Massive Turd Won't Flush

After the Islamophobic pastor got dunked on by his ethical son and booted from office for employing operatives that illegally stuffed the ballot box, North Carolinians have chosen to replace him with…a somehow even worse, transphobic white guy.

Dan Bishop, a state senator, cruised through the GOP primary for the Ninth District special congressional election, claiming 48 percent of the vote on Tuesday. Bishop was long viewed as the front-runner given his political experience and name recognition; he defeated snake-swamp man Stony Rushing and eight other candidates to claim the Republican slot. He will now face Democratic candidate Dan McCready in the general election on Sept. 10.

Without diminishing the fact that Mark Harris was a blowhard liar, it’s hard to overstate just how big of a piece of shit Bishop has been in his years as an elected official. He’s best known for authoring the infamous House Bill 2, a piece of legislation that came to be known as the “bathroom bill,” even though its most heinous aspects involved stripping legal protections from the LGBTQ community in addition to policing restrooms.

There’s also the time Bishop referred to Raleigh journalists—a respectable lot—as “jihad media” and the time Bishop invested in a website harboring open white supremacists to give the finger to “thought police tech giants.” There was also the time Bishop said neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are basically two sides of the same coin. And the time that he, along with plenty of others, sold his soul to Big Ag and decided that the poor people getting cancer and other diseases from literal pig shit runoff entering their water sources deserved it for living there in the first place. (That last one is wild not in the least part because Bishop sponsored it as a representative of Mecklenburg County, arguably the least agricultural county in the entire state!) And that’s all in just the last three-plus years since he joined the General Assembly.

Given that HB2 stands out as arguably the biggest black eye in modern North Carolina legislative history and the fact that Republicans were caught cheating in this election just four months ago, the party is justifiably concerned that their Evil White Man No. 2 could lose a seat that’s been in their grasp for five decades. So it comes as little shock that they’re dipping into the tried-and-true method of screaming “SOCIALIST!” at McCready, despite the fact that McCready is a moderate lib at best.

Last night’s results do feel like the only plausible Hell World outcome: A racist, fear-mongering good-ol’-boy Trump knockoff rises to fill the void left by a marginally better bigot.