His Wikipedia biography, at the moment, says:
“Jeffrey C. McNeely is a racist Republican member of the North Carolina House of Representatives who has represented the 84th district (including parts of Iredell County) since 2019.”
It appears to have been modified by a member of the public, and Wikipedia editors may change it by the time you look it up here. How did this come about? Raw Story explains (here) that McNeely addressed Democratic Rep. Abe Jones as follows:
“I understand that you went to public school and that you went to Harvard and Harvard Law, and the question I have is would you have been able to maybe achieve this if you were not an athlete or a minority, or any of these things.”
After another representative expressed shock, GOP Speaker Tim Moore stepped in and said, “The gentleman from Iredell is no longer recognized.” Moore knows when to cut his losses; he wasn’t about to give McNeely a chance to explain himself.
I couldn’t find much biographical information on either of these guys. McNeely (photo, left) looks like he’s in his fifties; he was appointed to the legislature in 2019, then elected in 2020. He has a degree in agriculture from a state college, and runs his family’s feed milling business.
Jones (photo, right), first elected in 2020, looks like he might be a little older, and is a practicing attorney. Both previously were elected county commissioners, in different counties.
Based on that skimpy information, I won’t conclude McNeely is racist. It’s equally plausible he heard about the Supreme Court case involving Harvard’s affirmative action program (see story here), and leaped to the conclusion Jones must’ve been an affirmative action admittee — and an athlete — because he’s black.
Actually, it’s pretty hard to argue that’s not racist. At a minimum, it certainly involves some heavy-duty stereotyping, which is what lazy people do when thinking is too much trouble. But given limited information, I’ll give McNeely the benefit of doubt and consider him mentally lazy instead of racist.
One other piece of information about McNeely: He once called the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) the state attorney general’s “Nazis” (see tweet and video here). You can read more about the SBI here. When I hear people call law enforcers “Nazis,” the first thing that jumps into my mind is they’ve had run-ins with the law. But I’m not going assume that about McNeely. It may just be how some Republicans like him talk about the rule of law.