Maine Governor Paul LePage, in a press conference on the 27th of August, once again made inflammatory statements about black and Hispanic drug dealers in the state, even while claiming their race didn’t matter to him.
“Look, the bad guy is the bad guy, I don’t care what color he is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy and the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, then you shoot at red.”
LePage addressed State House Minority Leader Ken Fredette (R-Newport), “Don’t you – Ken you’ve been in uniform? You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”
LePage is no stranger to controversy. His off-the-cuff and often over the top comments have been a constant part of his tenure. Early in his tenure as Governor, he refused to attend Martin Luther King Jr. events or to meet with representatives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
He also has fought against same-sex marriage, against transgender rights, and vetoed a bill against conversion therapy.
He has previously claimed that drug dealers were coming to main from out of state, stating at a town hall meeting on the 6th of January, 2016, that “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty; these types of guys, they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”
On the 24th of this Month, he was again asked about this statement. In response, LePage denied being a racist, but claimed that a binder he had been putting together on drug arrests in Maine backed him up.
“Ninety-plus per cent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people”
Asked later to share the binder in question with reporters, LePage again pushed his racist narrative.
“Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers. You ought to look into that.”
He then stormed out of the meeting, telling the reporters, “you make me so sick.”
The binder in question, 148 pages in length, only shows approximately 40% black and Hispanic people account for the cases presented. 60% are Caucasian. Lost in this, of course, is that the race of a drug dealer is irrelevant to the crime committed.
Watch the press conference below:
Image via screen capture from video source.