“I’m not Going to Back up from this Fight”- Congressman Brooks on War on Whites Comment

Congressman Mo Brooks’s vow came at an August 14th meeting of the Huntsville Tea Party Organization, which saw Brooks take the floor to address a crowded gym. Congressman Brooks (R) has served Alabama’s 5th congressional district in Washington D.C. since 2011, and recently made national headlines and generated considerable controversy by claiming on The Laura Ingraham Show that Democrats have launched a “war on whites.” Brooks spoke for an hour on a variety of subjects including immigration, jobs, the economy, the crises in Iraq and Ferguson, Missouri, and of course Democrats’ “war on whites.”

In the course of his address Congressman Brooks discussed a presentation to the House Democratic Caucus two years ago, which he believes outlines Democrats’ strategy for this war on whites, citing a 2012 Washington Examiner article by Joel Gehrke, titled “House Dems Trained to Make Race the Issue,” which states:

The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicated that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with bias, conscious or unconscious.

Brooks claims that this is evidence of a larger conspiracy perpetrated by Democrats with the goal of driving a wedge between American voters in order to fragment and discourage the Republican voting base. In his speech Congressman Brooks stated that our goal should be to bring Americans together, but that:

The President and the Democrats, for a number of election cycles now have tried to divide America based on race, based on sex, based on greed, based on envy, based on class warfare, and based on any number of other things.

The Congressman believes that Democrats cannot win in policy discussions so they must fall back to this tactic, which he criticized as repugnant. Brooks went on to portray himself as personally harmed by these tactics, and vowed to continue to fight against them, though he did not comment on specifically what he would do:

I’m the messenger that is quoting what the democrats are doing, and they’re trying to demonize me as being what? A racist.

As my mom would say, I don’t often back up from these kind of fights, and I’m not going to back up from this fight, because what the Democrats are doing is a subversion of the principles that have made this a great nation.

In attacking the President and The Democratic Party as a whole, Congressman Brooks can be seen as walking the edge of a knife. While his comments have generated much support from conservatives in his district, this move is not without risk, and could lead to intense backlash in Washington. In particular, his comments on the president could lead to ill will towards him, and perhaps by extension, his district, from the Oval Office. Furthermore, as some have pointed out, an administration that oversaw sequestration and the furlough of 15,000 Redstone Arsenal employees, many of whom are Brooks’s constituents, might not hesitate to retaliate.

By Joseph Mayes, Southern Torch Political Reporter