lectured African-Americans about such topics plenty of times -- drawing criticism from activists and scholars who point out that the problems afflicting black people have a great deal more to do with structural racism and the country's bitter racial heritage than with moral failures on the part of African-Americans.
Stein's latest racist rant comes less than three months after he told Newsmax TV that Michael Brown, the unarmed African-American teen shot and killed by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, had it coming.
"He wasn't unarmed," Stein said at the time. "He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self."
Watch Stein's appearance below, via Newsmax TV:
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