This election cycle has given us plenty of bad things: nazis, white supremacists, and grifters who dabble in racism, just to name a few. But if there’s one good thing that’s come out of this awful pre-midterm hell world, it’s this: GOP candidates whose fundamental awfulness is so unbearable that their own flesh and blood relatives feel compelled to take a public stand against them in order to preserve the family honor.
First it was Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, whose six siblings all appeared on camera for a campaign ad urging voters in the state’s Fourth Congressional District to vote for anyone but their brother. Now, 12—a full dozen!—of Nevada’s GOP gubernatorial nominee Adam Laxalt’s relatives have come together in a joint opinion piece for the Reno Gazette Journal to explain just why their own family member essentially sucks. And folks? It’s absolutely brutal.
Here are just a few highlights:
They accuse him of being a carpetbagging opportunist:
First, for those of us who were actually raised in Nevada, it’s difficult to hear him continue to falsely claim that he was raised in Nevada or has any true connections to Nevadans. The simple fact is that while he may have been born in Reno, he left as an infant and was raised on the East Coast, 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., and moved here only in 2013, only one year later launching his political career. Aside from the occasional short visit, Adam never knew the state or its people. Perhaps if he had, he would stand for Nevada’s values rather than for those of his out-of-state donors.
They say he’s a cosplaying phony:
Recently, Adam held his “Basque Fry,” a fundraiser that he has put on over the last several years in Gardnerville. This event perfectly captures the Adam Laxalt candidacy: the phoniness of the setting and costumes, the pretense of folksiness used as a prop for Washington power players like Kelly Anne Conway and Devin Nunes.
Here, for reference, is an extremely awkward promotional video of the fry:
They insist he’s bad at his job:
There is the simple question of whether Adam is qualified to head the executive branch in Nevada. His brief experience as a practicing lawyer was described as a “train wreck” by members of his own firm. His tenure in the attorney general’s office has been little more than a four-year publicity tour for his current campaign for governor — in fact, he outsourced jobs in the AG’s office to out-of-state lawyers who were given special exemptions to practice law in Nevada.
Adam Laxalt? I don’t know her.
If he responds to this article at all, it will probably be to say that he hardly knows the people writing this article. And in many ways that would be true. We never had a chance to get to know him, really — he spent his life in Washington, D.C., while we lived in Northern Nevada and grew up in public schools and on public lands. He moved to Nevada in 2013 so that he could lean on the reputation of a family that he hardly knew while tapping into support by donors who had no interest in our state or its people.
Truly, the whole op-ed is worth a read, if only to experience a master class in how to drag a shitty relative straight to hell, but doing it so well that you’re still invited to the family reunion next year.