Former Trump Campaign Advisor Roger Stone Calls VP Candidate Tim Walz an Anti-Gay Slur
Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Roger Stone, the far-right operative and former campaign advisor to Donald Trump, is back in the news this week after he used a homophobic slur to describe Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
On Monday, August 12, during his show The StoneZONE on the streaming platform Rumble — which also hosts Trump’s self-branded social media network, Truth Social — Stone referred to Walz as a “faggot” with a thin pretext of plausible deniability, should he need it, that he was just quoting the film Blazing Saddles.
“This guy, Tim Walz — saw him at a rally, I mean, I hate to quote Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, but he was jumping around like a Kansas City faggot,” Stone told his cohost Troy Smith and guest Caitlin Sinclair of the right-wing advocacy group Turning Point USA. Stone added, pointedly, that Walz was “really, really weird,” an apparent attempt to use Walz’s own language about Republicans against him.
There’s some context to the Blazing Saddles quote, not that it helps Stone’s case. In the film, the line is delivered by Taggart, a corrupt politician’s flunky, while berating his own gang of racists who were themselves tricked into jumping around and singing the minstrel song “Camptown Races.” If Stone wants to cast himself as Taggart, we suppose there’s nothing we can do about it, but it seems like a pretty transparent excuse to drop a slur.
Stone was likely referring to Walz’s recent appearance at a campaign rally in Las Vegas, which right-wing media have worked overtime to frame as freakish, despite nothing out of the ordinary really happening. Far-right propaganda outlet Breitbart called Walz — who, to be clear, simply waved enthusiastically to the crowd — “weirdly giddy” at the event, while U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail referred to Walz as “bizarre.” Stone also falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris of changing her ethnicity over time, a rising talking point on the right that strongly resembles the racist “birther” conspiracy against former President Barack Obama (of which Stone was a major architect).
As Stone’s show continued, Sinclair opined that the GOP needs to produce real policy solutions for the problems it has promised to address, rather than personal insults — blithely ignoring the slur that Stone had just lobbed at Walz.
“What I think Republicans and conservatives need to focus on, including Donald Trump, is the vision, is the plan for how we’re going to put America first,” she said. “How we’re going to lower gas prices [and] make food affordable once again [...] I think when we get into the semantics and the name calling and all of the noise, which is so obviously a distraction and exactly what the left wants us to get involved in, we lose that focus on the vision.”
“I completely agree with you. Look, I think name-calling is a mistake and it won't work,” Stone replied.
The Minnesota governor is a longtime LGBTQ\+ ally, dating back to his time as a GSA advisor and football coach.
Hypocrisy is nothing new in the world of conservatism, nor is the casual use of anti-LGBTQ+ slurs and epithets — certainly not for Stone, who called for political violence in 2020 and previously called then-CNN anchor Don Lemon a “cocksucker” and “dumber than dogshit” in Twitter posts which eventually led to his permanent banning from the platform. In fact, this type of behavior is its own strain of virtue signaling to the far right, and extends far beyond Stone himself. As Rolling Stone reported earlier this year, any reporter hanging around a meeting of the New York Young Republicans Club will hear its members using homophobic, transphobic, and racist slurs, letting their peers know where they stand. It’s a message of “anger and disdain” that the GOP hopes will magnetically attract more of Trump’s base to win another election, the magazine reported. “This is part of the plan.”
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