by Kindler
Why has Glenn Youngkin – who goes to great lengths to portray himself as a “Republican moderate” – hired one of Donald Trump’s notoriously racist, right-wing liars to be his Communications Director?
Matt Wolking, Youngkin’s Communications Director, has a reprehensible history in politics that includes:
- Calling Muslims “murderous thugs”;
- Supporting trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen;
- Signaling support for crazy conspiracy theories from QAnon to Replacement Theory;
- Spreading misleading right-wing memes from Benghazi to Hunter Biden’s laptop;
Let’s take ‘em one by one!
Wolking got his start with a blog called Wolking’s World which he wrote from 2008-2011. According to The American Independent:
“In one February 2008 post, Wolking wrote that ‘over 90 million Muslims are murderous thugs, a conservative estimate considering all of those who would rather not go on record as supporting terrorism.’ Islam, Wolking continued, is ‘a religion whose followers danced in the streets on 9/11.’”
As the “over 90 million” figure makes clear, this guy’s contempt for the practitioners of one of the world’s major religions is not exactly confined to “a few bad apples”. Both Youngkin and his spokesman need to be asked about these Islamophobic statements, whether Wolking still believes this hateful nonsense, and whether Virginia’s roughly 200,000 Muslim residents can be expected to be treated fairly and respectfully by the incoming governor’s administration.
Wolking’s career has included serving as executive producer for the execrable Laura Ingraham’s talk radio show and as press secretary to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) when Gowdy was leading the House Select Committee on Benghazi. In case there’s any doubt about Wolking being a true believer, he was still defending the Benghazi investigation as recently as October 2019.
In fact, his love for right wing conspiracy theories made him a perfect fit for trump ‘s 2020 campaign. In his “rapid response” role for the campaign, Wolking sent numerous tweets in support of donald’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen.” For example, he sent a tweet on September 24, 2020 repeating false claims about 9 military mail-in ballots and calling them evidence that “Democrats are trying to steal the election.” On the same day, he linked to an article about an investigation in Wisconsin of discarded mail “including absentee ballots” – without issuing a correction a few days later when local authorities determined that this discarded mail included ZERO state absentee ballots.
Wolking’s desperate attempts to back up America’s most dishonest president ever veered into some disturbing territory. On July 6, 2019, he tweeted: “If you want to know why Democrats are desperate to help as many illegals as possible get into our country, look no further than this thread. Democrats are literally colluding with foreign actors to hack our democracy.” This sounds an awful lot like the Replacement Theory favored by the Western world’s most notorious racists – the idea that liberal, globalist elites are purposely flooding America and Europe with immigrants to change demographic and voting patterns.
No less incredibly, on August 12, 2020, Wolking blasted Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for having the gall to tell the Republican base that “QAnon is a fabrication”. And Wolking’s tweets about Hunter Biden were pretty much endless (as well as baseless) including even the gem on November 22, 2020 that “Tony Blinken is being put forward for Secretary of State because he knows too much about Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings. They need him to cover it all up.”
So why did Glenn Youngkin hire a guy with such a long track record of lying, of spreading conspiracy theories and hate, to be his comms director? Could it be that Youngkin wants a professional propagandist to cover up his own fabrications about how race issues are taught in Virginia schools or the idea that the state economy was “in the ditch” under Democratic leadership?
I recommend that Virginia’s press corps ask the governor-elect all of these questions. And that they stop spreading the myth that this guy is any kind of “moderate”.
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