If your parents named you “Mark Wayne” and as a nickname, you decided to just stick them two names together and just be “Markwayne,” how many brain cells you think you’d have? Four? Six? Baker’s dozen?
Watch this clip of Oklahoma Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin interviewing witnesses in today’s hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and see how many brain cells you can personally count. (You’ll note that he’s sitting next to Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is officially the stupidest motherfucker in the Senate. This will not affect your counting of the brain cells.)
Because Mullin is so stupid, he wanted to know whether a children’s book about race called Our Skin should be taught in schools, or whether they should teach “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” (If you are not familiar, white racist Christians like that song because its lyrics about Jesus loving children of all colors allow them to feel like they are being accepting with THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM effort humanly possible.)
But first he had to get mad at Bernie Sanders, the committee’s chair:
Mullin noted the committee is run by a “self-proclaimed socialist.”
“I’m not just calling you that, Chairman, you openly say that you’re a socialist in your book, Outsider in the House. The chairman says Bill Clinton is a moderate Democrat. I’m a Democrat socialist,” Mullin continued, warning a socialist has oversight of the U.S. education system.
“That’s over our education system.”
It is a testament to how deranged and yes, uneducated, modern Republican MAGA hogs are that they can’t conceive of the idea that among normal people, “socialist” isn’t an insult, merely a political philosophy. (We’d add that no man named “Markwayne” could likely serviceably explain what “socialism” is, even if the penalty for not doing so was having to carry a Bud Light around a Target while singing “I Feel Pretty.”)
Mullin pulled out the children’s book and read the terrible words in it.
MULLIN: And I’m going to read exactly what this book says. You guys might find it interesting. ‘A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and they deserved more than everybody else.’ This would be taught if we socialize our pre-K system, this would be …
SANDERS: Do you disagree with that? Findings in the book?
MULLIN: One thousand percent.
We guess he “disagrees” with the idea that white people made up race. (A group of white people invented race, and continued inventing it for several hundred years, in different contexts.)
Mullin doesn’t want to teach children that there was a time when people with white skin weren’t considered all parts of one race, we guess, even though that is an indisputable fact. He wants to teach this:
MULLIN: How about we teach ‘Jesus Loves Me’? How about, how about this? And teaching Jesus loves and loves the little children. The lyrics go ‘red and yellow, black and white. They’re all precious in our sight.’ Now, which one would you think would be better? I’ll ask everybody on the panel. Which is better to teach?”
That’s two different songs. What a stupid, stupid goddamned idiot, mixing up the preschool Jesus songs like that, stupid motherfucker.
“This, that is a story that was made up to teach our kids, three-year-olds, who have no idea what race is,” he continued, holding up the book.
Which is why you teach them things, so that they learn things. This is called “education.”
“Now all of a sudden is being taught that white people said this as a truth. Someone prove to me that this is a truth that white people developed race, that white people developed that, that all of a sudden that was our word that we developed,” Mullin continued.
Oh my fucking God.
So then Mullin started badgering each and every witness, asking should they teach that whiteness was created — which we guess is a very offensive idea to him! — or whether Jesus loves the little children. “WHICH ONE IS BETTER?” he yapped and yapped at the witnesses.
“If you don’t want to answer my question, that’s fine. Let’s move on down the panel. Which one is better to be taught? This book or the ‘Jesus Loves Me’ lyrics that say everybody’s skin doesn’t matter. They’re all precious in his sight,” Mullin continued.
“I think it’s important to teach that all children are seen and valued for who they are, and that’s…” replied another witness before Mullin cut her off.
“But why do you teach this? Don’t you think that other people are saying that white kids are to blame? It’s exactly what they’re going to teach, is exactly what it is, ma’am,” Mullin shot back.
Why is it totally normal to these people to think that if children are taught real history, little young white children will immediately be blamed and shamed? Why are they such fucking MILKTOASTS about all this?
“I disagree. First, it is important that we teach Jesus and Jesus is what we teach,” replied Cheryl Morman – President of the Virginia Alliance for Family Child Care Associations.
“So which one is better?” Mullin demanded.
Morman replied, “But reality is…”
Mullin cut her off, “Do you think this.”
“Could she answer the question, please?” Sanders then interjected.
“I don’t want reality. I’m asking the question which one is better?”
And that’s when everybody laughed at him.
“Got it on tape,” another senator could be heard saying on the microphone.
“Misspoke,” Mullin conceded.
No he didn’t.
“So what I’m saying is, which one is which? Which one is better to be taught?” Mullin demanded yet again.
“Mr. Chairman, is it this, or is it or is it the Jesus?” he continued.
Is it this, or is it the Jesus?
These are the inbred MAGA cow people who want to control your child’s education in America.
Oh my fucking God.
OPEN THREAD!
[Mediaite]
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