Blake Masters Tweets out photo of his three kids monkeying around in a tree at a local park
Blake Masters race with Mark Kelly is getting heated, even entering some unexpected territory.
This story first broke on September 10, 2020 when Senator Kelly was running against then incumbent Republican Senator Martha McSally. And now the issue has come up again in the 2022 race against libertarian-conservative GOP nominee Blake Masters.
Current polls show the two neck-in-neck. According to Trafalgar, a right-leaning pollster, Mark Kelly leads with 46.6% (+1.1%) to Blake Masters – 45.4%.
From The Hill, September 19,
Kelly holds slim lead over Masters in Arizona Senate race: poll
The polling comes roughly 50 days out from the November midterms, and the Arizona Senate race is considered critical for determining which party controls the upper chamber. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the Senate race as ”toss up.”
Human Events editor Jack Posobiec, Tweeted out about the controversy to his 1.5 million followers, saying “Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly apologizes for racist joke comparing Hispanics to monkeys.”
From the original 2020 story in Arizona’s number one newspaper, The Arizona Republic,
Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly apologizes for racist joke
Democratic Senate candidate Mark Kelly apologized on Thursday for an offensive comment he made two years ago while joking about the physiological changes his twin brother experienced after spending a year in space.
Kelly, a retired NASA astronaut, made the remarks during an appearance before the Boy Scouts of America, Northern New Jersey Council.
A video was shot of the event back in 2018. When Kelly first ran for Senate in 2020, a Democrat primary opponent briefly brought the subject up, but it did not gain traction.
This is what Kelly said:
I think the word hasn’t gotten out how bad it is for him [his brother]. You know, it’s gotten so bad, that we recently had to release him back into the wild
He’s like halfway between an Orangutan and a Howler Monkey. We’ve even changed his name to Rodrigo. He lives in the woods. He lives in Eagle Rock Reservation (forest reserve in New Jersey).
His remarks garnered what could be described as nervous laughter by the crowd.
“Shameful video of Mark Kelly making a racist joke to an all-white crowd. He must think people named Rodrigo look like monkeys” — Moses Sanchez
It is unclear where Kelly got the name Rodrigo from. But Rodrigo (bio) is of course, a famous footballer from Spain. He was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and has African/Caribbean features.
Additionally, Rodrigo y Gabriela are a well-known flamenco guitar duo whose music has been featured in Pirates of the Caribbean. See Disney Music.
Moses Sanchez, who is an immigrant from Panama, is the one who originally posted the video. At the time he had this to say:
Shameful video of Mark Kelly making a racist joke to an all-white crowd. He must think people named Rodrigo look like monkeys. Time to move past this type of racism & time for the media to scrutinize Mark Kelly more thoroughly like they would a Republican.
After Posobiec Tweeted out the Sanchez Tweet from 2020, reaction condemning Kelly’s remarks were swift.
Examples:
At the height of the media attention, Sept. 24, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters sent out a simple Tweet – a photo of his three sons climbing around in a tree. Caption read “Campaign volunteers.”
One Blake Masters supporter responded:
Real talk, folks. If @bgmasters compared Hispanics to monkeys like Mark Kelly, his campaign would be over. No apology accepted.
— Rich Baris "The People's Pundit" (@Peoples_Pundit) September 24, 2022
If this guy is actually “racist” or not he did make the mistake of apologizing so he is doomed. Personally, if I had made a comment like that I would clarify that the monkey adjective referred to the behavior, not the race of the children. If anyone assumes that a monkey refers to blacks or hispanics then it must be their own thinking that is in fact “racist”.