Dan Whitfield, “Progressive” Racist for U.S. Senate

Following our previous post on cosplay Senate candidate Dan Whitfield, Dan Whitfield reacted in the totally normal way of putting out a 90+ minute video in which he demonstrated that he doesn’t understand much of anything that is going on. While my prior focus had been Whitfield false statements about his pending appeal, that prior post caused a reader to tip me off about an interesting comment on Whitfield’s campaign’s Facebook page.

I apologize for the quality of that picture. Whitfield deleted the comment from his Facebook page before I was able to get a proper screenshot. Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough by this comment to reach out to the author and poke around a bit.

During that conversation, the comment author again mentioned Whitfield’s history of racist actions and comments. When I asked for examples, he provided the following screenshots from a month before the 2012 election (the red and blue redactions are people related to Whitfield):

Now, a few things. First, before someone chalks it up to “it was a long time ago” or “he was a kid” or whatever, Dan Whitfield was a 25-year-old man at the time that he referred to President “Nobama” as a “monkey.”1 This was Obama’s second election, so we had already had roughly four years of the first black president being pretty constantly attacked with racial epithets, especially online. Moreover, the “Nobama” label, while ferociously unclever and dull, makes it clear that Whitfield was opposed to President Obama–a position that Whitfield maintained as recently as March 2019–making the “monkey” comment even less believable as an innocent mistake or something that he did not intend to be racial in tone.

All of that is bad enough on its own; if Whitfield is saying things like that online, after all, just imagine what he says in private. But it is even more jarring when you realize that, less than a month ago, Dan Whitfield was trying to get President Obama to endorse Whitfield’s quixotic Senate run!

Apparently, Whitfield’s racism takes a back seat to his unyielding desire to get attention for pretending like he is a viable Senate candidate.

There are myriad reasons at this point for someone not to support Dan Whitfield or to donate money to him. His not being on the ballot is a big one, but there is also his constant ignorance of what federal and state campaign-finance laws allow him to do with money that he raises in this 2020 Senate race.

Even if none of those are a dealbreaker for you, however, I would certainly hope that anyone who still backs Whitfield because “he’s a progressive” would take a big step back and ask themselves just how progressive he is–or just reflective of your values he can be–if he was calling President Obama (or any black person!) a “monkey” on Facebook fewer than eight years ago.