Photo credit: Michael Vadon
Most Americans no longer have to worry any more about Steve Bannon—the scruffy, white supremacist reprobate who once threatened to elect the most scurrilous Republicans imaginable all over the country—after he was fired as President Donald Trump’s chief political strategist.
Bannon had a diabolical dream of using his expertise at putting a completely unqualified bigot in the White House to create his own nationwide network of corrupt, unfit Republican officials. It all came crashing down when accused child predator Roy Moore, the first candidate Bannon selected to kick off his plot, was defeated by a Democratic civil rights attorney in a U.S. Senate race—in Alabama, of all places.
Bannon immediately sank out of sight and lost another job: getting fired by Breitbart News, the inflammatory website he’d built into a national platform for the white supremacist alt-right. Decent people everywhere celebrated in the streets, but apparently many Wisconsin Republicans haven’t heard the news.
Wisconsin still has not one, but two, Republican candidates for federal office who were sleazy enough to receive Bannon’s personal endorsement. They are Kevin Nicholson—a candidate for the Republican nomination to oppose incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin; and Paul Nehlen—an openly racist, anti-Semitic candidate for the congressional seat of fleeing U.S. Rep. and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
Billions in Outsider Money
And lest you think these are just fringe candidates, Politico reported that through various means, Nicholson’s campaign has received more than $7 million from Richard Uihlein, the Illinois billionaire who has been one of the primary funders of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s political career and his ill-fated run for the presidency. The Washington Post recently identified Uihlein—whose great-grandfather was one of the co-founders of the Schlitz Brewing Co. in Milwaukee—as the little-known “megadonor” who is disrupting Republican primaries around the country by contributing more than $21 million this year to extremist candidates who, with any luck at all, will be unelectable in November.
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They’re the sort of donors who run vile, inflammatory ads on hot button right-wing issues such as protecting Confederate symbols, criminalizing abortion, repealing marriage equality and abolishing civil rights for members of the LGBTQ community. Uihlein backed Jeanne Ives, the extreme primary opponent of Illinois Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner who hired a deep-voiced male actor to appear in a commercial wearing a dress, holding a purse and thanking Gov. Rauner “for signing legislation that lets me use the girls’ bathroom.”
Nicholson, a former U.S. Marine without any other actual qualifications, disparaged his fellow veterans, declaring that any Democrats among his Band of Brothers must have returned home with brain damage—a faulty “cognitive thought process.” Nicholson absurdly claimed Democrats have “wholesale rejected the Constitution.” Quite the opposite. Democrats, including millions of veterans, are fighting passionately to protect the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment under the law regardless of race, religion or national origin in the face of repeated assaults by Nicholson’s party and president.
One of the big chuckles about Nicholson’s rabid hatred of Democrats, of course, is that many of his own party leaders loathe him, not for any of his off-the-wall political comments (which only put him right at home in the Republican Party), but because when Nicholson was in college, he was, gasp, a Democrat.
Begging for Bad Endorsements
State Sen. Leah Vukmir, the party favorite to oppose Sen. Baldwin until Nicholson began burying her under Uihlein’s avalanche of millions, provided some amusement herself. After Bannon’s political plummet, Vukmir demanded Nicholson repudiate Bannon’s endorsement. That gave Nicholson an excuse to leak just how desperately Vukmir had unsuccessfully groveled before Bannon begging for his endorsement.
Nehlen, a Republican candidate in the First Congressional District, has experience doing Bannon’s political dirty work. Bannon hated Paul Ryan for failing to endorse Trump’s openly hateful attacks on Mexican and Muslim immigrants. Ryan preferred using more traditional Republican code words to appeal to racists. Breitbart and Bannon enthusiastically endorsed Nehlen’s primary challenge to Ryan in 2016, and Trump gave Nehlen several shout-outs.
Now Nehlen is back without Ryan to kick around. He’s promoting his candidacy this time with racist attacks on Meghan Markle—the biracial American actress marrying Great Britain’s Prince Harry—and denouncing imaginary Jewish conspiracies against what he proudly calls his “Pro-White” campaign. Don’t count Nehlen out as the Republican congressional nominee.
Wisconsin: Making Bannon’s Dream Come True
It’s embarrassing to see Wisconsin still stuck in Bannon’s sick version of the Republican Party. That’s what can happen as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing billionaires to spend unlimited amounts of cash to promote any twisted candidates of their choosing.
It’s even worse in Wisconsin because of a corrupt state supreme court decision shutting down a John Doe investigation into illegal coordination between Republican candidates and what are fraudulently termed “independent political groups.” The court ruled it’s not illegal in Wisconsin for outside groups to coordinate directly with politicians’ campaigns. This essentially allows outside groups to spend millions of dollars in dark money to help elect politicians without ever having to identify the sources that may in effect be buying public officials.
It’s Steve Bannon’s dream come true.
