Joe Kent, a grown-ass man and candidate for Congress, humiliates himself on a livestream for teenage white nationalists.
There’s really no getting out of a campaign with your dignity fully intact. But every once in a while there appears a candidate who manages to abase himself in such a spectacularly extravagant manner that it merits special recognition.
Lately that person has tended to be Ted Cruz.
But this week Cruz’s golden ball gag was claimed in breathtaking fashion by a young upstart: Joe Kent, the MAGA primary challenger to Washington Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera-Beutler.
Kent has positioned himself as a darling of the self-described “America First” wing of the GOP, contrasting his slavish devotion to Donald Trump with Herrera-Beutler’s support for Trump’s second impeachment. In doing so, Kent has touched all the MAGA campaign bases.
But then Ol’ Joe made a miscalculation. Apparently, he’s been getting strategy advice from the virgin white-nationalist leader Nick Fuentes. This relationship was revealed when Fuentes released the recording of a call he had with Kent during which the candidate praised the Groyper’s attempts at trolling his way to a white majority telling him “I love what you are doing.” It was also reported that Kent’s top campaign consultant set up a booth at Fuentes’s America First PAC conference, the same one Rep. Paul Gosar spoke at last year.
After getting caught in bed with the Keyboard Hitler Youth, Kent got some backlash in the district. So last week on Twitter, Kent tried to get some distance from the group, condemning “Fuentes’s politics, especially in regards to our ally Israel.”
And that’s when things went off the rails.
Because what got him crosswise with Republican primary voters wasn’t being phone pals with Fuentes, but trying to break with him. So he decided to get on his knees and beg for another cookie. Like a dog.
Joe Kent is a grown-ass man who let a racist brat browbeat him into admitting on video that he does, in fact, share their white nationalist ideology, but that he doesn’t think it’s a good campaign strategy to say it out loud.