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Demovictory9

(32,457 posts) Wed Aug 24, 2022, 05:46 PM Aug 2022

Two of the GOP's Worst Ghouls Lost Their Primaries - Loomer and Paladino

Two of the GOP’s Worst Ghouls Lost Their Primaries
It’s a relief to know that Carl Paladino and Laura Loomer won’t be coming to Congress. But that doesn’t mean the Republican Party’s 2022 slate is a normal one.

On Tuesday, two of the biggest ghouls in right-wing politics failed in their attempts to win Republican nominations for Congress—races they would likely have won in these heavily gerrymandered districts, had they succeeded.

Carl Paladino, a decades-long presence in western New York’s Republican politics, who was running to represent the state’s 23rd district, has praised Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today.” He opposes abortion in all instances, including rape and incest. He has claimed that mass shootings are false flags engineered by Democrats who hope to repeal the 2nd amendment and seize privately-owned guns. He made comments so racist and vile about the Obamas that even Donald Trump’s transition team had to condemn them. In 2010, he got busted for forwarding racist emails to colleagues—and for sending bestiality porn to friends. More recently, he said that attorney general Merrick Garland should be “executed” for authorizing the raid on Donald Trump’s Florida residence. (Paladino later claimed he was being “facetious.”)

Laura Loomer, a candidate in Florida’s 11th district who is nearly 50 years younger than Paladino, but no less vile, has boasted that she is a “proud Islamaphobe.” She has celebrated the death of migrants, attacked school shooting victims, and said “no one cares” about the 51 victims of a New Zealand mass shooting that targeted Muslims. She’s a proud anti-vaxxer who once handcuffed herself to Twitter’s Manhattan headquarters to protest being banned from the platform for spreading an incessant barrage of conspiracy theories.

Paladino, running in a district that stretches from the Buffalo suburbs all the way to central New York, had tried with mixed success to distance himself from his reputation for saying outlandish things—which earned him the nickname “Crazy Carl.” Loomer made no such attempt and immediately began crying voter fraud as soon as she lost. Both, in true Trumpian fashion, refused to concede.

The candidates that Loomer and Paladino were running against, moreover, are hardly bastions of decency; they do not represent a turn toward the normal.

https://newrepublic.com/article/167528/two-gops-worst-ghouls-lost-primaries