Yesterday was kind of a shit storm for U.S. Senate candidate, Rep. Joe Heck (R. NV). First, his former aide posted this stupid and offensive remark about Heck’s opponent, former Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto (D. NV):
Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, running to replace Sen. Harry Reid in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, said it was “offensive” to suggest she isn’t Mexican enough because she doesn’t speak Spanish.
Cortez Masto was responding to her opponent’s former political director, who is also Mexican-American and who had made a sarcastic remark about how Mexican she is. The former aide, Tom McCallister, asked in another tweet: “quick question does @CatherineForNV speak Spanish?”
Cortez Masto told BuzzFeed News the tweets were “offensive” and sought to tie them to her opponent.
“First of all, I think it’s offensive, not just offensive to me, but to the many Mexican-Americans particularly in the state of Nevada who have worked so hard and provided so many contributions,” she said.
McAllister is the former political director for Rep. Joe Heck; McAllister left the campaign in June. Cortez Masto argued that the tweet showed who Heck “truly is and that he’s not willing to stand for the community because he supports Trump.”
The Heck campaign said McCallister does not speak for the campaign.
And she took aim at the idea that she isn’t Mexican enough because she doesn’t speak Spanish.
“I think its absolutely ridiculous — if that was the litmus test for whether or not you’re Mexican-American then Gov. Sandoval would be thrown into that,” she said of the popular Republican governor in Nevada.
Then this happened on the same day about his son:
Using the username Joeyj424, Joey Heck posted inflammatory and misogynistic comments on Reddit during the past year. As recently as two months ago, a message (called “flair” by Reddit users) appeared next to his username on all his comments that said, “I wish Hillary would violate me as much as she did federal law.”
Joey Heck also commented more than once on the rape allegations against Bill Cosby. In one post a year ago, he commented on a photo comparing the comedian, accused by dozens of women of sexual assault and by some of drugging them, to champion boxers. He wrote, “Up there with the best of them, good for you Billy”. In another comment on a New York Magazine article cover that featured 35 women who accused Cosby of assaulting them, “Number 9 didn’t even need the drugs her eyes are already all sorts of fucked up.”
Heck’s son also upvoted, or endorsed, a number of racist and anti-Semitic pictures and memes. Reddit’s algorithm uses upvotes to determine what gets promoted on the site. One image he upvoted was a racist depiction of a group of black children with the caption, “God made the little niggers, He made them in the night, He made them in a hurry, and forgot to make them white!”
He also upvoted a meme of a white person with a disability in a wheelchair, which read, “Just another retard who thinks hes a nigger I hate when white kids throw up gang signs”. In another picture he upvoted, a penguin is shown in front of an oven expressing happiness that “my jews are almost done!”
A year ago, Joey Heck commented on a picture of a sex toy in a basket of children’s toys, saying, “I’m deeply ashamed of you for this. You’re a failure as a father. 3 years old and that’s all she can take?”
In a number of comments, Heck’s son refers to people with disabilities by the slur “potatoes.” He called a woman who appeared in a video with her autistic son a “Hot ass potato farmer.”
And in a comment on a meme of a dancing black child wearing a diaper, with the words, “Guess Who’s Getting Confederate Flag Shirts,” Joey Heck posted, “Great, what’s next? Giving them food too? Greedy bastards”. In another comment, Heck wrote that he was “impressed” by a meme of a Muslim man being sodomized by a pig.
This isn’t the first time Heck’s son has been busted for posting these types of comments. They revealed some of this back in 2013:
A review of tweets by Joey Heck, 16, dating to August of last year shows numerous examples in which Heck used words like “faggot” and “nigga.” For instance, on Sept. 11 Heck tweeted “Fanny pack = fag bag,” and on August 23 he retweeted a tweet that read, “There are gays everywhere. Maybe that’s gods way of thinning out the population because faggots can’t have babies.”
Heck’s twitter feed also included numerous racial slurs. During a Sept. 16 Jets football game, the younger Heck tweeted “[Mark] Sanchez can hop the border faster than he can throw the ball.”
During the Oct. 16 presidential debate, Heck took issue with the performance of moderator Martha Raddatz, ABC’s Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent. “This is why men need to be moderators,” he wrote.
He also wrote that Mitt Romney “raped” Obama and made him his “slave” during a debate.
In an exchange with a friend during the debate on October 3rd, Heck asked rhetorically, “I would like somebody to tell me one good thing Obama did in these past 4 years…. I got nothing.” Later in the conversation he said “yeah like spear chucking and rock skipping. The sports they do in his home country…”
Heck’s political comments are particularly jarring, since his twitter feed clearly shows his active engagement not only in national politics, but his father’s reelection race last year. He repeatedly argues his father’s job as a congressman gives him an inside understanding of politics: For instance, during the Oct. 16 debate he tweeted “Obama didn’t make the call to kill Osama… That was the intelligence committee #iwouldknow.”
Additionally, at one point he bragged that his mother got him a well paying job with “some company for like voting stuff.”
Here are Joey Heck’s Tweets:
They say judge a man by the company he keeps. Now Heck’s former aide doesn’t surprise me and while I would rather judge Heck’s record as a politician and not as a father, his son’s remarks a grossly disturbing and you have to wonder where he learned it from. Lets fight back against all of this. Click here to donate and get involved with Cortez Masto’s campaign.