Just as the Republican Party is trying to fine-tune its image amid the escalating immigration battle, a prominent Alabama Republican has come out swinging against Democrats, accusing leaders of waging a “war on whites,” The Hill reports.
U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks made the assertion Monday on the air with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. He was responding to National Journal columnist Ron Fournier’s comment on Fox News Sunday that the Republican Party is becoming “the party of white people,” the report says. He brushed back the notion that “the more conservative GOP bloc’s position on immigration is hurting his own party,” The Hill writes.
“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party,” he said during the interview, according to The Hill. “And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well, that’s not true.”
But Brooks didn’t stop there. He went on to defend “his party’s rigid stance against any kind of immigration reform that isn’t [focused] primarily on deportation, arguing that opposing a pathway to citizenship and further immigration is beneficial to all races,” Salon writes.
“It doesn’t make any difference if you’re a white American, a black American, a Hispanic American, an Asian American, or if you’re a woman or a man,” Brooks said, according to Salon. “Every single demographic group is hurt by falling wages and lost jobs.”
So it appears that rhetoric is more important to Brooks than, say, Republican voting records. Even Ingraham described the congressman’s comments as “a little out there,” Talking Points Memo pointed out.