Amid near-daily reports of horrific hate crimes against Asian Americans and transgender Americans, Mike Huckabee is under massive criticism for posting a hateful, racist, anti-Asian, transphobic tweet that’s also anti-democracy, amid a rise in vicious and violent hate crimes.
Huckabee is the host of “Huckabee” on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), and is the father of Arkansas GOP gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump White House press secretary. For decades Huckabee has played the part of a conservative Christian, using his faith as a sword and a shield.
“I’ve decided to ‘identify’ as Chinese,” Huckabee tweeted Saturday. “Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my ‘values’ and I’ll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain’t America great?” he asked, mocking the millions of Americans furious about Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp signing the nation’s worst voter suppression bill into law. On Friday Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta and hundreds of corporations and organizations have denounced the legislation designed to make voting even more difficult, especially for the state’s Black and low-income voters.
Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister who ran for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination but failed twice, is the former Arkansas governor. He has a long history of attacking minorities, especially LGBTQ people.
Many across the nation reacted in horror when video of a New York City man attacking a 65-year old Asian American woman in a hate crime, including repeatedly kicking her in the stomach, causing her to fall to the ground, then stomping her head multiple times, went viral last week. Just weeks ago a gunman massacred eight people at a Asian spa in Atlanta. Six of the eight murdered were Asian American.
Huckabee’s attack comes on Holy Saturday, just one day before Easter, a highly important holiday for people around the world of the Christian faith who celebrate what they believe is Christ’s resurrection.
This is far from the first time Huckabee has been accused of racism.
“2020 was the deadliest year for the transgender community,” according to ABC Tampa.
“There were 122 incidents of anti-Asian American hate crimes in 16 of the country’s most populous cities in 2020, an increase of almost 150%,” Voice of America reports.
On social media many expressed their outrage in response to Huckabee’s tweet: