To be fair, Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis (R) probably had no idea what he was saying when he said it, but it was highly offensive.
23 minutes or so into the Commissioners’ meeting on December 12, 2023 to approve the annual budget (video), Commissioner Davis discusses how difficult it is for him to understand the budgeting process and said,
“If I didn’t have help sometimes, reading this budget I’d feel like a knuckle-dragging Mongoloid.”
He was apparently unaware that “knuckle-dragging Mongoloid” is a highly offensive term.
For a long time the term “Mongoloid” was a pejorative term used to refer to people affected by Down Syndrome. It is also a racist term used to refer to people of Asian descent.