*Shortly after Buffalo real estate developer Carl Paladino publicly wished death by mad cow disease upon President Barack Obama and suggested first lady Michelle Obama was actually a man who should be living with gorillas in Africa, he has offered what he believes is an apology, reports The Huffington Post.
“I never intended to hurt the minority community who I spent years trying to help out of the cycle of poverty in our inner cities. To them I apologize,” Paladino wrote Tuesday in an open letter to Artvoice, the publication to which he’d earlier sent the racist responses to interview questions.
As previously reported, Paladino ― the New York co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign and a member of the Buffalo Board of Education ― provided the following email response to Artvoice regarding a question about what he’d “most like to happen in 2017”…misspellings and all.
“Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford,” he wrote. “He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarret, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.” (Valerie Jarrett, who is black, is senior adviser to Obama. She is not dead.)
Asked what he’d “like to see go away in 2017,” Paladino turned his sights on the first lady.
“Michelle Obama,” he wrote. “I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”
Once the remarks went viral, Paladino tried to downplay them, insisting that they had “nothing to do with race.” But after drawing condemnation from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), Trump’s transition team and his own son, among others, it appears Paladino felt the need to do more damage control.
In his letter Tuesday, Paladino said he’d never intended to send the comments to Artvoice to begin with.
“I filled out the survey to send to a couple friends and forwarded it to them not realizing that I didn’t hit ‘forward’ I hit ‘reply,’” Paladino wrote. “All men make mistakes.”
Tens of thousands of people have signed online petitions demanding that Paladino be removed from his position on the Buffalo school board. But Paladino said in his open letter that he doesn’t plan to step down.
“I’m not leaving the school board, not when it’s time to help implement the real choice elements of Trump’s plan for education reform,” he wrote.
The board is set to hold a special meeting on Thursday to have the final say on Paladino’s tenure.
Paladino’s apology letter (which doesn’t actually offer an apology to the Obamas) misspells the names of both the president (“Barak”) and the first lady (“Michele”) while arguing that the Obamas have made the United States worse in the past eight years. He claimed that he wrote his original, racist email in an “emotional moment” after hearing “Obama’s statement that he regretted the slaughter in Aleppo that, in fact, resulted from his failed and cowardly foreign policy.”
“I could not have made a worse choice in the words I used to express my feelings,” Paladino wrote. But he ended the letter on a defiant note: “I don’t intend to yield to the fanatics among my adversaries. I certainly am not a racist.”
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