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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Brian Kemp- 2023 Update [1]
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Date: 2023-07-30
On this date in both 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published our original profile of the man who was the Secretary of State of Georgia, and who is now Governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp. Kemp was elected Secretary of State back in the 2010 Tea Party Wave, who you may have heard of as that troglodyte who actually ran a campaign ad where he cocked a loaded shotgun at a young man who supposedly wanted to date his daughter to prove what a manly man he is.
Yes, woe to us all, it’s this sort of idiocy that stirs something in the hearts of GOP Primary voters, and that led Kemp to make the ad to make up the thirty points he was trailing in polls to his main opponent, Casey Cagle, and not ask themselves, “Wait, did he just point a loaded gun at a child?” and wonder if he’s perhaps a bit too unstable to be given the governor’s mansion. Maybe if the gun-totin’ loon was off message a little, he decided to point his gun in a different direction in his next ad, as he marched around with the same gun boasting about how he’d “round up criminal illegals myself” with his big ol’ pickup truck. Yes, it seems there is no better utility tool to rule over Georgia with than a shotgun. It solves all the problems, if you ask Kemp. Well, not all problems. He also went full “Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Macho Camacho” and released a third ad where he took a chainsaw to a “stack of regulations” before blowing them up in a giant fiery explosion.
Kemp’s gamble seemingly paid off, as he closed enough ground to keep Casey Cagle under the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff election, which going into the final stretch, polls showed Kemp and Cagle neck-and-neck. It didn’t help that Cagle was literally caught on tape admitting that the two Republican candidates were focused on “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest”, either. Kemp wore that accusation like a badge of honor, and released the audio hoping that blue-collar people in Georgia would rally behind him because of it.
Kemp, a die-hard anti-immigrant Trump supporter… hmm… maybe this would be a good time to point out that while serving as the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brian Kemp’s brilliant oversight managed to release the names and social security numbers of millions of registered voters, and he repeatedly fought with the Department of Justice regarding the security of Georgia’s voting systems (which were hacked by Russians), and resisted preventing any investigation into the intrusions even after the 2016 elections. His name appears in declassified reports alphabetically just prior to “Jared Kushner”, for some reason. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence…
Even more disturbing? He claimed in the buildup to the 2018 midterms that our own Department of Justice is “hacking” Georgia election systems, and he wants Donald Trump to personally investigate the matter (this would more than likely be a guy setting up a future claim of “voter fraud” when he loses). Just days prior to the election, he then claimed that Democrats had hacked the voting rolls… which is ironic, because the e-mail he cited as “evidence” was between a voter and a Democrat who noted how easy it was to hack Georgia’s voter information under Kemp’s watch, and that Democrat forwarded their concerns to the FBI herself.
Brian Kemp narrowly “defeated” Stacey Abrams at the polls in the 2018 elections, and we put that word in quotations because Stacey Abrams never conceded, and neither do we, really, given of how suspect the final counts are… and Kemp’s actions after the election. One of his first hires as governor was to bring on a lobbyist who not coincidentally, worked for the company the voting machines used in Georgia were purchased from… mysteriously at a price tag far higher than Georgia should have paid (and a price tag Kemp tried to conceal from the public).
All of this reeks of voter fraud carried out by the man who was supposed to secure Georgia’s elections, but all signs point to the fact that he rigged them in his own favor. And that is why the would-be Governor Kemp got called before Congress, specifically the House Oversight and Reform Committee, to explain a systematic voter purge that likely kicked just enough Democratic votes off the voter rolls to ensure Kemp’s victory.
And expect some discussion of the latest news, that Kemp and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office ignored a judge’s order to follow up on an FBI investigation into the 2018 election potentially being hacked, and never served a subpoena to the FBI for their copy of the records, per the judge’s request. It's almost like they have something to hide and don’t want to check and make sure that it was a fair election, you know?
And that has left Brian Kemp under suspicion of being an illegitimate executive. One who can do terrible things like sign off on a fetal heartbeat bill, HB 481, and respond like a complete maniac to a proposed boycott by film and television studios on filming in Georgia (which brings billions to the state) by calling those who voiced their displeasure “C-List celebrities squawking”. At least he didn’t point a shotgun at them. This time.
As Covid-19 spread across the country in 2020 and several red-state governors have embarrassed the hell out of themselves in the things they’ve said, and the ways they’ve responded or in many instances, not responded to the pandemic. And Kemp has been no different. Almost a month into the crisis, and well after CDC experts warned that Covid-19 can be spread by people who are infected by asymptomatic, Kemp revealed that fact as if it had just been discovered, and that it was a “game-changer”. He didn’t even keep a “stay home” order through April, being one of the first to reopen his state on April 28th, and wouldn’t you know it, Georgia rose to one of the top states in the country in new Covid-19 cases. By the end of June, he signed an executive order to do away with most of the remaining restrictions on businesses, including opening up restaurants, and in mid-July, he signed another order to rescind any mask-wearing mandates from local municipalities that actually had the nerve to give a damn about public health and safety. In a final, desperate attempt to get people to die of Covid-19, he actually filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Atlanta for issuing mask mandates within her own city. Kemp eventually dropped the lawsuit, because it didn’t have a prayer of holding up in court.
Brian Kemp knew his political survival in 2022 was to win a state-wide election depended on him doubling down on voter suppression and creating the 21st Century’s finest revival of Jim Crow, and thus he signed a sweeping voter suppression bill that not only was designed to prevent African Americans in Georgia from exercising their right to vote, not only set itself up to force in-person voting that would create the longest lines to vote in decades… but it was written to criminalize bringing food or water to people stuck in line to vote. When criticism rained down on that suggestion, Kemp sneered and said that voters in line “could just order Uber Eats”. Kemp, in a move to steal another victory in the 2022 elections, signed the bill and had a Democratic legislator for daring to knock on his door while he did. Several businesses had threatened to boycott doing business with Georgia if the bill was signed, and made good on that promise, including Major League Baseball, who pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta, and leading conservatives around the country to call on their ilk to, in turn, boycott MLB.
At this point, conservatives are running out of sports to support.
Perhaps all the pressure on Gov. Kemp from those on the right enraged on him for not helping Donald Trump steal a second term in the White House, the criticism from the left regarding… well everything and not even just his attempts at voter suppression… but just the fact that he’s done a terrible job of running Georgia throughout the pandemic. Maybe that’s why in a Fox News interview back in June, he couldn’t even nail the layup that is wearing American patriotism through aged colloquialisms when he finished up by saying:
Throughout September of 2021, Governor Kemp decided to help his case with conservative voters by picking an issue to establish himself as to the right of Perdue, and apparently decided that he could earn some cred with the MAGA jackass demographic by coming out hard against Covid-19 vaccine mandates. However, his logic was pretty flawed, because he said, on more than one occasion, that he was against it because “the HIV vaccine didn’t work either when it was mandated”.
For those confused by this statement, we’ll remind you that an HIV/AIDS vaccine has never been developed.
Now, while Brian Kemp is a huge nitwit, he did face a GOP Primary challenge from former Senator David Perdue, based on the fact that Donald Trump got angry when Kemp couldn’t think of a way to blatantly steal the electoral votes of Georgia for Trump, and recorded the phone calls to leave an evidence trail of Trump’s crime of trying to extort that election fraud out of Kemp. But alas, David Perdue really, really sucks, and Kemp advanced out of the primary and into a rematch with Stacey Abrams. Brian Kemp won re-election in 2022 with 53% of the vote, mostly on the strength of having worked to continually suppress the vote as Secretary of State years prior, and continue to have Republican state officials continue the practice as much as possible for the first four years he was in office.
He could be factoring into Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Jan. 6th, and Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the will of the American people in the 2020 election, as last week Kemp was contacted by Smith about Donald Trump’s phone call to him, and likely a lot of other questions about Trump’s efforts in Georgia. Brian Kemp will likely remain in office until 2026, at which point we hope Georgia has learned electing a Republican is like punching oneself in the face.
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