Dear Republican Party: Stop. Propping up.
Crazy people.
Dr. Greg Brannon, a Republican contending for the party’s Senate nomination in North Carolina, once called U.S. property taxes as central planning, referencing the Holocaust and Soviet Union as other examples of central planning, in a 2012 radio interview. [...]
“When has central planning worked, Bill?” Brannon said. “It’s called Holocaust, it’s called Soviet Union, it’s called, you know, apartheid. Central planning does not work but America’s version of it is better? Think about that. You pay your property tax every single year on the same property and if you don’t pay it the government takes it away. So who owns that property, Bill?”
The bank, probably? But of all the things to compare to central planning—property taxes? Federal government doesn't do those, buddy. Those are supposed to be the good, local taxes. I don't think—wait, you know what? Screw this. Screw arguing with the crazy person just because the Republican Party of North Carolina can't tell the difference between a would-be statesman and a man yelling that the fillings in his teeth are telling him to find the seventh horcrux. Screw. This.
Greg Brannon ran a website that supposed the Aurora theater shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing to be false flags, panicked over "Agenda 21" and warned of the menace of fluoridated water. He calls food stamps "slavery". He was previously caught lifting large parts of his campaign website directly from Sen. Rand Paul's website, apparently because that's what Ayn Rand would have done, and far from being chastened by the discovery has in fact continued to pilfer from everyone from Rep. Justin Amash to the Cato Institute to the Coalition for Jobs. So he's not just stupid, he's an unapologetic crook.
And yet there is no act that will render Greg Brannon, doctor, patriot and defender of our precious bodily fluids, too stupid or too disreputable for the Republican Party to prop up under the Big, Big Stupid Tent. That's what we're reduced to these days. In a party in which shutting down the government for unclear reasons sounds like a brilliant thing, in a party that considers the primary purpose of Congress to be spigot for the month's newest conspiracy theories, in a party that launched campaigns to convince young Americans they should do without health insurance, regardless of the obvious risks to them and their welfare, because the health and welfare of those Americans was not worth two little shits compared to the possibility of doing vague damage to the other party in the next set of elections, you cannot pipe up and say that overtly mean, conspiracy-peddling, anti-patriotic crackpots aren't who the party is. It has become all the party is. If Dr. Greg Brannon makes it to the Senate, he won't be an outcast. He'll fit right in.
You own this guy, Republicans. He's getting funding, he's getting support, he's getting the chance to be a Real Big Boy Politician because of an intentionally dumbed-down and corrupted base that can no longer tell the difference between honest and dishonest, or between conspiracy theories and provable fact. And you've gone to a great deal of trouble to mold your base into that, so you can take all your professed worries about how to appear more reasonable and jam them up your Agenda 21 factory.
Is there some lower bound? Is there some jackass that cannot get the support of a sizable portion of the dwindling Republican base of fantasists and morons? Are we there yet, or do we still have a ways to go?