Former GOP Official Claims To Be Gay Black Trump Supporter; Scrambles To Explain
A Republican who used to be the County Commissioner in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and ran for Congress this year, is being called out for claiming to be a gay Black Trump supporter. Now he’s scrambling to explain “context” of the tweet.
Meet Dean Browning. According to his official campaign site, he’s a “proudly pro-life and pro-2nd amendment Christian conservative.” According to Ballotpedia, he was a close second (of two candidates) in the GOP primary for Pennsylvania’s 7th District’s Congressional seat.
And according to a tweet he’s since deleted, he’s a gay Black man whose life was better under Trump’s presidency, and worse during the Obama years.
“I’m a [B]lack gay guy and I can personally say that Obama did nothing for me, my life only changed a little bit and it was for the worse. Everything is so much better under Trump though. I feel respected — which I never do when [D]emocrats are involved,” he claimed.
He’s being called out for it widely and accused of holding a second account, a ‘sock puppet’ in which he pretends to be a Black man. Twitter recently purged a mass of fake accounts that were created to pretend to be Black Trump supporters, so users are very aware that this is a tactic that has been used to try to portray Trump as a good choice for minorities.
TFW you forget to switch to your sock-puppet account pic.twitter.com/35a0LIeygP
— Yes, You're Racist (@YesYoureRacist) November 10, 2020
Ummmmm somebody come look at this pic.twitter.com/bDzZpkaU1z
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) November 10, 2020
Browning responded to the criticism by claiming that it was a message he’d received from a constituent, and that he just accidentally completely forgot to use quotation marks or in any other way explain this.
Regarding the tweet that is going viral from my account — I was quoting a message that I received earlier this week from a follower.
Sorry if context was not clear.
Trump received record minority votes & record LGBTQ votes.
Many people won’t say it vocally, but do in private.
— Dean Browning (@DeanBrowningPA) November 10, 2020
(Nobody is buying it.)
hey thanks for copying and pasting a testimonial from a follower with no quotes or explanation that it was from a follower or not you masquerading as a gay black dude.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 10, 2020
Just show us the message you received. What forum did you receive it in? Twitter? Handwritten note? Voicemail?
Just show us the evidence and you will be in the clear.
Also, free advice: The first rule of holes is to stop digging.
— Eric Owens (@ericowensdc) November 10, 2020
hey now in Dan’s defense this excuse worked way better before the entire internet found his racist alt account
— Mx. (@BraverStill) November 10, 2020
In fact, fact-checker Brooke Binkowski seems to have found what could be Browning’s second account — with a cartoon Black man as a profile pic, the account seems to reply supportively to an awful lot of Browning’s tweets, and has only existed on Twitter since October.
Do you just reply to all of your own tweets with this sock? How sad. pic.twitter.com/RUefoUzwk4
— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) November 10, 2020