SOUTHINGTON, Conn. (AP) — A Republican candidate for Connecticut’s General Assembly has withdrawn following criticism over comments he made online about victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Steven Baleshiski, a 22-year-old college student from Southington, had been challenging six-term state Rep. Joe Aresimowicz for a House seat.
The Hartford Courant reports the Republican town committees for Southington and Berlin withdrew their endorsements of Baleshiski before he resigned. The two committees said they do not condone Baleshiski’s “hurtful and dividing behavior.” Committee chairs said they are looking for a new candidate.
In a social media post in March, Baleshiski said a survivor of the Parkland shooting who turned to gun-control advocacy “can burn in hell.”
Baleshiski did not respond to a request for comment from the newspaper.
22 years old! That’s a good reminder to everyone here that the GOP is not “dying off”. There a plenty of hateful young dicks waiting in the wings. If anything, growing up on the internet has made them even worse than their elders.
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
This is of a kind with the story about the Republican in Kansas who said the lesbian kick-boxing Indian candidate would be sent packing back to the reservation. It is the kind of thing that infects social media. Republicans think they can say such shit with impunity right up to the moment they are caught.
Among the many mysteries of Democratic campaigning over the years is the refusal to make icons out of absurdly evil or repellent Republicans. A TV Ad “The Republican Party has changed” could feature a parade of monsters, child molesters, fraudsters, big mouths, traitors, money launderers etc drawing simply on those who have been outed just in the past year. It would make compelling viewing–especially among the white men who are not interested in policy arguments or being seen as Democrats but are nonetheless uneasy about the direction of the country and need a socially acceptable narrative to bail on the Republican party. An organization like MoveOn could trial run such ads in deep-red states where we don’t really have a chance of winning, but where ads would be cheap and a negative branding campaign could lay the foundation for a future comeback.
More broadly, Democrats must not shirk from the argument–which has been made clearly by ex-GOPers like Schmidt, Kristol et al–that the Republican party is rotten as such, is a gangster organization. Anyone who runs as a Republican should be made to deal with the negative party brand (just as Dems for years had to deal with the brand “liberal” as if it were a filthy word). It isn’t OK to be in the Republican party. The Republican party has collapsed into criminality and hatred. Let’s message that without timidity.
The two committees said they do not condone Baleshiski’s “hurtful and dividing behavior.”
In public, that is…