‘What Did He Say?!?’ Pelosi Stunned As Reporter Reads Trump-Backed Candidate’s Remarks Deriding Women Governing

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was stunned when a reporter read comments from Trump-backed congressional candidate John Gibbs denigrating women’s intelligence.

Gibbs, an election denier and former Trump administration official whom former President Donald Trump endorsed in November, has a history of inflammatory comments that include those he made as a student and founder of something he called the Society for the Critique of Feminism.

On Thursday afternoon, Speaker Pelosi held her weekly press conference, at which a reporter asked Pelosi to comment on those remarks, some of which Pelosi was hearing for the first time

The reporter, Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, took pains to clarify he did not share Gibbs’s views:

JAKE SHERMAN: Madam Speaker?

SPEAKER PELOSI: Yes, Jake.

JAKE SHERMAN: I wonder what you think – John Gibbs, who is running for House in Michigan, said that women don’t possess the characteristics necessary to govern.

SPEAKER PELOSI: Wait a minute. I want everybody to hear what you’re saying. Please speak up. What did he say?!?

JAKE SHERMAN: And men were smarter. I’m not adopting this position.

Speaker Pelosi. I just want them to know what that candidate said.

JAKE SHERMAN: Women don’t ‘think logically about broad and abstract ideas in order to deduce a suitable conclusion without relying upon emotional reasoning.’

SPEAKER PELOSI: Is that what he said?

JAKE SHERMAN: Uh‑huh.

SPEAKER PELOSI: I thought he said that passage of the –

JAKE SHERMAN:  He also said that –

SPEAKER PELOSI: – Nineteenth Amendment made us a totalitarian state when women had the right to vote. Didn’t he say something like that, too?

JAKE SHERMAN: I was trying to keep it short.

SPEAKER PELOSI: And didn’t he – and didn’t he also – be part of a movement to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment for women to have the right to vote?

What do I think of that? I think I hear something like that every day around here when people say that women shouldn’t be able to make their choices about contraception or their own reproductive health.

That’s a sign of disrespect for women. What he’s saying is outrageous. I don’t think many Members up here would subscribe to that. But the insult to women’s intelligence is one that exists in many forms around here.

Watch above via C-SPAN.