NC GOP Ousts Precinct Chair Who Went Crazy Racist On The Daily Show

The North Carolina Republican Party went into full damage control mode today in a desperate attempt to distance themselves from racist remarks made by Buncombe County precinct chair Don Yelton on The Daily Show. NC Republican Party chairman Claude Pope, asked for Yelton’s resignation today declaring that:

The North Carolina Republican Party finds the comments made by Mr. Yelton to be completely inappropriate and highly offensive.

The Daily Show interview exposed Yelton’s blatant racism and the video went viral shortly after airing on last night’s program. Yelton stumbled and bumbled his way through the interview with Aasif Mandvi, making one racist comment after another. He proclaimed proudly that the law was not racist but that it was intended to “kick the Democrats in the butt”. He then proceeded to explain that he was not racist because he has a black friend, and then he remarked that the voter ID laws are in place to keep lazy college kids and ?lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything? from voting. He added,

I can’t believe we have that many stupid people in North Carolina. People who don’t know how to follow directions and go down there and get a photo ID for free at the DMV. Do we want those people picking your president?

At one point, Aasif Mandvi even offered Yelton a life line saying, “You know we can hear you, right?” However, Yelton kept talking anyway. In a statement, Buncombe County Republican Chair Henry Mitchell also distanced himself from Yelton’s comments saying;

Mr. Yelton’s comments are offensive, uniformed, and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party. In no way are his comments representatives of the local or state Republican Party. Let me make it very clear, Mr. Yelton’s comments do not reflect the belief or feelings of Buncombe Republicans, nor do they mirror any core principle that our party is founded upon. This mentality will not be supported or propagated within our party.

Yet the reality is, Yelton was not asked to resign because he is a racist, but rather because he expressed his racism in such an unsophisticated way. Despite their disavowal of Yelton’s remarks, the Republican Party does propagate his mentality, albeit with more subtlety than Yelton demonstrated.

Blatant racist remarks are said in private company while the wording is more cautious in public. Yet voter suppression efforts designed to suppress African-American turnout and anti-immigration rhetoric used to gin up white voters are precisely a manifestation of racism within the ranks of the GOP.

While the party’s platform is not explicitly racist, Republican voters continue to elect obvious racists, like Iowa’s Steve King and Alaska’s Don Young, to Congress with nary a word of protest from Reince Priebus, or other party leaders. Yelton is the logical manifestation of the GOPs’ Southern Strategy and dog whistle politics that has tacitly embraced racism as a means to garner votes while publicly declaring a colorblind ideology.

Unfortunately, for the Republican Party, Mr. Yelton did not get the memo that overt racism is supposed to be masked by colorblind rhetoric. The Republican leadership will try to distance itself from Yelton’s remarks, but they cannot escape the reality that Yelton is right at home in their party.