Stop the Nutjob Takeover
The call of the normal is going unheeded by more and more office-seekers.
By Kyle Smith
Part of the act of running for office is acting normal. This creates lovable spectacles such as presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, a quintessential Yankee blueblood, who was presumably raised on a diet of camembert, foie gras and emu tenderloin, saying he was partial to a normal, wholesome American junk food: pork rinds. The kind of guy who seemed like he probably knew a lot about harpsichord concertos also said, “I love country music,” though he somewhat diluted the point when he went on to cite the lyrics of a band called the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird (meaning the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band). We all appreciated the effort, though.
These days, the call of the normal is going unheeded by more and more office-seekers. We live in an environment of freaks, flakes and fruitcakes who are not only running away from reality but running toward significant power and authority. Would it be too much to ask for our political class to aspire to be normal again?
Possibly the weirdest figure out there, in what is looking like a fiesta of the bizarre, is Victor Marx, who a few weeks ago won the Republican nomination for governor in Colorado. Colorado is pretty blue these days, so Mr. Marx’s chances of winning would be minimal even if he were normal. But he is to normal what Chuck Grassley is to young.
Mr. Marx, who calls himself a “high-risk humanitarian,” once said his stepdad forced him to kill another man when he was 7 and when asked the follow-up question whether he had killed anyone else, said he wasn’t sure. (“I’ve been in other situations where, you know, possibly people or persons died, as a result of me defending myself and in other countries.”) Also, he said that as a minister he had freed many people from demonic possession, sometimes over the phone, though he calls the process different from exorcism.
He claimed on X to have gone on more than 130 missions to rescue women and children from terror and abuse and bragged that, despite having been a civilian at the time, he also called in an airstrike that killed some 70 ISIS fighters. When asked for evidence of these assertions, he demurred. “I can’t help it if I’ve had an extraordinary life,” he said at a debate. A claim on his website that he had “saved” more than 45,000 people has been amended to say that he and his ministry had “served” a similar number, “some of whom needed to be rescued from captivity.”
Mr. Marx’s father’s name was Karl, but at least he isn’t a Marxist. It’d be nice if no one could say the same about any incoming members of Congress. But Darializa Avila Chevalier, who as the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th Congressional District is nearly certain to nab that House seat on Nov. 3, has used X to say things like “seize the means of production”; called “Capital,” by the O.G. Karl Marx, an “essential must-read”; and put “how communist of you” in the biographical part of her profile on what was then known as Twitter, where she also stated: “Most of the theory I’ve read is communism but the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
Among many other (literally) red flags, Ms. Avila Chevalier is also a prison abolitionist, a police abolitionist and a graduate student in sociology. She joked about wiping dirty hands on the American flag, and she joined the hooray-for-Hamas rally that took place in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023, as the blood of more than 1,000 murdered Israelis was still drying. Such are her views on interracial relationships that David Duke, once a grand wizard in the KKK, said he agreed.
This is not normal. This is gaga. You may note that individual members of Congress don’t have much power over people’s lives. But governors sure do, and Ms. Avila Chevalier’s fellow democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, appears to have a big lead in the race to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, whose current governor is a Democrat. That primary is tomorrow.
Ms. Hong is such an oddball that even President Obama’s political guru David Axelrod called her, on X, “a font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.” Ms. Hong filled up every square on the Woke Bingo card circa 2019-21, calling for abolishing the Senate, saying police exist to uphold white supremacy, and claiming she had an “anxiety attack” in a restaurant because “to [sic] many old white people didn’t think we spoke english.” Demographically, Wisconsin is the 12th-oldest state and the tenth-whitest. Yet she fretted, “My proximity to whiteness continues,” because her son is half-white (she split up with her white husband).
Ms. Hong’s most bizarre trait might be her grudge against holidays: “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621,” she wrote in 2020. No, this wasn’t just a Covid precaution; she said T-Day was a day “celebrating colonialism” and a “colonizer holiday.” Wrong. It’s a holiday celebrating football, and the only oppressed entity that should think of it as victimization is the Detroit Lions.
The candidate also hates Valentine’s Day (“the worst of humanity comes out from folks ‘celebrating’ on another day capitalism tells you how to show love”), Halloween (“I would actually ask every single person in costume to leave,” adding later that people who want to talk to her should bear in mind “the only subject off limits is Halloween”) and Christmas (“I feel slightly attacked” she said when a co-worker changed a screensaver to a Christmas theme). Ms. Hong has been compared to the Grinch, but that’s unfair to the green fellow, who hates only one of these holidays. Even fellow socialist Bernie Sanders has refused to endorse her: “I don’t think so,” he offered.
American stability is enduring, but it isn’t guaranteed. Obsessive reactions to Covid, racism and then inflation seem to have unleashed a crazy id that is usually kept on a short leash. Now it’s getting far too close to power to be dismissed, and it has the energy of a pit bull on Red Bull. Here’s hoping there are more normal people than wackadoodles. Rise up, normies. Stop the nut-job takeover.
Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion, and the Journal’s film critic.
Nutters on the right and left are different. The ones on the right will leave me alone, but the ones on the left are determined to isolate me due to my race and gender, and then exact all of my wealth. Not the same thing.
The Colorado opposition party battles one another more than the opposing party. What are the issues? There are a lot of pro-choice types (this goes back to the wild-West tradition of rationalizing the sowing of oats -- really!). There are crony capitalists (they call themselves "Nationalists"). The Evangelicals of Colorado Springs are quite active. There are actual pro-free enterprise folk, but too few, and, also, too few, the pro-life Catholics (even the pro-lifers have issues with one another -- Evangelicals don't trust the Catholics). Before marijuana was legalized, these groups actually elected a few governors and senators together; once the West Coasters began moving for the legalized weed, Republicans were marginalized and began clawing at one another. It's a sad sight.