In yet another infuriating yet also entertaining moment out of Congress, a relatively unknown but nevertheless woke and awful Democrat, Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-CA), went berserk and started screaming at Republicans for having mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., declaring them to be unworthy of mentioning him.
For reference, the late-July hearing in which the incident occurred took place in the Health Care and Financial Services Committee. Titled “Sacrificing Excellence for Ideology: The Real Cost of DEI,” the hearing focused on the major costs to America of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs.
Rep. Simon’s freakout came after Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) sounded off on DEI, saying, during a lengthy speech on the problems with DEI, “To me, DEI stands for ‘didn’t earn it.’” He added that DEI is “disastrous… Marxist, it destroys innovation and motivation.” He later quoted from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to back up his point, saying that people should be judged based on their character rather than on their race.
That led to Rep. Simon freaking out and snapping at him, snapping that he hadn’t studied King like she had and so he shouldn’t get to quote him. She began by yelling, “4 out of the 5 of you last year posted on your social media the words of Dr. King.” She added, “Very few of you have read and studied and have sat in Ebenezer Baptist Church, so I would ask you: You keep Dr. King’s name out of your mouth.”
Rambling about King yet further, she declared (historically accurately, given his support for affirmative action) that King and other Civil Rights figures would have supported DEI programming of the sort Re. McGuire was attacking and would have been infuriated by the ongoing discussion surrounding it.
She snapped, “If you, like me and the many scholars who will be watching, studied King, you know that he and the mothers and the fathers of the civil rights movement, of the movement for emancipation, not only would be struck by the conversations in this room, but would be shattered by the consequence of lies, of hatred, of abuse of this administration in the name of folks who worked to make this country more free.”
Not done, she kept rambling about King and using his name in vain, equating him with the Biblical commandment about taking God’s name in vain, saying, “Today’s hearing says quietly, and actually out loud, who the majority believe is allowed to belong in this country. They used Dr. King’s name in deep vain, who has a place in the hierarchy that was never meant to be questioned.”
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And, yelling at Republicans for not wanting to push Marxist interpretations of history on high schoolers, she said, “It is a bigotry. It is a hypocrisy. Republicans, like I said before, will quote Dr. King all day, will bring forth Lincoln and will talk about Frederick Douglass in the same breath that they are gutting civil rights offices in our governments, in the same breath where they seek to ban AP African-American studies that tells the true story of this country.”
Watch her here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video