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Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse raised eyebrows over the weekend with a commencement speech that has been referred to as tone deaf and insensitive in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Addressing the graduating class of 2020 at Fremont High School, Sasse took a jab at the graduates, blamed China for the pandemic (repeatedly), and dished out a series of statements that many found insulting.
Sasse’s spokesman James Wegmann attempted to explain that the GOP senator’s comments were in jest. But the remarks apparently weren’t taken as the politician had hoped.
Fremont school board member Michael Petersen called on Sasse to apologize, writing on his public Facebook FB, +1.41% page that students “deserved better.”
And Sasse’s Democratic rival in the November senate race, Chris Janicek, also criticized the speech. “It’s hard for me to believe that a U.S. senator would make remarks like he did in that speech,” he told the Associated Press. “Ridiculing mental health care specialists, suggesting that the graduates are lazy slackers and using the platform to blame China for the pandemic we have now is beyond reprehensible.”
The Twitter TWTR, +2.82% reactions were more colorful, comparing the speech to a failing stand-up comedy routine or a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.
At least one critic referred to the speech as “the worst graduation speech of all time.”
Notably, Sasse commended the graduates “not on graduating high school,” he said, “but on making the journey down the stairs from your bedroom to the living room and putting on something slightly more formal than sweatpants.”
“It took a lot of effort. We want to recognize your sacrifice,” the senator said.
He also implied that the Class of 2020 is out of shape: “Back in the day, when we were a lot fitter than you people are, we used to have to climb ropes all the way up to the ceiling of the gym all the time.”
Sasse’s spokesman responded that the remarks were jokes. “Like he said in the video greeting, Ben’s proud of each of the graduates — and he believes their generation is tough enough to help lead us through the bumpy economic times ahead,” Wegmann said in a statement to the Associated Press.
“It’s ridiculous that some politically addicted folks are complaining about Ben calling out China in a joke” the spokesman added. “He’s said this for months, because it’s true: The Chinese Communist Party’s coronavirus coverup wasted time that could have contained the spread — those lies cost innocent lives in China and around the world. Pretending graduates are too fragile to hear the truth is silly,” the Sasse representative alleged.
This wasn’t the only controversial graduation address of the weekend. Former President Barack Obama also delivered a virtual commencement speech on Saturday, which took jabs at President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus. Trump responded by dismissing Obama as “grossly incompetent.”
Read more:President Trump gets slammed by Barack Obama and counters by calling him ‘grossly incompetent’
As of Monday, the novel coronavirus that was first identified in Wuhan, China and has infected more than 4.7 million people and killed more than 315,000. The U.S. continues to have the highest case count of COVID-19 at around 1.5 million. Follow MarketWatch’s coronavirus coverage here.
Sasse repeatedly blamed the pandemic on China, musing that the Class of 2020 will probably remember their graduating year as “that time when China started a big global pandemic that created the worst public-health crisis in over a century and brought the economy to its knees, and we had to stay home, and everybody was hoarding toilet paper.”
He also said: “We’re gonna have to have a serious reckoning with the thugs in China who let this mess spiral out of control by lying about it.”
And, oddly, he claimed that, “Everyone named Jeremy is the worst,” while musing that the only reason murder hornets are so vicious is because they grew into their name.
Check out a video of the full speech:
