Staten Island Republican candidate who screamed “Heil Hitler” says she meant to say “mein Führer”
The modern Republican Party spends a great deal of time demonizing and riling themselves into a fury over “antifa” — anti-fascists — while also displaying an increasingly vocal appreciation for the ur-fascist himself, Adolf Hitler.
A Staten Island Republican consultant has found herself in hot water for screaming “Heil Hitler!” at an anti-lockdown protest. At first glance, one might (as I did) have thought this was the incident outside the Capitol Hill on January 6th when a newly elected Republican Congresswoman declared that “Hitler was right about one thing,” but no, this is the second incident in a little over a month where a Republican has invoked history’s most notorious genocider.
Leticia Remauro, who is currently running for borough president, was filmed at a Dec 2. protest against Staten Island’s coronavirus lockdown as sheriff’s deputies closed down businesses. “We’re with the small business community, with Staten Island to stand up for our right — the right to pay taxes so that we can pay the salaries of these good men and women,” railed Remauro in a video that she herself posted and later deleted from Facebook.
“But, not for nothing, sometimes you got to say, `Heil Hitler! — not a good idea to send me here!’”
When reached for comment by the NY Daily News, Remauro apologized and said she “absolutely regrets the choice of words” but also made it clear that she “actually meant to say ‘mein Führer, it’s not a good idea to send me here,'” which is not any better.
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She went on to give a typically Republican double-down: “I apologize profusely that the word I used in trying to create an analogy are offensive,” she said. “But when you think about in Nazi Germany, in Cuba, with Mussolini it starts the same way. They come for your business, your religion, your property, and then for you.”
With such a staggering human toll, it is beyond offensive for anyone to compare the efforts to stop the spread of coronavirus to anything the Nazis did and just another sign of how wildly out of touch with reality the rhetoric on the right-wing has become.
Original reporting by Chris Sommerfeldt and Cathy Burke at the NY Daily News.
Watch the video here:
