I’m back with some more political news from Dollar Store Gilead. First, the good news:  all of the bills I wrote about—the so-called Women’s Bill of Rights (really an anti-trans people bill), the bill to arrest librarians if there is “pornography” in the building, and the bill to make it easier for parents to put their underage kids to work—all failed. For now.

Now we turn our attention to the primaries for state-wide elections. Since Governor Jim Justice is running for Joe Manchin’s seat, there are a bunch of Republican misfits running for his seat. Let’s meet one of them, Chris Miller.

His mother is one of the WV House representatives, Carol Miller. I live in the Eastern Panhandle, so he’s a complete unknown to me, but evidently he’s a car salesman. He had also been the chair of the WV Faith and Family Coalition, which, you guessed it, is a Christian nationalist group.

He has no prior political experience, which makes him especially extreme. And he’s a rich dude, so right now he is funding his own campaign, and so he’s just out there in orbit. For example he’s concerned about the population drain in WV. OK, fair enough—it’s a real issue. His solution is to make WV more “business friendly”.

I think this is one of the big problems he has—he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth via the family car business. To him, “business friendly” means low taxes so he can get richer. But that’s not what a true business friendly state looks like.  How are you supposed to attract business when WV has a near total ban on abortion? How do you attract businesses if their employees aren’t going to be able to get the health care they need?

West Virginia is an especially hostile place for trans kids, so how do you locate your business here if you can’t attract the best staff because of discrimination? How do you attract staff who are people of color when the state can’t even pass the CROWN Act?

And his inexperience doesn’t stop there, either because his panacea for all that ails this state—at or near the bottom of surveys in health, education, quality of life, etc.–is to…cut taxes by eliminating the state income tax. Which he can’t do unilaterally. And which would destroy the state.

These are fundamentally unserious people. They live in MAGA bubbles and say magic words and somehow they’re the answer to hard times that actually require thought and hard work.

Miller is essentially a trained seal saying buzzwords and sitting in front of props. And then there’s the overacting, too.

Here’s his ad about trans girls:

Here’s his ad for Critical Race Theory. Oh, and COMMUNISM!!!

Here’s his overtly threatening gun ad:

 

He’s a thug. Let’s hope his campaign goes nowhere, because the Club For Growth is now funding him in addition to their candidate, Patrick Morrissey.

This seems like a good song to close out on: