Handel’s Husband Deletes Racially Charged Twitter Message
The husband of Karen Handel, the Republican candidate in the 6th Congressional District runoff, sent out and later deleted a racially charged social media message on Tuesday.
Steve Handel retweeted a message urging voters to request an absentee ballot and vote for Handel, who faces Democrat Jon Ossoff in the June 20 runoff. The image Steve Handel retweeted, from a user with the handle @rose10052, claims that “Handel will fight for minorities to excel.”
Below that headline and photo of Handel is a stock photo of a young African-American man, with the following message: “Criticizing black kids for obeying the law, studying in school, and being ambitious as ‘acting white’ is a trick Democrats play on Black people to keep them poor, ignorant, and dependent. Free the black slaves from the Democratic Party plantation.”
Both Steve Handel’s retweet and the original Tweet were later taken down, according to CNN. The account of the Twitter user @rose10052 is locked, but in her profile she identifies herself with the hashtag #TeamKaren and claims that prominent national Republicans, including vice president Mike Pence, follow her on the social media channel.
CNN quoted a Handel campaign spokesman as saying that the candidate’s husband made a mistake and “retweeted something he didn’t pay a lot of attention to, thinking it was just an absentee vote message. It clearly was not appropriate and has been deleted.”
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