Orange County Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez—who is running for Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat in 2016—has a history of racially insensitive remarks. Time to add another one, in an interview she did yesterday with CNN’s Larry King regarding the threat of terrorism.
We know that there is a small group, and we don’t know how big that is—it can be anywhere between 5 and 20%, from the people that I speak to—that Islam is their religion and who have a desire for a caliphate and to institute that in any way possible.
I don’t know who the people Loretta Sanchez “speaks to” are, but five to 20 percent of Muslims would mean anywhere from 80 to 400 million terrorists.
No credible expert on ISIS would ever come close to that figure, so she is fearmongering like Donald Trump. That’s offensive from a Republican, and even worse from a Democrat.
But Sanchez cannot simply write this off as a math gaffe. She has a history of racially insensitive comments.
Earlier this year at a gathering of East Indian delegates at the California Democratic Convention, she jokingly told a story about confusing East Indians with Native Americans—and followed up by imitating the war whoop (see video.)
At the time, our political director David Nir speculated that Sanchez may drop out of the race—where she is already the underdog against Attorney General Kamala Harris. But now, Sanchez has even outdone herself.