Plan B Forum

New QAnon-Allied GOP Senate Candidate Also Pushed Anti-Semitism, Flat Earthism, and 9/11 Conspiracies

THIS ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

The National Republican Senatorial Committee did not return a request for comment.

Will Sommer
Updated Sep. 16, 2020 6:56PM ET / Published Sep. 16, 2020 2:14PM ET

One-time QAnon supporter Lauren Witzke won the Republican Senate primary in Delaware on Tuesday, campaigning on a pledge to institute a decade-long moratorium on all immigration and beating a rival candidate endorsed by the state GOP by nearly 14 percentage points.

Witzke’s win marks the second time a fan of the dangerous pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory has won a GOP Senate nomination this cycle, although Witzke said in January that she no longer promotes QAnon. But while Witzke has been photographed wearing a QAnon T-shirt and has repeatedly posted QAnon hashtags on social media, even as she now claims not to believe in the theory, her connections to the right’s darkest internet fringes go far beyond QAnon. And she’s not particularly inclined to hide them either.

With her victory still just hours old, the newest Republican Senate nominee publicly thanked a white nationalist leader who marched in the “Unite the Right” rally and has questioned the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

“Thank you, Nick!” Witzke tweeted in response to a tweet from Nick Fuentes, a Charlottesville participant who has become the face of the far-right angry, young white nationalist fringe.



It’s not just Fuentes with whom Witzke communicates. She also is regularly in contact with anti-Semitic and white nationalist figures in the “America First” faction of the pro-Trump right. Witzke has posted racist messages of her own on social media, calling Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “third world” and “tards.”

Witzke has also more or less endorsed the idea of Trump becoming a lifelong king of the United States, and said she believes that the earth is flat.

Witzke’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign wing for the Senate GOP. But the story of how, in just a few years, Witzke went from being a drug-dealing heroin addict to a QAnon-believing, racism-spewing, Flat Earth-believing nominee for federal office illustrates both the tumultuous politics of 2020 and the conspiracy theories and racist beliefs gaining traction in the GOP.

In interviews she’s given to other media outlets and podcasts, Witzke has claimed to have worked for Mexican drug cartels or “cartel families” as a “low-end drug-runner” or drug dealer transporting drugs between Detroit and Tennessee.

“I was running drugs, actually, for the Mexican cartels,” Witzke told a Delaware radio station in May.

Witzke claims that she also bought identifying documents like birth certificates from other drug users before trading them to the “cartel families” who employed her in exchange for more drugs, in what’s now become part of her pitch for a decade-long immigration ban.

“Fast forward eight years later, I was selling drugs for the cartels, I was selling people’s identities, as in their birth certificates, in exchange for drugs, in exchange for the Mexicans to come here and live here and basically take our identities,” Witzke said in a May 2019 podcast interview with Michael Sisco, a self-described monarchist who became her campaign manager in January.

In August 2017, according to a police blotter published in a local newspaper, Witzke was arrested in Tennessee on a series of charges. The newspaper noted that a woman named Lauren Witzke had been arrested on violating both heroin and methamphetamine laws, charges of driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and introduction of contraband into a penal facility.

More here.

Well, I've said it before, but now it's conclusive: The insane wingnut faction is dressed in a suicide vest and has barricaded itself inside the GOP with 4 tons of C4.

Jim, in true Frankensteinian (Frankenstinian?) fashion your party created a monster that has come back to kill its creator. It is now no longer a convenient tool for Republican pandering to the retarded racist xenophobe "base;" it is now the blood-thirsty bootlicking zombie servant of the Scaife-Koch-Olin cabal and corporate masters of the pharma, insurance and petrochemical industries, who are only too happy to piss all over the teabaggers and tell them it's just trickle-down economics.

I swear, I have never seen so much concentrated idiocy and fundamental lack of comprehension on public display. Stupid should be painful, so that there might be less of it.

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Jim, what you are witnessing is a genuine hijacking of the Republican party by powerful anti-tax, anti-regulation corporate interests working hand-in-glove with far-right extremist ideologues to manipulate an angry and ignorant bloc of the electorate. Recognizing that it could not successfully create its own independent neo-Fascist party out of whole cloth, the "Tea Party" funding is essentially nothing less than a wholesale purchase of the GOP apparatus in situ. It's a shrewd move: even if it doesn't result in electoral majorities, a sufficiently strident opposition can hamstring legislative initiatives of the majority (as we've seen the last 18 months). It's cynical, it's disgusting, and it's proving to be very effective. But if you're looking for a party of principled policy positions capable of the political give-and-take necessary for a functioning government, the GOP is no longer your first choice.