Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal admitted earlier this week that he has been posting anonymously on a number of political blogs using a handful of pseudonyms.
Some of the postings attributed to Huppenthal, a Republican, are inflammatory and impolitic. He called food stamp recipients “lazy pigs,” for example, and equated Margaret Sanger’s promotion of abortion for poor black people to the extermination of Jewish people by the Nazis, reports The Arizona Republic.
He also blamed Franklin Roosevelt’s policies during the Great Depression for the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and suggested that Obama’s policies are similar to Roosevelt’s.
Huppenthal has apparently used at least two different screen names to write his screeds. They are Thucydides and Falcon9. He’s been at it since at least 2011.
A group of bloggers at Blog for Arizona, a pro-Democrat outfit, had been maintaining for months that Huppenthal was the man behind the pseudonyms.
On Wednesday, he came clean to the Republic.
“I love talking about public policy, and I have a passion for engaging in debate,” the state school superintendent said in a statement released on Wednesday. “I probably have 300,000 words out on the Internet, and 100 of them are getting me in trouble. When all of your missteps are there all together for people to see, it’s not a pretty picture.”
He also apologized.
“I sincerely regret if my comments have offended anyone,” Huppenthal said.
So what were the blog comments that have landed Huppenthal in hot water out in the Arizona desert? The Phoenix New Times has collected a bunch of them.
On Oct. 15, 2011, Falcon9 wrote:
Our successful small businessmen/job creators are being taxed to death. At most, they should give up 40 cents on the dollar to expanding government burden. But, Obama demands 63 cents. Meanwhile, Obama is rewarding the lazy pigs with Food Stamps (44 million people), air conditioning, free health care, flat screen TV’s (typical of “poor” families).
In his statement, Huppenthal explained that the phrase “lazy pigs” is a reference to a classic folk tale, “The Little Red Hen.” The fable involves “a fat lazy pig” who “refuses to help the little red hen sow her seeds,” he said.
In a June 21, 2012 comment at the Blog for Arizona, Falcon9 declared himself as a bit of a birther:
Obama said he was born in Kenya!!!! If this were a Republican, you would be going nuts demanding those college records.
In another Blog for Arizona comment on Dec. 23, 2011, Falcon9 linked Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies with the rise of Adolf Hitler and compared President Obama’s policies to Roosevelt’s:
Roosevelt’s disastrous economic policies drug down the whole world and directly led to the rise of a no-name hack named Adolph Hitler who was going nowhere until Germany’s economy went into the tank.
Now, we have to suffer the misery again as the current slime in the white house repeat the Roosevelt playbook. Who are the victims? Young African-Americans, recent college graduates and small business job creators. Unemployed, unemployed and bankrupt.
In still another Blog for Arizona comment on Sept. 8, 2013, Huppenthal – this time as Thucydides – spoke of himself in the third person, recalling that he had a slew of Hispanic friends as a high schooler:
Huppenthal grew up in south Tucson, all of his friends were Hispanics. He was the only Caucasian in his social group. Jimmy Ortega, Manny Gonzales, Luis Rodriguez, Charlie Praciado, Marcelino Lucero. Just because he won’t support the “we hate Whitey” curriculum of extreme Chicano activists doesn’t mean he can’t do well among Hispanics.
On September 2, 2013, another one of Huppenthal’s aliases, reflected in the comments section of a conservative blog about the similarities between Charles Darwin, Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler:
When Darwin wrote his treatise on evolution, it was titled “Survival of the Favored Races.” There were two parts to his work, one was to give a foundation to evolution, the other was to explain the dramatic differences between species. As he explained it in his 1859 work, as a species evolves it begins to develop different races. When one of those races develops a superior advantage, it wipes out the genetically inferior race. It was Darwin, not Hitler who named the Germans the master race. It was Darwin who expressed approval of eliminating both Jews and Africans. Hitler worked to eliminate the Jews. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was given the job of eliminating African Americans. Hitler fed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Sanger has fed 16 million African Americans into the abortion mills.
The state schools superintendent seemed to defend this comment in his statement when he said: “I will never apologize for being a pro-life policy maker, or someone who believes in improving conditions for all people.” (RELATED: Unearthed Footage Shows Planned Parenthood Founder’s True Mission)
Huppenthal’s statement, obtained by the Republic, explained that he doesn’t sleep very much and spends his nights reading academic material as well as spouting in blog comment sections. He said he claimed the mantle of anonymity because he believed “that any other” way “would limit a free and open exchange.”
He is also running for re-election soon. The pro-charter schools, pro-private-school vouchers and pro-Common Core state official has said that he does not believe that his blog commentary under various noms de guerre will negatively affect his campaign.
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