Carl Paladino of the Buffalo, NY School District uses a familiar tactic that the political right has all but mastered: he makes derogatory comments about people who aren’t white, but then swears he isn’t racist, he’s just being blunt, ‘telling it like it is’ and refusing to bow to political correctness. It’s the same excuse that Bill O’Reilly uses when portraying Latino immigrants as criminal illegals or that Chris Christie uses when he berates and attacks teachers. They’re not hateful bigots, they’re just being honest and truthful. It’s high time we started calling out and holding accountable those who try to excuse their own bigotry and harmful policies in this manner.

Paladino was the Tea Party favorite when he ran for governor of New York in 2010, losing to Andrew Cuomo with 33% of the vote (and losing to Cuomo that badly is quite a feat given how unpopular his war on teachers has made him.) Paladino was formerly a centrist and once a member of the Democratic Party, but now claims that after the death of his son Patrick in 2009 he underwent a personal transformation and reinvented himself as a conservative family values candidate. This is also a dubious proposition given revelations of his sending out pornographic, racist and misogynist emails. More recently, Paladino made a remark about the ‘damn Asians’ who enroll at SUNY Buffalo as international students and declare residency after one year, thus getting in state tuition and benefits at NY taxpayer expense. The comments about international students are not supported by evidence, and even if they were there is never any excuse to attack an entire race of people for the actions of a few.

The issue with politicians like Paladino is not primarily what they say, but what they do on a policy level. As a school board member, he has said that he will not accept the notion that poverty plays a role in student achievement, claiming (much like NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein under Bloomberg) that the fact that he grew up poor and managed to go to law school and make something of himself proves that hard work and individual achievement is all that’s required. In his 2010 gubernatorial campaign he promised to ‘significantly’ slash the state’s education budget, freeze wages and benefits and ‘close the border’ to anyone moving to NY state to collect welfare (any guesses as to what color people Paladino imagines when he talks about people moving to NY to collect welfare?) When he ran for Buffalo School Board in 2013, he ran with the intention of ousting Buffalo Teachers Federation head Phil Rumore, even though the teachers elect their union leader and the board has no say in the matter.

Paladino is a walking contradiction: he rails against government spending on education or social programs and collects $87 million in rent as Buffalo’s largest landlord while benefiting from government contracts and subsidies that have allowed him to build this real estate empire. In classic divide and conquer fashion, he scapegoats immigrants and the poor for NY state’s ills while calling for budget cuts that will hurt all New York residents in his hometown and everywhere. This country already has more than enough old, rich white guys railing against the poor while claiming that their own fabulous wealth came only through hard work and dedication and never through privilege or due to the assistance of others like teachers who helped them get there. Such toxic rhetoric and policy has no place in the United States of 2015.