Nancy Pelosi Did Not Call Republicans Racist
The Claim
Nancy Pelosi had a meltdown on TV, during which she claimed that Republicans were racist.
Emerging story
A number of conservative social media personalities have recently shared an article critical of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and made the following statement: “Pelosi has a psychotic meltdown on live tv, rages that Republicans are racist.”
These posts have gained significant traction, with them receiving hundreds of interactions within days.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation found that Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not call Republicans racist. The article linked in the tweets contains a video in which Speaker Pelosi does not once say that Republicans are racist. Instead, she mentions several times that voter restriction laws that Republicans are enacting across America will affect racial minorities disproportionately.
Speaker Pelosi highlighted 20 laws across America that have been enacted by Republican state legislatures that will affect people of color. Here is the statement where Speaker Pelosi specifically mentions people of color:
“Just because they want to suppress the vote among people of color, they are also suppressing the vote for everyone else.”
There is evidence that voting restrictions would disproportionately affect people of color. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union has stated that this happens with voter suppression laws.
Later in the clip, she references how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream Speech mentions the nullification of voting and uses that as an example of how that existed in the “Jim Crow World that they want to resurrect.” Speaker Pelosi is correct to state that the I Have a Dream speech mentions nullification, which occurs in reference to Alabama’s governor. However, Speaker Pelosi is hardly breaking new ground in comparing Republican voter restriction laws to Jim Crow. President Biden and Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock have both made the same comparison previously.
Therefore, Speaker Pelosi did not call Republicans in general racist. Instead, she said that laws that some Republicans are enacting would lead to racial discrimination. We also looked to see if in the past Speaker Pelosi had called Republicans racist. The closest instance we could identify was in 2019 when she called a series of then-President Trump’s tweets racist
Additionally, the social media users and the shared article state that Speaker Pelosi was having a “psychotic meltdown” and that she “raged” While these terms are subjective, her behavior in the video clip likely doesn’t meet what most people would define as a psychotic meltdown or raging. Speaker Pelosi does not raise her voice once during the video clip and doesn’t even speak rapidly.
