Tea party candidate and noted book owner Chris McDaniel looks crabby even in his own campaign photos.
In a promotional segment for his Christian conservative radio program, Right Side Radio, Mississippi Republican Senate candidate Chris McDaniel blamed rising gun violence on a "hip-hop" culture that "values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry." [...]
"The reason Canada is breaking out with brand new gun violence has nothing to do with the United States and guns," McDaniel said in this promotional sampler for his syndicated radio show. "It has everything to do with a culture that is morally bankrupt. What kind of culture is that? It's called hip-hop."
And so on and so forth. Now, now, though: That newly discovered clip dates from somewhere around 2004-ish, back when McDaniel was (of course) a conservative radio host. (I have that as macro now, by the way—"former conservative radio host". I only have to type F3 to get the phrase "Republican candidate and former conservative radio host." F1 brings up "Another mass shooting has taken place in America, this time in," and F2 is set to "has promised to block the appointment for no apparent reason.") That still raises the question of why newest tea party heartthrob Chris McDaniel was still on the hoary "black people's music causes gun violence" kick in the otherwise-more-modern two thousand and naughts, given that I thought even the silliest wingnuts had given up on that one a half-decade beforehand—but I might be remembering wrong. For all I know, former Republican candidate and current conservative radio host (F4) Mike Huckabee was arguing the same damn thing yesterday.
What it does demonstrate, though, is that the where do they find these people (F7) aspect of tea party conservatism continues apace. A swath of the Republican Party decided that Mississippi Sen. Thad Freaking Cochran was not conservative enough for them, i.e. had not bitten the head off a bat while declaring that the United Nations was coming to take over our school systems for at least a full week, and so scrounged very hard to dig up someone "more" conservative. And the only way you keep digging up candidates "more" conservative than the previous hard-right candidates is to go digging in fever swamps that nobody seriously dared go digging in before, and that is how you end up with Republican candidate and former conservative radio host Bitey McSoAndSo as an actual, promoted thing.
And that, in turn, is how we have ended up in a place where you cannot run for office in certain states or districts unless you claim things like how Music Black People Make is a far more direct a cause of gun violence than the part of our culture that says every nutcase in America has an absolute right to enough weaponry and ammunition to take out an elementary school if they for some reason woke up one day and decided they wanted to do that.
