New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim calls podcaster’s North Korean flag tie accusation ‘disgusting’

U.S. Rep. Andy Kim, a Democrat who would be the first Korean American in the U.S. Senate if elected in November, condemned as “disgusting” an accusation by New Jersey podcaster and Donald Trump supporter Mike Crispi that a tie he wore during a debate Tuesday had a North Korean flag on it.

”What is he trying to tell us? Where do his allegiances lie?” Crispi tweeted. Crispi last gained attention for a post on X, which has since been deleted, about Gus Walz, son of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, in which he said: “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”

Kim noted that Crispi was a Trump delegate during the Republican National Convention and urged his opponent, Curtis Bashaw, to “condemn this xenophobia,” which Bashaw did.

Bashaw, a gay man, tweeted: “As someone who has been stereotyped and on the wrong end of hateful incorrect assumptions my entire life, I wholeheartedly denounce baseless accusations based solely on someone’s background or appearance.” He called Kim “a good man and a patriotic American.”

Kim noted in another post that during his first campaign for Congress, he had been the object of racist advertising mailers sent out “with my name in Chinese take out font” and TV commercials saying “Andy Kim, he’s not one of us.”

”I tried to ignore it but I realized that I should have done more to stand up,” he wrote. “Unfortunately we see hate growing in our country.”

He listed several other races across the country where Asian Americans had been targeted with racist slurs and tropes.

Crispi continued to lean into the false accusation Wednesday, posting a video of himself continuing to question Kim’s allegiances and asking, “Why did Andy Kim wear a tie that had a foreign flag across the middle?”

The tie Kim wore had a small horizontal section of blue, white, and red stripes on it, but they were not a flag.