Last night the Daily Show ran a segment on the slew of new “anti-voter fraud” legislation that’s been passed in Southern states in the months since the Supreme Court decided that racism was no longer a problem and struck down the Voting Rights Act. Specifically highlighted was a recent law passed in North Carolina.
Along the way Aasif Mandvi interviewed Don Yelton, a GOP executive committee member in North Carolina. In addition to getting Yelton to admit on-camera that the new laws were less about preventing fraud and more about making it harder for Democratic voters to vote (“The law is going to kick the Democrats in the butt,” Yelton said.) Yelton added that “one of my best friends is black” as a defense against charges of bigotry. Yes, he really said that. He also tossed in these gems…
“When I was a young man, you didn’t call a black a black — you called him a negra.”
“I had a picture one time of Obama sitting on a stump as a witch doctor, and I posted that on Facebook…for your information I was making fun of my white half of Obama, not the black half.”
“Now you have a black person using the term n*gger this n*gger that and it’s okay for them to do it.”
It was all so ridiculous that at one point Mandvi jumped in to ask, “You know that we can hear you, right?”
UPDATE: The Republican Party forced Yelton out of his position today. The Buncombe County GOP released a statement saying, “Mr. Yelton’s comments are offensive, uniformed, and unacceptable of any member within the Republican Party…In no way are his comments representative of the local or state Republican Party.”
