The "N" Word

The St. Louis Tea Party, Andrew Breitbart's website Big Government, and Fox News have been claiming for almost a year now that tea party merchandise seller Kenneth Gladney was called "the 'n' word" prior to an altercation at a town hall meeting last August. They used this allegation to claim that various liberals are racist and that the case should have been classified as a hate crime (based on their dubious claims that Reverand Elston McCowan attacked Gladney first). Dana Loesch continued this trend yesterday, but amazingly undermined the claims they'd been making for the past 11 months, apparently without even recognizing that she did so!

Yesterday, Loesch wrote a blog post titled, "Elston McCowan, NAACP, Others Laugh at Calling Kenneth Gladney the N Word." This is the video she used to try to back up her claim (interesting note: despite the fact that Loesch claims to be massively influential on the internet, only 328 people viewed her video at the time of me writing this):



What is amazing about Loesch using this as "evidence" is that Elston McCowan was explaining that the word he used was "negro." Negro, as anyone dimly aware would know, is not the "n" word. The "n" word is a word that is completely unacceptable for people to say in public, and it is quite clear that all of the times that the right-wing media was claiming that "the 'n' word" was used, they were implying that this more serious word was used. By posting this video as evidence for her claim, Loesch is admitting that she and the rest of the right-wing media complex have been misleading the public and the media for the past 11 months. Loesch and her fellow right-wing hacks were claiming that this should be called a "hate crime" because one black man called another black man negro.

Now I'm not going to pretend to be an expert in what contexts the word "negro" is appropriate. In fact, I know there's actually quite a bit of debate about that subject as was evident during the census. But the fact is that it is not the "n" word, and the right-wing media has been decieving people about this issue for nearly a year.