Ted Nugent: I Honor Blacks Every Day, Barack Obama Engineers Destruction Of Black America
Ted Nugent clearly does not shy away from broaching potentially inflammatory racial topics.
In a Feb. 20 column written for ultra-conservative WorldNetDaily, the
controversial conservative activist and proud National Rifle
Association board member claims that, while he himself "honors blacks"
every day,
President Obama and his Democratic party are engineering the destruction of black America:
With February being Black History Month, historians looking
back at this timeframe studying black Americans will judge it as a
complete and total disaster. And they won’t blame President Bush.
Barack Obama, the guy who received roughly 93 percent of black
American votes, is the clear and present engineer of the destruction of
black America.
Black Americans, Nugent also writes, need to realize that "
dirty Democrat politicians are their true enemy, not their salvation."
Nugent backs up his argument with a series of statistics on what he
insists are the president's destructive "economic and social policies":
The unemployment rate for adult black Americans, he writes, is twice
that of white Americans; teenage black unemployment is 40 percent; the
high school dropout rate for black Americans in some inner cities is
above 50 percent. He also cites the "epidemic" of black-on-black
violence and claims that "75 percent of black kids are now raised in a
single-parent household."
As Nugent does not provide sources for his facts, its difficult to
evaluate some of them. The stats about unemployment are correct,
according to 2011 figures from the Labor Department. But sources differ on single-parent numbers, with The Annie E. Casey Foundation
citing 69 percent. While Nugent does not state which cities' dropout rates he's referring to, the U.S. Department of Education claimed that
40 percent of black students dropped out nationwide during the 2010-2011 academic year.
MSNBC's Morgan Whitaker points out that, although Nugent may have at
least some of his facts straight, "there’s ample evidence" to support
the idea that
President Obama has helped black America, rather than hurt it.
"The president has recently announced a series of proposals designed
to help minority communities, including expanding access to pre-school
and making higher education more affordable," writes Whitaker. "He’s
also pushing to increase pay for those earning a minimum wage, of which
African-Americans are a disproportionately large group. Don’t forget
Obama’s support for the Voting Rights Act, which Republicans are
actively trying to dismantle."
Nugent has recently been on something of a tear, in terms of
offending the African-American community. Last April, he described
himself
as a "black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally." A few months later, he mused whether
the South should have won the Civil War after all. Then, in January, he compared
gun owners to Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks.