Last year, Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, a Black man, was giving a speech to a group of people and he talked about how bad slavery and colonization was during colonial times. He then criticized the Republican movement trying to prevent schools from teaching this part of history. Right wing radio squawker and hack Dan O'Donnell took a highly edited clip of the speech in a lame effort to make Barnes look like he was anti-American:
EXCLUSIVE: Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor and Democrat Senate candidate Mandela Barnes (@TheOtherMandela) on America: "Things were bad. Things were terrible. The founding of this nation? Awful!" pic.twitter.com/0GhKhhhaUY
— Dan O'Donnell (@DanODonnellShow) July 3, 2022
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel gives a more complete sense of what Barnes had actually said (emphasis mine):
Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is running in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, is coming under fire for comments he made nearly a year ago about the teaching of slavery and the founding of the country.
"Imagine being so ashamed of how we got to this place in America that you outlaw teaching it," Barnes said in an apparent reference to slavery.
[...]
"Things were terrible," Barnes said. "The founding of this nation? Awful. You know, but we are here now and we should commit ourselves to doing everything we can do to repair the harm because it still exists today.
"The harm, the damage, whether it was colonization or whether it was slavery. The impacts are felt today and they're going to continue to be felt unless we address it in a meaningful way."
Wisconsin Republicans, thinking that they had a golden gotcha moment, immediately went on the attack. The state Republican party claimed that Barnes was trying to dismantle the country because he hates it. In other words, they think that to bring our country, which they claim is the greatest in the world, is to teach its children history.
Barnes' predecessor, Becky Kleefisch, went so far as to demand that Governor Evers call out Barnes for his "awful comments." Kleefisch, who is now running for governor, also made the campaign promise that she would ban CRT from being taught and was seeing CRT where it wasn't. She's also the person who said that same sex marriage was like bestiality or marrying a table or a lamp.
The Republicans are terrified of Barnes. He is one of the Democrats running to take on Ron Johnson in November. He is easily the most progressive of all the candidates and has been consistently leading in the polls and in fundraising. The thought of Wisconsin electing its first Black senator sits as well with them as when the nation elected its first Black president. They have good reason to be afraid since RoJo's idea of patriotism is hanging around with Putin on the Fourth of July and trying to overthrow democracy by cheating on an election.
And now that Barnes has shown that he's willing to take on their racism, the Republicans are shaking in their hoods.
