Read My Lips: No More Crackpots
If Republicans don’t stop nominating fringe candidates, the party deserves to be marginalized
The nomination of Corey Stewart as the Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, less than a year following the awful events that took place in Charlottesville, should be a wake-up call for the GOP.
Stewart’s embrace of Donald Trump’s tactics, lambasting immigrants, his defense of Confederate statues, and his association with white nationalists such as Jason Kessler and Paul Nehlen (whose anti-Semitism and racism was so foul that it got him permanently banned from Twitter) should have spelled an easy loss against his primary opponent, Nick Freitas. The fact that Stewart thinks President Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery is another reason the GOP should want no part of his candidacy.
Candidates such as Stewart used to be mere annoyances, forcing conventional campaigns to spend more money before moving on to the general election against a Democrat. Now we’re at the absurd point where Republican Senator Ted Cruz is imploring people to vote for a Democrat over the Republican candidate — an avowed Nazi.
These events did not happen in a vacuum. Fringe beliefs have penetrated to the highest reaches of American government. Never more so than when immigration…
