“It was just us three in there and I looked over and I said, ‘Well, lookey there, it’s the jihad squad.’ And in that elevator, we were joined by Ilhan Omar,” Boebert told a New York crowd in September. Take a lookey there: “One of my I staffers, on his first day with me, got into an elevator in the Capitol. And a “lookey there” tossed into the mix. And Omar coming into the elevator after Boebert.
And then, as you might have expected, CNN found another video, this one from September, in which Boebert was telling a, uh, similar story, except with no cop. I assumed it was all just shtick, racist shtick, the kind of shtick you’d expect at a Proud Boys open-mic night.
Want to get early access to Mike’s columns? Click here to become a premium member of The Sun. She claimed she went on to call Omar, to her face, a member of the “jihad squad.” Her supporters broke out into laughter and cheers as Boebert called her colleague - or any Muslim with a backpack, for that matter - a likely suicide bomber. I kept waiting for the rim shot, but the Boebert crowd didn’t need the help. “What’s happening? I look to my left and there she is, Ilhan Omar, and I said, ‘Well she doesn’t have a backpack, we should be fine,'” Boebert said.
“I was getting into an elevator with one of my staffers, and he and I were leaving the Capitol, we’re going back to my office and we get in the elevator and I see a Capitol Police officer running hurriedly to the elevator. You’ve no doubt heard of Boebert’s elevator story, in which she tells a Colorado crowd of her impromptu - and likely apocryphal - meeting with Ilhan Omar. Ilhan Omar, the only Muslim in Congress to wear a hijab. As you may guess, I have nothing against hell-raising in principle, except for those times when it devolves into anti-Muslim, homophobic, xenophobic, racist trolling as it did in Boebert’s recent stand-up routine slamming Minnesota Rep.