Pastor Mark Burns, an outspoken and frequently controversial Donald Trump surrogate from South Carolina, has just released an apology for an inflammatory tweet, now deleted, that he sent out on Monday—despite defending it only hours before.
Burns, who is black, tweeted a cartoon that had Hillary Clinton in blackface, talking about pandering to African Americans. The cartoon seems to have come from the website ComicallyIncorrect.com.
That same day, Burns retweeted two more inflammatory memes. One showed an altered picture of Hillary Clinton with dreadlocks, and one showed a picture of a couple in blackface at a party, claiming that it is a young Bill and Hillary Clinton. They're not—the meme has long been discredited.
In a Monday afternoon interview on MSNBC, Burns defended the tweets, insisting the couple in the photo was actually the Clintons. Out of nowhere, he asked host Kristen Welker, "Where are your ancestors from?", eliciting a stunned silence. He also ended his appearance by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Several hours later, Burns had changed his tune... sort of. On an 11-minute-long Periscope rant he posted a little after 8 p.m., Burns apologized not for the tweets, but for offending people.
Some of the highlights:
The last thing I want to do is to offend people. The tweet was not designed to anger or stir up the pot like it did. It was designed to bring how I feel a very real reality as to why the Democratic party and how I view it have been pandering and using black people just for their votes...