McDermott: Pinner may have been crackers, but in today’s GOP, she was practically normal – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

St. Louis County Republicans last week surely feel they dodged a bullet with the exit from the November ballot of Katherine Pinner, who was briefly the partys nominee for St. Louis County executive. Whatever issues shed hoped to focus on in her campaign, the real issue would have been the lawsuit she filed against her former employer alleging that its mask mandate was satanic and that getting vaccinated displeases God.

Pinner thus took her place among a long line of loons in elective politics these days. Not all, but most, hail from the rightward side of the political spectrum. Which invites some legitimate questions about what has happened to the once-sober conservative movement.

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Pinner is the 55-year-old political novice who emerged from out of nowhere this month to win the Republican nomination for the countys top political post. Online, she had voiced beliefs consistent with QAnon, the culty crowd that thinks a dark world of all-encompassing conspiracies hums just beyond plain sight a good-versus-evil epic that casts Donald Trump, improbably, as the former.

Pinners posts pointed out that if you replaced each B in President Bidens Build Back Better legislation with 6, youd end up with the mark of the devil. As voters started catching onto this plan of 6uild 6ack 6etter, the democrats quickly changed their slogan, she wrote. (Shes right. I remember the memo from headquarters.)

She suggested that coronavirus vaccines were laced with nanotechnology designed to bar code nine billion people in order to inventory them.

Its all connected, she warned.

Because, yknow, its always all connected.

After winning the Aug. 2 primary, Pinner apparently got some good advice and did some online house cleaning to remove indications that she is, well, crackers. But it seems she couldnt rein in her demons for long. The $1.2 million lawsuit Pinner filed last week against her former employer, the American Association of Orthodontists, for its pandemic policies, alleges that vaccines prompt transhumanism changes in the body that can lead to being barred from Gods graces. And it claims mask-wearing is associated with dehumanization and satanic ritual abuse.

In the latest head-spinning twist, Pinner late Thursday told the county Republican chair she plans to drop out of the race, without explaining why. Its a welcome if undeserved reprieve for the party, which can now put someone less demonstrably loopy on the ballot.

But the question remains: Why do Republicans, here and around America, keep nominating candidates who, if they approached them on the sidewalk, would prompt them to cross the street?

The poster-child for this phenomenon, of course, is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia. Evidence of her psychosis is too voluminous to detail here, so lets leave it at her suggestion that Californias wildfires were caused by space-based lasers controlled by a cabal of Jewish overlords.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colorado, hasnt achieved quite that level of bonkers, but its not for lack of effort. Among her litany of lunacy was a speech in June declaring, The church is supposed to direct the government Im tired of this separation of church and state junk thats not in the Constitution. (Narrator: Except in the very first words of the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights.)

Republican candidates coming up through this years congressional primaries promise more of this derangement. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who has more motive than anyone to get Republicans seated, no matter the details recently worried aloud that his party might fail to take back the Senate because of what he diplomatically called candidate quality issues.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, Pennsylvanias Republican Senate nominee, has pushed such quack remedies that it prompted an essay in the normally staid Scientific American headlined: Dr. Oz Shouldnt Be a Senator or a Doctor. Arizona Republicans have nominated to the Senate 36-year-old Blake Masters, who has praised the anti-tech manifesto of Ted Unabomber Kaczynski. In Georgia, GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker the former NFL star who has already been in the politically awkward position of having to issue clarifications to the media regarding how many children he has fathered by how many women bashed Bidens new climate law last week by asking, Dont we have enough trees around here?

Then (as always) theres Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who last week lambasted Dr. Anthony Fauci at a fundraising event. Fauci, the federal governments top infectious-disease expert, is retiring in the face of conservative fury over his allegiance to science instead of Trump. But thats not good enough for DeSantis, who told the crowd that someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac. Its worth noting that this elevated rhetoric comes from the man who many Republicans view as the more-sane alternative to Trump for the GOPs 2024 presidential nomination.

Despite the controversy surrounding Pinners brief presence on the St. Louis County ballot, she perhaps shouldnt completely discount a future in the GOP. At the rate its going, todays Republican Party will likely have a place for people like her for a long time to come.

Kevin McDermott is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board member. On Twitter: @kevinmcdermott Email: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com

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McDermott: Pinner may have been crackers, but in today's GOP, she was practically normal - St. Louis Post-Dispatch