HATEFUL

Racist Trolls Disrupt Iowa Lawmakers’ Town Hall

It’s the second time a week that anonymous callers have made vile and violent comments.

For the second time in two weeks, racist trolls disrupted an event hosted by Iowa lawmakers featuring Black elected officials. The Des Moines Register reports that anonymous callers to this weekend’s Zoom event hurled a racial epithet at State Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad. The town hall was not shut down—“We cannot afford to allow their voices to be louder than ours,” Abdul-Samad said—like last week’s meeting hosted by the Iowa Democratic Black Caucus. “What these folks, these anonymous folks, did is they interrupted a meeting, they startled people but they also gave all of us a taste of what people like the Black caucus have to go through all the time,” said Rep. Marti Anderson, who is white but was called a sexist slur.