A Trump-Backed Veteran Ran Hard to the Right, Only to Be Outflanked

[Celerity]

Joe Kent, a decorated retired Green Beret and House candidate in Washington State, is discovering just how far the modern far right will go.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/25/us/politics/joe-kent-house-trump.html

https://archive.ph/5JXC7



Joe Kent, a square-jawed Trump devotee running for a House seat in Washington State, is in a bit of a pickle. Kent has campaigned as a “Stop the Steal”-style candidate on Donald Trump’s “America First” platform, positions that apparently caught the eye of the former president, who has endorsed him.

Kent insists the 2020 election was rigged, and has rationalized the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, by claiming that an otherwise peaceful crowd was infiltrated by Deep State agents provocateurs. In September, he spoke at a rally in Washington, D.C., in support of people accused of storming the Capitol, urging the release of what he called “political prisoners.”

But in recent weeks, far-right figures led by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who has spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler, have started an online drumbeat claiming that Kent, a retired Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer who has a fistful of Bronze Stars, is actually a deep-state denizen himself.



Kent’s wife, Shannon, was a targeting specialist for the National Security Agency who was killed by a suicide bomber in northeast Syria in 2019 while fighting the Islamic State. After her death, he wrote about how his experiences in the Special Forces had made him more skeptical of “pointless or unwinnable wars.” On his arm is a tattoo inscribed with the date of her killing, along with an image of the World Trade Center aflame after the Sept. 11 attacks.

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