Lue Elizondo Wants to Run for Congress, Makes Weird Comments on Nazis, Slurs

​In a podcast interview this weekend, government contractor, cable TV personality, and future UFO book author Lue Elizondo said that he hopes to serve in Congress in the next five years—an aspiration he has teased less explicitly in the past. Elizondo expressed a number of right-leaning political views, making it clear that his intention is to run as a Republican. Wyoming has only one representative in the House, currently Liz Cheney. Unseating the incumbent will be a tough task for a looney tune whose claim to fame is promoting leaked government “UFO” footage and speculating about interdimensional underwater space monsters. Who are we kidding? He will fit right in.

​As an aspiring politician, Elizondo immediately set himself up as a promoter of right-wing counterfactuals, going off on a bizarre tangent denying that Nazis and Neo-Nazis are right-wing extremist groups, a false position popular in conservative circles: 

The problem is we’re not doing the due diligence in understanding things. So, for example, people say neo-, the Nazis, white supremacy and Nazis—again, being Latino myself, they say the Nazi Party, the Neo-Nazi party, is a far-right extremist group. Is it really? Let’s look at that. Where does the word ‘Nazi’ come from? Well, it comes from the German word [for] ‘National Socialist Movement.’ Socialism is in the very title. Socialism is a left-leaning effort, not right. So, I’m not saying it’s good or bad. It’s not, either way, but let’s be specific about terminology here […].

​Elizondo continued on to explain that Latinos should not feel insulted by the slur spic because it “isn’t a real word” since it originated in a non-offensive contraction of Do you speak Spanish? This is not true, incidentally. There are two disputed origins for the term: (1) a contraction of a thickly accented protestation, “No speak English,” and (2) a contraction of spaghetti, both applying to any Latin person, including Spaniard and Italians, whom WASPS frequently lumped together. (See also: dago, a contraction of Diego, but applied increasingly to Italians rather than Spaniards.) The word was understood to be offensive from its origins in 1917, a variant on the earlier offensive term spiggoty (i.e. “no speak-a”). There is little context where such words wouldn’t be considered derogatory and offensive, and it is very strange that Elizondo advises people on the receiving end of slurs to attempt to etymologize them into acceptable.