What do you do when you’re a tea party organizer with a history of inflammatory comments comparing America’s public schools to Nazi Germany? If you’re Wisconsin state Senate candidate Kim Simac, the answer may be liberally apply the delete key to your online past.
Simac is the Republican candidate in the Wisconsin recall election in state Senate district 12, which means she’s hoping to unseat incumbent state Sen. Jim Holperin (D). Thanks to the strange political dance that is the Wisconsin recall process, Simac will face Holperin in a general election contest later next month.
Simac has the support of the state party, according to the Wausau Daily Herald. She’s also got a well documented history of saying extreme things about public schools. Those two roles — mainstream GOP candidate and fiery tea party leader — may be in conflict as Simac attempts to unseat an incumbent Democrat. And so it appears that one of Simac’s more controversial statements has disappeared from her tea party blog just as the general election fight begins in earnest.
The post in question went up in Oct, 2010 on the Patriot Action Network, a tea party social network that connects activists across the country. Simac is a longstanding member of the network, though her page is set to private meaning only people she’s friends with can now look at her posts.
Back on Oct. 6, Simac appears to have posted a potentially controversial missive about the American public school system. Here’s the original link, here’s a cached version, and here’s a sample:
The scary comparisons of the indoctrination tactics of our youth today and those of the Hitler Regime of past.
I am done raising my kids but if I was a young parent today I would take my kids out of the public school system today. At what point will we stop talking about the comparisons to what is occurring today and what actually happened by the regime of the Nazi’s in the past?… Take the commercial that Glenn Beck showed from British Progressives that explains to little children that if they do not listen to their teachers recommendations on subjects such as carbon emissions, they could have their heads blown off. Add to that Kindergarten Sex Ed classes and I really wonder how it is American parents smile and kiss their children good bye every morning and in good conscience hand their most precious resource over to the hands of such questionable people.
Not exactly the kind of thing that most political experts would call helpful in a general election, which is what Simac faces in just a few weeks. The post was deleted from Patriot Action Network last week, though it’s not clear why or by whom. Simac’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the post over the past few days. Simac did not respond to a request for comment left at the contact info listed for her Wisconsin horse farm.The state GOP did not respond to phone inquiries Monday. And the administrators of Patriot Action network didn’t immediately respond to a request emailed Monday night.
The post certainly fits the profile of Simac, who’s a conservative Christian author and tea party activist with particular interest in the lives of children. She’s also prone to making comparisons to Nazi Germany, as she did in this tweet posted in November, 2009 during the height of the war over health care reform:
I think of how the German people such intelligent wonderful people were led so astray and to slaughter I am beginning to see it clearly now
During the Republican primary leading to Simac’s nomination in the recall fight, her opponent criticized her for being too extreme for a state Senate trying to return to some semblance of order following the drawn-out union battle in Wisconsin that transfixed the nation for weeks.
“The only way to get something done in Madison is for legislators to talk to one another,” Bob Lussow said in a debate with Simac earlier this month, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “There must be compromise.”
On her campaign website, Simac says she’s running “because she knows the Northwoods [region] needs a voice that isn’t afraid of challenges.”
Unless that challenge is a question about something she wrote on a blog last year, apparently.
