All eyes are on the Arizona Capitol as the State House battles through the passage of the budget package. With so many lawmakers eyeing higher office, tensions have risen as politicians with higher political aspirations are trying to deliver sound bites they can use on the campaign trail later on. But these efforts are not without their risks.
On Friday, during a heated debate on the Education Budget bill in the Arizona House of Representatives, congressional hopeful Rep. Daniel Hernandez (D-LD2) rose to defend communism and to declare that the real threat facing the nation was white nationalism. Rep. Quang Nguyen (R-LD1), a freshman lawmaker from Prescott, showed that some sound bites can bite back, when he schooled Hernandez on the horrors of communism.
Nguyen, a naturalized U.S. Citizen, who escaped communist Viet Nam as Saigon fell, is usually a quiet legislator, not known for fiery rhetoric or frequent floor speeches. But his reminders about the dangers that socialism and communism pose to America and the world garnered immediate attention from the media and his fellow lawmakers, many of whom came over after to thank him “for speaking the truth.”
“White Nationalism isn’t a mainstream anything” said one Capitol observer, “it is a small group of angry nuts who are unwelcome in both political parties. But socialists and communists essentially dominate today’s Democratic Party, and those are the ideologies that represent the real threat to American values. Full credit to Rep Nguyen for making that point today.”