Earlier this month, the Republicans won control of the Nevada Assembly, the lower chamber of the state legislature. However, Ira Hansen, the man poised to lead that new majority as speaker, is in full damage control mode before even being sworn in. How’s that possible? A decade’s worth of newspaper columns have come to light that have exposed Hansen as one of the most extremist and bigoted people to hold elected office in recent memory. While he has made a weak effort to apologize, it shouldn’t even begin to be enough to save his job.
Hansen is in his third term representing a large swath of northern Nevada, though the bulk of his district’s population is located in Sparks, a suburb of Reno. For those who wonder how it was possible for him to be in line for the speakership, since 2010 assemblymen have been limited to six terms (12 years). On Thursday, the Reno News & Review, an alt-weekly, published an exhaustive review of 13 years of columns Hansen wrote in his hometown paper, the Sparks Tribune. Some of the lowlights:
- Just before Tim McVeigh’s execution, Hansen claimed that the Oklahoma City bombing was a false flag orchestrated by the Clinton administration. His evidence? The Murrah Building was torn down “before any meaningful investigation could occur,” and anti-government sentiment took a nosedive after the bombing after the people were “masterfully manipulated by the Clinton administration.”
- Hansen claims that women don’t belong in the military, “except in certain limited fields.” He also thinks that if a male soldier looks at a woman “with ‘longing in their eyes,'” that man is setting himself up for a sexual harassment complaint.
- He has argued that blacks aren’t grateful enough to whites for ending slavery, calling the “deliberate ignoring” of whites’ role in freeing the slaves “a disgrace that Negro leaders should own up to.”
- He claims that Democrats and blacks have what amounts to “a master-slave relationship” in which Democrats supposedly know what is best for the “simple minded darkies.”
- After learning that Sparks High School had been classified as at-risk, he wrote that it was “a polite way of saying it has a high minority population.”
- He claims that gangs and criminal activity are “dominated by immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants.”
- He seems to subscribe to the extremist shibboleth that child molesters are gay, claiming that there is a “grossly disproportionate” percentage of male homosexuals in child molestation cases.
Want to see more? Andrew Barbano, who was a longtime colleague of Hansen’s at the Tribune, has collected samples of Hansen’s work which can be read here.
Needless to say, condemnation came fast and hard from across the spectrum. The Reno-Sparks chapter of the NAACP demanded Hansen’s ouster as speaker-designate, saying that many of the legislators elected in the massive Republican wave that swept through Nevada may not know that Hansen has “beaten the drum of intolerance for decades.” State senate minority leader Aaron Ford tweeted that reading Hansen’s bigoted views made him “nauseous,” and later said that he was dismayed to have to tell his children how anyone could be elected after making such disgusting comments. On the Republican side, U. S. Senator Dean Heller said Hansen’s sentiments “have no place in public discourse,” and Governor Brian Sandoval called them “abhorrent” and called for him to “answer questions about his previous statements himself.”
Hansen tried–and failed–to give such an explanation earlier today. While saying that he was sorry for making comments that “offended many Nevadans,” he claimed they had been “taken out of context” in order to make it appear they were “intentionally hurtful and disrespectful.” Rather, he intended for them to be provocative. Um, Ira? You can be provocative without resorting to hateful language and conspiracy theory.
To my mind, Hansen isn’t alone in blame for this travesty. There is no way that Hansen would have even made it past the Republican primary if he’d been adequately vetted.? I’m reminded of a similar situation in South Carolina in 2010, when Alvin Greene came from literally out of nowhere to upset Vic Rawl, the Democrats’ favored candidate to oust Jim DeMint. Greene had no campaign organization to speak of–no yard signs, no Website, nothing. This led to charges that he was a Republican plant. However, it was only after the primary that it was discovered he was facing felony obscenity charges for showing a pornographic image to a female student at the University of South Carolina and then propositioning her. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that had this come out BEFORE the primary, we wouldn’t have even had any discussion about whether he was a real candidate or a plant. All somebody had to do was check public records on Greene before the primary. Simply put, the South Carolina press failed to do its job–and as a result, DeMint pretty much got handed a second term. The failure by Nevada’s mainstream press is equally egregious in my book. The News & Review did something that should have been done when Hansen first ran for the Assembly in 2010. And because they failed to do so, a man who is morally unfit to be dog catcher is now poised to stand third in the line of succession to the governorship.
Regardless of what the Republicans in the Nevada Assembly decide to do, the ball is in Hansen’s court. He needs to save himself and the state further embarrassment by not only standing down as speaker-designate, but resigning from the Assembly. In light of his past columns and his laughable claim that they were taken out of context, this is the only acceptable solution.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
