title:  Maine’s Horrible Governor Just Outright Declared Blacks And Hispanics ‘The Enemy’
text: Paul LePage, who might as well be Maine s version of Donald Trump, is becoming well known for his racist attacks on people of color. He especially can t stand black people or Latinos, and went so far as to call them  the enemy.  In other words, he sees a race war in which white people are the  good  side, and black and Hispanic people are the  evil  side. Look, a bad guy is a bad guy, I don t care what color it is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red, don t you? You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can t help that. I just can t help it. Those are the facts. There s no implication there. He said, flat out, that the enemy right now is the black and Hispanic people coming into his state. Those are  the facts  on his twisted planet. The true facts are that he s a racist prick. We can t help that.LePage has claimed that 90 percent of the people arrested for drugs in his state are black or Hispanic   data based on a binder of mug shots he allegedly keeps. Maine is 95 percent white, but LePage justifies his racism by saying that people of color are all criminals.The actual state prison statistics for Maine paint a fairly grim picture. Per 100,000 residents, Maine has 140 white people incarcerated, 104 Hispanics incarcerated, and an astonishing 839 black people incarcerated.That s a prison population that s roughly 77 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic, so LePage s  90 percent  comment is actually not far off.However, in a state that s 95 percent white, that s really sick.And LePage trots out these statistics specifically to perpetuate hate against people of color, when in reality the disparity is largely due to racism in the justice system.The ACLU of Maine has a problem with this, obviously, because it means that Maine police are nine times more likely to arrest a person of color than they are to arrest a white person, even though whites and people of color deal drugs at about the same rate. Despite that pesky little fact, LePage is implying that Maine is in an all-out war against people of color for no other reason than he s a racist dick.Featured image by Maine Dept. of Education. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr