No Mexican Employees at Epcot’s USA Section, Please

Sep 1, 2012
4:34 PM

Who would have thought that a little WordPress blog post from Rockstar GOP would lead to coverage by both Think Progress and NBC? But it happened. The reason? It had a little bit of everything: a delegate to the Republican National Convention, a pre-convention trip to Epcot, and a little bit of straight-out stone-cold anti-Mexican racism.

Here is the scoop.

On August 29 RNC delegate Mark Harris and his wife posted the following to its WordPress blog:

That led to Think Progress picking up the blog and then NBC Latino reporting the story as well. Here is what NBC had to say about it:

The comments were swiftly and categorically condemned by members of the Republican party in Pennsylvania. Snyder County Republican leaders blasting the former GOP committee members.

“The statements made by Mark and Irene Harris are uninformed and highly offensive,” said country commissioner Malcolm Derk. “The Harrises’ comments show their ignorance as they cast judgment on someone they do not know. They do not speak for our county or party.”

Harris contacted a local newspaper after hearing officials and residents were offended by the statements. “This is getting taken out of context,” he said. “What we said is that in Epcot we saw a man that had a name tag that said ’Eddie, from Mexico,’ and we felt that in the America section of the park, there should have been Americans.”

Right now the Harrises' blog post is still up but the comments have been turned off, and we have emailed them for additional follow-up question as to why their blog post was "taken out of context." So far, we have yet to receive a response, but if we do, we will share.