The congressional intern Mediaite cast as a white supremacist Wednesday is actually black, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
Nate Washington is a black conservative attending Western Kentucky University and is a former intern of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton.
Mediaite contributor Caleb Ecarma implied that Nate Washington is a white supremacist by linking his use of the term “cuck” to alt-right and neo-Nazi groups and framing his political views as racist, all the while leaving out mention of his race.
“He 100 percent tried to cast me as a white supremacist,” Washington told The DCNF.
Washington referred to House Speaker Paul Ryan as a “cuck,” to the British as “faggots” and to Americans as “the superior race,” Ecarma reported, based on a recording he obtained while talking to Washington at a party. Washington told TheDCNF Ecarma recorded him and his two roommates without their permission.
“The recordings were all recorded without my or either of my roommates’ consent. I’m not going to speak on anything that was said during that recording,” Washington told The DCNF. “But I was certainly intoxicated at the time and so was everyone else.”
The relevant text:
The term ‘cuck’ originated in political spaces during 2015, as white nationalists and the far-right began calling Republicans they deemed too moderate ‘cuckservatives.’ The word is racially charged, as ‘cuck’ that Joan Walsh described as a pornographic genre ‘in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man.’
In reference to Ryan, the ‘cuck’ slur towards him originated on alt-right and white supremacist websites. Ryan has been deemed a ‘cuck’ from white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, neo-Nazi websites The Daily Stormer and Stormfront and alt-right pundit Mike Cernovich. Ryan even received the title ‘Cuck of The Year For 2016‘ by the Reddit page President Trump used to host an online town hall event.
The term “cuck” does have strong links to the alt-right in this political climate. However, it’s hard to deduce that someone is a white supremacist just because they use it. In most conservative circles, the word is used to mean a rather spineless person who lets the opposition run all over him.
Regardless of whether “cuck” is a racially charged word, Ecarma should note the person who used it is black to give the comments better context. Otherwise, it appears that a white nationalist or neo-Nazi is saying it.
The same principle applies to Washington’s comments about Americans as a “superior race.”
“He continued his conversation with this reporter by saying ‘Americans are the superior race to everyone in the world … we’re superior people’ — his evidence for such an assertion came from America’s wartime record,” Ecarma wrote.
Once again, leaving out Washington’s race makes the heavy implication that he is a white nationalist or neo-Nazi.
Ecarma also made a point of noting Washington holds conservative political views liberals often cast as racist, such as his support for Trump’s proposed wall on the southern border, and his view that health care is not a “right.” He also notes Washington was interning for Cotton, who is a “Trump ally” and supports the president’s travel ban on certain Muslim-majority countries.
Ecarma told The DCNF the decision to leave Washington’s race out of the piece had nothing to do with accusing him of being a white supremacist or racist, and suggested The DCNF improve “reading comprehension” skills.
“Not the implication at all, I was only stating what extreme portion of the right-wing that the slur originated from in context to Ryan,” he told The DCNF. “I also mentioned the ‘far right’ using the term, not just white nationalists. I never accused Nate of being a white supremacist–reading comprehension matters.”
He also offered an alternative view to the events at the party. Washington was the one who approached him first, he told The DCNF.
“Nate approached me specifically at an event in Alexandria a few weeks ago, he recognized me from Twitter/my pieces and said he wanted to talk to me about his work in Cotton’s office,” he said. “He then began spouting off all his controversial views to me directly.”
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