ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Republicans last week surely feel they dodged a bullet with the exit from the November ballot of Katherine Pinner, who was briefly the party’s nominee for ºüÀêÊÓƵ County executive. Whatever issues she’d hoped to focus on in her campaign, the real issue would have been the lawsuit she filed against her former employer alleging that its mask mandate was “satanic†and that getting vaccinated displeases God.
Pinner thus took her place among a long line of loons in elective politics these days. Not all, but most, hail from the rightward side of the political spectrum. Which invites some legitimate questions about what has happened to the once-sober conservative movement.
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Pinner is the 55-year-old political novice who emerged from out of nowhere this month to win the Republican nomination for the county’s top political post. Online, she had voiced beliefs consistent with QAnon, the culty crowd that thinks a dark world of all-encompassing conspiracies hums just beyond plain sight — a good-versus-evil epic that casts Donald Trump, improbably, as the former.
±Ê¾±²Ô²Ô±ð°ù’s posts pointed out that if you replaced each “B†in President Biden’s “Build Back Better†legislation with “6,†you’d end up with the mark of the devil. “As voters started catching onto this plan of 6uild 6ack 6etter, the democrats quickly changed their slogan,†she wrote. (She’s right. I remember the memo from headquarters.)
She suggested that coronavirus vaccines were laced with nanotechnology designed to “bar code nine billion people†in order to “inventory†them.
“It’s all connected,†she warned.
Because, y’know, it’s always “all connected.â€
After winning the Aug. 2 primary, Pinner apparently got some good advice and did some online house cleaning to remove indications that she is, well, crackers. But it seems she couldn’t rein in her demons for long. The $1.2 million lawsuit Pinner filed last week against her former employer, the American Association of Orthodontists, for its pandemic policies, alleges that vaccines prompt “transhumanism†changes in the body that can lead to being barred from “God’s graces.†And it claims mask-wearing is associated with “dehumanization and satanic ritual abuse.â€
In the latest head-spinning twist, Pinner late Thursday told the county Republican chair she plans to drop out of the race, without explaining why. It’s a welcome if undeserved reprieve for the party, which can now put someone less demonstrably loopy on the ballot.
But the question remains: Why do Republicans, here and around America, keep nominating candidates who, if they approached them on the sidewalk, would prompt them to cross the street?
The poster-child for this phenomenon, of course, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. Evidence of her psychosis is too voluminous to detail here, so let’s leave it at her suggestion that California’s wildfires were caused by controlled by a cabal of Jewish overlords.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado, hasn’t achieved quite that level of bonkers, but it’s not for lack of effort. Among her litany of lunacy was a speech in June declaring, “The church is supposed to direct the government … I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution.†(Narrator: Except in the very first words of the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights.)
Republican candidates coming up through this year’s congressional primaries promise more of this derangement. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who has more motive than anyone to get Republicans seated, no matter the details — recently worried aloud that his party might fail to take back the Senate because of what he diplomatically called “candidate quality†issues.
Indeed.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate nominee, has pushed such quack remedies that it prompted an essay in the normally staid headlined: “Dr. Oz Shouldn’t Be a Senator — or a Doctor.†Arizona Republicans have nominated to the Senate 36-year-old Blake Masters, who has praised the anti-tech manifesto of Ted “Unabomber†Kaczynski. In Georgia, GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker — the former NFL star who has already been in the politically awkward position of having to issue clarifications to the media regarding how many children he has fathered by how many women — bashed Biden’s new climate law last week by asking, “Don’t we have enough trees around here?â€
Then (as always) there’s Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week lambasted Dr. Anthony Fauci at a fundraising event. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious-disease expert, is retiring in the face of conservative fury over his allegiance to science instead of Trump. But that’s not good enough for DeSantis, who told the crowd that “someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.†It’s worth noting that this elevated rhetoric comes from the man who many Republicans view as the more-sane alternative to Trump for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Despite the controversy surrounding ±Ê¾±²Ô²Ô±ð°ù’s brief presence on the ºüÀêÊÓƵ County ballot, she perhaps shouldn’t completely discount a future in the GOP. At the rate it’s going, today’s Republican Party will likely have a place for people like her for a long time to come.
Kevin McDermott is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board member. On Twitter: @kevinmcdermott Email: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com