On Wednesday (April 28), President Joe Biden addressed a joint session of the House and Senate for the first time since taking office, and Republicans sent South Carolina’s African-American Senator Tim Scott (R) to deliver a rebuttal speech. That night, “Uncle Tim” took Twitter by storm, even though it seemed to violate the platform’s previously stated policy on hate speech.
Since 1966, when a sitting president delivers a State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, a member of the opposition party will then deliver a rebuttal speech that will be broadcast directly after the president’s speech. This year, Scott took on the job.
“We just listened to President Biden’s first address to Congress. Our president seems to be a good man.” Scott said in the speech. He then criticized Biden for failing to deliver on his promise of unity to Americans and said Biden and the Democrats are “pushing us further apart.”
Scott went on to denounce the Democrats’ attack on Georgia’s election laws, arguing that the newly passed bill ensures the integrity of Georgia’s elections while allowing Georgians to vote.
Scott also made a point of emphasizing that America is not a racist country, that fighting discrimination with a different type of discrimination is regressive, and that “it is wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down the debate in the present.
Despite Scott’s defense of America, many on the left attacked Scott on Twitter, which led to the term “Uncle Tim” quickly becoming popular on Twitter.
Uncle Tim” alludes to the character “Uncle Tom” from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin “. In the novel, Uncle Tom is portrayed as a submissive black slave. It is a derogatory and offensive term used to refer to blacks who are seen as subservient to whites. The term is widely considered to be racist.
“Twitter has chosen to popularize the left’s racist attacks on South Carolina’s black Republican Senator Scott.” Mollie Hemingway, senior editor of the conservative online magazine The Federalist, wrote in a tweet Wednesday.
“Twitter is still relentlessly making racist attacks against Republican Senator Scott popular here,” Hemingway added, apparently because his highly effective speech stole Biden’s thunder.
Will Ricciardella, editor of the Washington Examiner, questioned, “Not only does this not violate Twitter’s hate speech policy, they actually allowed it to become a trending topic, which has a lot to do with the left, doesn’t it?”
Conservative academic Stephen Miller sarcastically said, “By calling Tim Scott an ‘Uncle Tom’ here, we are proving to him that we are actually a very racist country. Good job, guys.”
A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement that they are blocking the popular phrase.
Fox News, meanwhile, asked Twitter rhetorically, “Why did it take that long to stop a phrase that violates its policy?”
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