The Republican Party's plan to find all the worst people in America and run them for office just keeps on going. This time it's Kim Crockett, who has a good shot at becoming the party's nominee for Minnesota secretary of state on Tuesday. Crockett wants to be in charge of Minnesota elections. Crockett has some extremely peculiar ideas about which Americans even ought to be allowed to vote to begin with.
In a 2020 radio interview resurfaced by The Huffington Post, Crockett mused on a state Supreme Court ruling allowing voters to ask for help in casting their vote if they have a disability or don't feel confident in their ability to read English. And by "mused," we mean:
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"So, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that indeed you can help an unlimited number of people vote if they are disabled or can’t read or speak English, which raises the question, should they be voting? We can talk about that another time."
Ohhh yes, I think we will. Crockett is now furiously (and very dubiously) backtracking, but her question was a straightforward one. If you don't speak English or if you can't, say, physically make it up the steps outside your assigned voting location, "should they be voting?"
Well, neither of those things is a requirement for being an American citizen, so unless we're going to start classifying wheelchair use or poor vision or dyslexia or not speaking English as a felony, those people do get to vote. It's not, uh, controversial. Unless you're a Nazi, of course.
This is the sort of eugenics-adjacent ick that most people wouldn't think to even say in private, much less on the radio, but saying such things on the radio is how your state Republican Party decides they want to endorse you as their candidate for office. But Crockett has much more on her resume. She's a promoter of election conspiracy hoaxes, which is why she was grousing about the state Supreme Court letting disabled people vote to begin with. She's anti-immigrant, which is why she was grousing about the "can't speak English" part.
HuffPost notes a 2019 New York Times story quoting Crockett as saying America was "at the breaking point," in terms of immigration, because "These aren't people coming from Norway, let's put it that way. These people are very visible." She's also a promoter of antisemitic rhetoric, thinks Biden's win was "illegitimate," and is in general just an absolute garbage fire of a human being.
Again: She won the Minnesota Republican Party's endorsement just last May, as Republican state parties become functionally indistinguishable from early Naziism. Is suggesting that disabled people shouldn't vote or presenting, to the party convention, a video depicting the Jewish incumbent of the office you're running for is a "puppet" of George Soros—is that the "Minnesota nice" we keep hearing about?
Or just the burps of midwest fascists?
There is a whole lot of extremely-adjacent-to-Nazism rhetoric coming out of state Republican candidates this cycle, and it's stuff that the party would be extremely unlikely to stomach a decade ago. That's ancient history. This time around, high-profile Republican candidates are using rhetoric plucked right from Klan rallies.
Yeeeesh. And in the meantime, fascist cells promoting the notion that democracy itself must take a back seat to hard-right goals are getting gauzy profiles from a press still unwilling to pick sides between fascism and not-fascism.
Republican campaigners are no longer self-filtering. They'll tell you exactly what they think, and they think that whole segments of Americans shouldn't be voting and that "Marxists" are infiltrating schools to promote "LGBTQ degeneracy." These people are not good. These people are hateful, bigoted, racist, paranoid, cruel, paranoid, compulsively lying, paranoid, and paranoid people. This is a whole party that's made a game of finding the people in America most willing to work themselves up into an absolutely batshit froth, then put Republicanism's official backing behind the lot of them.
I don't know how you find someone like Kim Crockett. That takes some doing. I'm also stunned the Republican Party found her before Fox News signed her to host her own evening show.
Daily Kos has endorsed Democrat Steve Simon in this race. Donate to his campaign and other Democratic secretary of state candidates now to stop Republican attempts to subvert our elections from the inside.
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