Yes, Ted Nugent is a jerk. But even for him, this is awful. Nugent posted the picture above on his Facebook page with this comment:
Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS while many of them have tax paid hired ARMED security! Know them well. Tell every1 you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!
And look at the little Israeli flag icon on each one, clearly suggesting that their religion has something to do with their support for gun safety laws.
Right Wing Watch notes that it isn't the first time Nugent has gone toward anti-Semitism in his remarks, but in the past they were aimed at President Obama, not specific Jewish lawmakers and activists.
Ted Nugent may have made his name as a rock musician, but today he increasingly is known for his controversial comments about President Barack Obama. At a January gun expo in Las Vegas, Nugent described Obama as "a communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured, subhuman mongrel."
Nugent now is campaigning with Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott. This led CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to question whether the Abbott campaign understands the history of such language. (Abbott has not distanced himself from Nugent.)
"That’s what the Nazis called Jews to justify the genocide of the Jewish community," Blitzer said in a Feb. 18, 2014, interview. "They called them untermenschen, subhuman mongrels. If you read some of the literature that the Nazis put out there, there is a long history of that specific phrase he used involving the president of the United States."
Nugent is also speaking for the NRA, whose board he serves on, and his comments should be considered something they sanction at least, and agree with at best.
This is what Donald Trump and the nativists in this country have stirred up: Anti-semitic, racist, despicable remarks calling on the haters in this country to denounce others as "evil" and to "shut them down."
Someone ought to shut Nugent down. He's past redemption.
