Left-wing Twitter users reportedly went on the attack against U.S. Sen. Tim Scott after the South Carolina Republican delivered the GOP’s primetime rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s Wednesday address to Congress.
According to the Washington Examiner, the phrase “Uncle Tim” trended on Twitter for some period of time following Scott’s remarks before the platform finally blocked it from appearing in its featured section. The trend was apparently a play on “Uncle Tom,” a derogatory term widely regarded as racist that has its roots in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that Scott said Wednesday he had been called in the past, The Hill reported.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway drew attention to the “racist attack” against Scott, who is Black, in a tweet Thursday.
Twitter is choosing to trend a racist attack from the left on Sen. Tim Scott, the black Republican senator from South Carolina. pic.twitter.com/kpyPOHnuXJ
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 29, 2021
“Our healing is not finished”
In his remarks following Biden’s speech, Sen. Scott declared that “America is not a racist country” and defended a new election reform law in Georgia that Democrats including the president have decried as discriminatory.
The Republican also said he has “experienced the pain of discrimination” firsthand, as The Guardian reported. “I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason. To be followed around a store while I’m shopping,” Scott remarked.
“Believe me, I know firsthand our healing is not finished,” he added, according to The Hill. “In 2015, after the shooting of Walter Scott, I wrote a bill to fund body cameras. Last year, after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, I built an even bigger police reform proposal. But my Democratic colleagues blocked it.”
The senator went on: “I extended an olive branch. I offered amendments. But Democrats used the filibuster to block the debate from even happening. My friends across the aisle seemed to want the issue more than they wanted a solution.”
“A different kind of intolerance”
Later in his talk, Scott said he’s “also experienced a different kind of intolerance” at the hands of those on the left.
“I get called Uncle Tom and the n-word by progressives and liberals,” he said, according to The Guardian. After the term re-emerged on Twitter in reference to the South Carolina senator, Scott told Fox News he was disappointed.
“It was upsetting certainly, but it was so disappointing that those people who want to be respected and given the opportunity to live their lives any way they want to, they don’t want the same thing for you and me,” Scott told Fox on Thursday, according to the Washington Examiner.
He went on: “What they want for us is for us to stay in a little, small corner and not go against the tide that they think is America. Their America and my America aren’t the same America, if, in fact, they think that discriminating is the fastest way to end discrimination.”
The post Twitter users respond to rebuttal from GOP Sen. Tim Scott with ‘racist attack,’ says Hemingway first appeared on Conservative Institute.
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