When Kentucky Rep. Andy Barr announced that he will run to replace Mitch McConnell in the United States Senate, it was reported that Barr mentioned President Donald Trump’s name “every minute of Rep. Barr's 17-minute announcement speech — in which the congressman attributed the president’s survival in an assassination attempt to a divine plan.”
Barr used the first 20 seconds of his first campaign ad for U.S. Senate to give his voters a lecture about hate. “The woke left wants to neuter America, literally. They hate our values. They hate our history. And goodness knows they hate President Trump.”
I’m not sure who Barr has been talking to, but I’m a run-of-the-mill Democrat and I don’t hate anyone or anything, including American values, American history, or the American president, and I certainly have not been walking down Main Street in Anderson County, Kentucky with a surgical knife looking for Trump-voting men to neuter “literally”.
This is one sick fever dream.
If Barr is looking for someone to fit his description, I suggest he look no further than the president’s own Easter message which read, in part, "Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country," Mr. Trump said, going on to wish a happy Easter to the "WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue.” The president continued, accusing "Sleepy Joe Biden" of purposefully allowing "Millions of CRIMINALS to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked, through an Open Borders Policy that will go down in history as the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America."
Who talks like this?
What kind of leader sends out this message on the holiest day of the Christian calendar?
Would Barr say hate-speech is part of the “divine plan” for Mr. Trump that he described in his 17-minute speech about running for senate?
I’m a pretty outspoken Democrat, I know a lot of Democrats, and yet I don’t know anyone who’s “fighting and scheming” to bring murderers, etc. into the country. This is just complete wackadoodle nonsense — which Barr surely knows — and yet Barr lays it right out there and proudly uses the word “hate” repeatedly in his opening salvo to run for U.S. senate.
Is ‘hate’ all that sells now in the Trump Republican ecosphere?
I hope not. Because all of this hate-selling mixed with Trump deism has consequences.
Yesterday, Robert Crimo III (age 23), the Highland Park parade shooter, was sentenced to “seven back-to-back life sentences for each murder victim plus 50 years for attempted murder. Crimo opened fire on crowds celebrating at a the Fourth of July in Highland Park, a city 30 miles (50 kilometres) north of Chicago. The victims of the shooting ranged from an eight-year-old boy, paralysed from the waist down, to a young couple and an 88-year-old-man who were killed.”
Last month, Mr. Crimo — who has the number 47 tattooed on his face — pleaded guilty and “signed the name ‘Donald Trump’ when he waived his right to trial.”
If this has been reported in conservative media like FOX News, I missed it.
I did not know about Crimo’s worship of Mr. Trump when I wrote about the parade shooting for the Washington Post right after it happened in 2022, a piece that ended up being mostly about what it’s like to live in a rural Kentucky county — part of Andy Barr’s district — which is awash in both Trump-worship and gun culture.
What I would ask U.S. Representative Andy Barr — if he ever stops hiding from his constituents by not holding town halls — is why does he believe campaign jargon about hate is a winning message?
Does Barr think there are no consequences for spreading hateful rhetoric while also claiming Mr. Trump is part of God’s divine plan? Does he not see the obvious dangers inherent in such words?
Is this the legacy Andy Barr wants to leave for his children? For yours?
Because if that’s all he’s got, he is unfit to serve.
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