GOP Candidate Who Said His Hitler Praise Wasn’t Hitler Praise Defended Obama ‘Gorilla’ Insult By Calling Black People ‘Dumb’ and Brainwashed

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Republican House candidate Carl Paladino has a very bad habit of spontaneously offering bigoted comments and then complaining that people are taking them out of context, even though the context never seems to help.

The most recently-uncovered moment where Paladino would have benefitted from a generous quantity of duct tape across his mouth came in a radio interview in which he defended himself against allegations of racism when he said Michelle Obama should “return to being a male” and be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe” to live in a cave with a female gorilla, by saying that Black people were “held hungry and dumb” and “captive in our inner cities” so they could be “conditioned” to vote for Democrats.

Yes, you read that correctly. He defended himself against accusations of racism for calling the former First Lady a male gorilla by saying Black people are stupid and brainwashed.

Paladino is a real estate developer with a previous failed run in 2010 for New York Governor (he won the GOP nomination and got walloped by Democrat Andrew Cuomo 63 percent to 33 percent) and a notoriously pugnacious tenure as the New York co-chair of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, threatening his fellow Republicans to support Trump or risk losing “what’s left of your pathetic careers in government.”

Now he’s running in the Republican primary for New York’s 27th Congressional District, an open seat after Rep. Chris King (R-NY) dropped his re-election bid after he said he supported gun control measures in the wake of the mass shootings at a Buffalo grocery store and a Uvalde, Texas elementary school and lost all of his Republican endorsements.

Mediaite wrote about Paladino just over a week ago, for his comments during a February 2021 radio interview with Buffalo, New York Station WBEN where he brought up Adolf Hitler completely unprompted in response to the show host’s question about how politicians could inspire people to get involved. Paladino praised Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today” and called him “inspirational” and “someone that is a doer, has been there and done it,” as opposed to New York Republicans, who he derided as RINOs and “sound asleep.”

Both Paladino and House GOP Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), one of his most prominent endorsers, attempted to walk back his Hitler fandom as being taken “out of context,” but as I wrote on June 9:

To be blunt, when rational people mention Hitler, they don’t focus on his watercolor paintings or expansion of Germany’s Autobahn highway system. That’s because the annihilation he oversaw of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, physically and mentally disabled people, political dissidents, and other innocents was the genocidal turd in the punch bowl of basic human decency.

Nothing else Hitler did matters, because the World War he launched, the Nuremberg Laws he passed, the Endlösung der Judenfrage he sought to implement, are an irredeemable and unremovable stain that dishonors his entire life’s work.

There is simply no context that justifies Paladino’s choice to bring up Hitler as an aspirational example for politicians, especially in light of his past history of incendiary comments, most recently promoting the absurd claim that the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings were false flag operations.

The newest cringe-inducing Paladino-ism arises from comments he made to ArtVoice, a local Buffalo weekly paper, in December 2016 that asked local prominent people what they would like to see in 2017. Among his wishes for the New Year were for Michelle Obama “to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,” former President Barack Obama to die from mad cow disease he caught from having sex with a cow, and to be buried in a cow pasture next to Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, whose fate Paladino describes as “being convicted of sedition and treason” and dying in prison after “a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.” Jarrett was born in Iran.

Shortly after that article was published, Paladino defended himself on WBEN.

“I don’t think of myself in any way as racist,” Paladino said after calling Michelle Obama a male gorilla, fantasizing about Barack Obama having sex with cows, and saying the Persian-American Jarrett deserved to be murdered in prison by a terrorist.

Paladino then argued he was being called a racist and sexist because he fought for school choice, and then complained that Black people were too dumb and — “you can’t teach them differently” — brainwashed by the Democratic Party:

“Someday, somebody like a Donald Trump is gonna come in and force that stuff on them — OK. And maybe then, OK, we’ll get some change because the Black people deserve better,” he said discussing Buffalo schools. “They shouldn’t be held captive in our inner cities. They shouldn’t be held hungry and dumb so as to provide a base for the Democratic Party, that’s what’s been going on. You can’t teach them differently because they’ve been so conditioned to think that way. And that is so, so wrong. And I’ll fight for that stuff until the day I die.”

Predictably, Paladino is dragging out the tired “out of context” defense for this latest foot-in-mouth moment, complaining that CNN was “once again taking my comments out of context from years ago” by reporting on the actual words he said. CNN’s KFile reporters, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, included the full quote as well as the audio clip of Paladino’s comments.

The bigger problem is that, just like his fawning over Hitler, there simply isn’t any context that makes calling a Black woman a male gorilla anything other than a grotesquely racist remark. Claiming that the only reason he’s being called a racist is because Black people are “dumb” and “conditioned” by the Democrats resonates more as a confession than a defense. Every new comment he adds to this Russian nesting doll of racism only makes the situation worse.