CORNERSTONE, TENNESSEE — Donald Trump surrogate and State Republican Representative Tom Thompaulsen is defending comments made by a fellow Republican in Tennessee this week about rounding up Syrian refugees in their state and kicking them out.
“I think what Chairman Casada was trying to say,” Thompaulsen said, “is that out of an abundance of caution for our national security, as well as security in the State of Tennessee, we should assume that all people from Syria are conspiring against us. You know, like we did with the Japanese Americans during World War II. That didn’t have any long lasting and negative impacts on Japanese Americans, or on our moral high ground did it?”
In an interview with a newspaper, Tennessee State House GOP Caucus Chairman Glen Casada said that he was “not worried about what a bureaucrat in D.C. or an unelected judge thinks” and that people in his state “need to gather [the Syrian refugees] up and politely take them back to the ICE center and say, ‘They’re not coming to Tennessee, they’re yours.'”
Critics of Casada said the language he was using was xenophobic, but Thompaulsen says it was “pragmatic truth that the American people need to deal with.” Thompaulsen said, “It’s not the fault of the Republicans that this administration has allowed all these potentially dangerous people into the country after being very heavily vetted.” He also said that “just because they were vetted really carefully before, that doesn’t mean we just trust them no matter what.”
“Look, if lame brained liberals want to house these Syrian refugees that we have put through an exhaustive screening process to make themselves feel superior,” Thompaulsen said, “that’s fine. But if they’re so concerned about us kicking them out of our states, I have a solution. Let’s just put the refugees in the FEMA camps that Obama had initially built to put us all into when he declared martial law, canceled next year’s election, took all our guns away, and forced us to get gay married to each other while performing third-trimester abortions.”
According to Rep. Thompaulsen, Tennessee alone has “22 separate secret and publicly known FEMA camps” that “Obama had intended to use as his own personal internment camps while he brought down America through his socialist policies of slightly-regulated free market capitalism in the vein of Reaganomics that has steadily brought us out of the worst recession of our lifetimes to the point that the unemployment rate is now the lowest its been since before the crash.” Those camps, he says, “are ideal for storing large numbers of people you fear out of nothing but religious-based intolerance for their religion.”
“I don’t get what all the fuss is about, really,” Thompaulsen said as his press conference was winding down, “is it not the epitome of American freedom to round-up a populace out of fear and paranoia? Let’s ask the Native Americans. Let’s ask the black people who went from the plantations to a life of forced impoverishment at the hands of share cropping and Jim Crow. When we Republicans talk about restoring our traditional values, and we talk about taking us back to a simpler time, guess what was happening back in that time? Yes! You guessed it religious and or race-based discrimination.”
Thompaulsen told the media that he was “absolutely sure that history would vindicate” those who advocated either throwing the refugees out of the state or locking them away in camps. “Sometimes you have trample over someone or a large group of someones’ constitutional rights in order to make scared, old, white people feel less scared,” he said, “and don’t blame the Republicans for being the only ones willing to persecute widows and orphans over things they literally had nothing to do with other than fleeing for their lives to escape.”
Follow James on Twitter @JamboSchlarmbo.
