It was on this date in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, as well as 2023, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Utah State Senator Todd Weiler, who first took office in 2012 when his predecessor, Dan Liljequist resigned his seat to try to unseat the methuselah who represented Utah in the U.S. Senate, Orrin Hatch. While Weiler got through his first years as a legislator without stirring up too much drama in Utah, it was in his second term that Weiler declared pornography a public health crisis and tried writing a bill that would let porn addicts sue internet pornography companies. Now, the obvious counter-argument to Weiler’s bill would be that it’s a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Well, he’d like to let all his critics know that online pornography actually violates HIS First Amendment rights, saying, “Someone may have the First Amendment right, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, to view pornography,” Weiler told Tony Perkins, host of “Washington Watch” radio show. “But what about my First Amendment right not to view it?” Of course, the “research” Weiler did on any of this was also not based in reality and as level-headed as Claude Frollo’s research into the Romani. And when you have to release a statement later to try to mitigate the damage where you compare porn to tobacco (Since it causes cancer, right?) and claim “I’m not trying to ban masturbation”, maybe you know you’ve taken your quest way too far. Guess what sorts of impropriety Todd Weiler doesn’t have a problem with? BIGAMY. Yeah, when Utah put a bill out to make bigamy a third degree felony in 2017, and he voted against it. Among the other things that Weiler doesn’t consider a public health crisis include bringing back public executions by firing squad, sex education being taught in public school.
When we last checked in with Todd Weiler… he’s been accused of extortion by a wealthy GOP donor, who even provided audio of the suggestion to offer her $1 million to make a false accusation against him. We tend to believe accusers here at FRED, but we’re just noting in this story that it seems Weiler has made an enemy of a top political donor in the state. More than one, in fact, because Weiler was not even up for election until 2020, and the Koch Brothers were targeting him to be defeated in the GOP primary that year, sending out fliers deriding him well in advance. Meanwhile, Weiler has been pretty active, and pretty much gaslighting on Twitter, where he’s made half-assed defenses of Brett Kavanaugh and trying to show some sort of double standard that the media supposedly applies to him and other perpetrators of sexual assault, as well as misrepresenting the facts about investigations into Donald Trump not being biased upon review.
Todd Weiler got to practically skip the primary process for his re-election in 2020 by the Utah GOP, being awarded the win without a public vote over his challenger, Marci Green Campbell. While she did resolve herself to start a write-in campaign for the November election, she struggled to even get on mail-in ballots. Thus, Weiler was all but guaranteed victory in November, and won with 94% of the vote.
So what has Weiler been up to in the past few years? Well, there was his sponsorship of SB 107, which would strip funding from public schools if they held virtual and not in-person learning (a great extortion tactic to send kids to school to get Covid-19 and risk their lives without reason).
But what has been noted in Utah politics is that Todd Weiler seems to have truly embraced Donald Trump’s “be an ***hole on Twitter” strategy in politics, whining about being told be constituents how they would like him to vote on bills, or just last week, when he decided to throw a tantrum because he received an Amber Alert, and derided the service, saying “it should not be used for custody disputes”. He doubled down after being criticized, in spite of commenters noting it meant he was indifferent towards kidnapping, and insisted he got “over 100 likes” for his post, ignoring that he was still ratio’ed and 80% of people are still in favor of Amber Alerts being used in that instance.
In 2022, Weiler hopped on board the GOP bandwagon towards transgender girls, voting in a bill to ban them from participating in sports in public schools. In 2023, voted to ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors and voted for a prohibition on minors being allowed to change their birth name or gender on their birth certificate.
It’s almost like as a hyper-conservative, he has an absence of empathy, and shouldn’t be in office, or something. Hopefully the voters in Todd Weiler's district do something about that in 2024.