Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore — one of two Republican runoff candidates who are currently vying for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat — delivered a campaign speech on Sunday that’s making waves for obvious reasons. The above clip is truly best presented without much commentary because it dives right into WTF territory from the beginning, but Moore really gets the ball rolling at the one-minute mark:
“You know that we were torn apart in the Civil War — brother against brother, North against South, party against party. What’s changed? Now we’ve got blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting.”
He wasn’t done yet, of course. Moore then told his audience that neither a president nor Congress could truly “unite” the country. Instead, he claimed, “It’s going to be God.”
Moore’s head-scratcher of a speech first gained traction on The Hill, although these comments match his usual mindset. Last week, CNN’s K-File reported that (this year) Moore suggested that the 9/11 terror attacks were punishment from God for a collective lapse of faith. In doing so, Moore quoted the Old Testament’s Book of Isaiah 30:12-13 and added a kicker:
“Because you have despised His word and trust in perverseness and oppression, and say thereon … therefore this iniquity will be to you as a breach ready to fall, swell out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instance … Sounds a little bit like the Pentagon, whose breaking came suddenly at an instance, doesn’t it?'”
The Book of Isaiah has been similarly quoted by ultra-right-wing sites and — as CNN handily describes them — “fringe elements of Christianity” to claim an Old Testament prophecy about 9/11. And Moore gleefully jumped on that bandwagon, so yeah, of course he’s also using racially insensitive terminology to refer to Native Americans and Asians while running for Congress.