New York Republican’s rape remark spotlights MAGA’s sickening scare tactics

Donald Trump and his desperate Republican Party are leaning in to bigoted invective ahead of the midterm elections as they try to distract from their failings and maintain political control.

The president has been accused of attempting to stoke a “race war,” including his recent imploring of Minnesotans to “fight back” against Somali immigrants. And few other people embody the use of bigoted scare tactics quite like New York’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Bruce Blakeman.

Blakeman, who recently referred to New York’s governor as “Hijab Hochul,” has faced criticism for standing up an armed civilian militia that has been compared to the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi brownshirts, an assemblage that Blakeman, who is Jewish, has said could help put down “a riot.” And on Monday, The New York Times reported on comments he made to Hasidic leaders in a closed-door meeting that echoed the klan in another way, by featuring a diatribe involving rape.

Per the Times:

“If there is rioting here, if they’re burning down the yeshivas and your shuls, and burning down your house and raping your women, you think Zohran Mamdani is going to stop them?” he said in the meeting, according to audio excerpts obtained by The New York Times, which have not previously been reported.

“Kathy Hochul doesn’t have the backbone to do it,” he added. He then referred to the 1991 Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn. “We saw this happen in Crown Heights when Dave Dinkins was mayor. It was minor compared to what could happen,” he said.

The Times reported that Blakeman did not dispute the veracity of the recordings.

These kinds of hypotheticals have been used by white supremacists to demonize Black and brown people for centuries. For example, in the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the klan, the threat of a Black man raping a white woman served as a central plot point.

It seems clear that such baseless assertions are being used to animate the GOP’s base as polls suggest the party is suffering from a lack of voter enthusiasm with the midterms just three weeks away.

Because if Blakeman truly cared about riots, he wouldn’t be supporting Trump, who fueled a deadly insurrection attempt and then pardoned the rioters who waged it‚ some of whom have since been convicted of sex crimes. And if he truly cared about sexual assault, he wouldn’t be supporting someone who has been found civilly liable for sexual assault and has sought to downplay the Epstein files.

Such efforts to enliven Republican voters with bigoted vitriol — while certainly offensive to the Black and brown people being maligned — ought to also offend white Americans on a personal level. They underscore the lack of respect Trump and his allies have for their supporters’ intelligence and presume, rightly or wrongly, that the MAGA base can be easily manipulated with lies and misinformation that soothe the racist psyche.

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