![]() ![]() ![]() "To the faggot who stole my dirt bike from the church parking lot, I will find you, and I will beat the crap out of you" has the distinction of being the most Arizona sentence ever written. Needless to say, I’ve already spoken with him about this, he has apologized, and I apologize as well.” “I’m very disappointed in my teenage son’s words, and I sincerely apologize for the insensitivity. Tanner's since taken his Twitter account private, and his dad-a goofy-looking survivalist Mormon- apologized in a statement to Buzzfeed: Not only does the boy- seen here holding an enormous weapon of some kind-go by "N1ggerkiller" on "Fun Run," he calls people "Jews" and "faggots" on Twitter: Tanner Flake, the "high-school aged" son of Arizona's junior senator, has not been using social media best practices for a while now, as Buzzfeed's John Stanton discovered. Those Twitter feeds did not read like they were written by kids who were rebelling against their parents’ Republicanism, but by kids who were embracing an extreme version of those Republican values.That guy calling himself "N1ggerkiller" while playing the iPhone game "Fun Run" isn't just any racist teenage prick-it's the racist teenage prick son of Arizona Senator Jeff Flake!Īnd that's not all. Likewise, if you’re so adamantly opposed to equal rights for gay people, you shouldn’t be shocked when your child is exposed as a raging homophobe. If you’ve won the support of birthers, don’t be surprised when your son makes comments about Obama being a Kenyan spear-chucker. He was also a part of the United States House of Representatives from 2001-13. However, he remained and served as a congressman for six terms. He was a member of the Republican Party and was elected as a member of the Senate in 2012. But Taitz’s public profile is evidence of the type of racial animus within the GOP that I’m talking about, and her support of Heck is evidence that Republicans count these people among their voting base. Jeffery Lane Flake is a politician of American nationality and a Senator of the United States from Arizona. When Heck’s campaign was initially asked whether he recognizes Obama as a legitimate president, the campaign refused to answer, instead telling the Las Vegas Sun that “the people of Southern Nevada are far more worried about keeping their jobs and their homes, and putting a stop to reckless spending in Washington.” Heck’s spokeswoman eventually clarified to Politico that he had not sought the endorsement and didn’t consider himself a birther. While you can’t choose who supports you, you can send him or her signals. ![]() Joe Heck, meanwhile, won the support of self-appointed “birther queen” Orly Taitz for his congressional campaign in 2010. Although he did recently say that a Republican presidential candidate supporting gay marriage is inevitable, Jeff Flake has a long history of anti-LGBT stances. In the case of Flake and Heck, you may be able to see a family lineage in their tweets. As Scocca wrote right before last November’s election: The sheer number and tenor of Tanner's offensive posts - more of which were still being flagged by readers after Buzzfeed broke the story this week - are shocking. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), has done for the past year, possibly longer. But it’s a sizable enough constituency that a key part of the Republican message is to use coded-and sometimes not so coded-language to appeal to this crowd. This is what Tanner Flake, the oldest son of Sen. Obviously not all Republican politicians and voters, or not even a majority of them, are racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant bigots. ![]() Namely, that there is a not insignificant portion of the GOP electorate that exists as a fever swamp of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-immigrant hatred, and bigotry of all sorts. It’s something that most of us already knew and something that occasional Slate contributor Tom Scocca articulated wonderfully in an article on this site last fall. While it’s true that dumb kids saying racist things on social media isn’t a particularly shocking news story, I think there is something about present-day conservative politics worth taking away from these cases. “I don’t think you can read political bias into this,” one editor said. In the Slate office, a few staffers were equally skeptical that these tweets by a couple random punks had larger implications. Nick Baumann of Mother Jones said that although the behavior was unacceptable, he hated the idea of journalists monitoring a kid’s tweets. After the Flake revelation, Daily Caller political reporter Alex Pappas tweeted, “Why is this news?” It wasn’t just conservative journalists asking. Several journalists wondered aloud if we should be paying any attention to the rantings of dumb, racist kids who happen to be children of major Republican politicians. ![]()
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