Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has the “worst luck in American retail politics ever,” declares host Molly Jong-Fast on this episode of The New Abnormal.
She’s referring to Stefanik’s past “replacement theory” rhetoric that resurfaced very quickly after the “screed” of the Tops shooter Payton Gendron had been reported to contain the same kind of views.
“People have died because an 18-year-old used those theories as the basis of his worldview,” adds co-host Andy Levy. “Look, if someone went out and killed a bunch of people because of stuff I’d been saying, I’d wanna run away from the stuff I said too, but that doesn’t change the fact that you said it.”
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It’s not like that rhetoric was far in her past either. Just last Friday, she sent a tweet parroting QAnon conspiracy about Democrats being pedophiles.
“[The shooting] is the result of a culture where white nationalism is the mainstream,” says Molly.
Molly also gets the lowdown from Democratic strategist Adrienne Elrod on the Pennsylvania candidates running in Tuesday’s election, including Kathy Barnette, who is “even too Trumpy for Trump.”
Elrod also has thoughts on Stefanik.
“Remember when she was actually kind of normal?” she asks Molly.
“I mean that tweet will live with her for the rest of her life. It will live with her, it will live with the Republican party, and it’s going to in infamy,” Elrod notes later.
Plus! Shannon Watts, founder of anti-gun violence group Moms Demand Action, explains the loophole that allowed the Tops shooter to get his gun, and how the NRA is linked to what drove him to kill.
“It’s like an overlapping circle now, right? The NRA’s agenda, the Republican agenda, the Christian nationalist agenda. And that is that gun extremism is a recruiting tool,” she says.
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