Neil Kumar, a 26-year-old Arkansas Republican with white supremacist ties running for the U.S. House, has issued a fundraising email stating that “LGBT groomers” and “Sodomite Predators” are “grooming and brainwashing your vulnerable children.”
“Public schools are now nothing more than psychological torture camps,” Kumar’s email said. “Education has been replaced by the promotion of the depraved LGBT agenda, a Satanic attack on God and Nature. I call it LGBTP—the P is for pedophilia.”
Related: Conservatives can’t stop calling people “groomer” & it’s hurting abuse victims
“These sodomite predators are grooming, brainwashing, and mutilating our vulnerable children,” he continued. “These demons are defiling innocence itself, and they must be stopped.”
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He then claimed that public school teachers in California (where he’s not even running for office) are giving puberty blockers to children without parental consent. He also claimed that another California school “brainwashed [a] girl into believing she was transgendered” and then had the child taken away from her mother by social services when the mother wanted their kid to see a mental health professional. Kumar offers no names of individuals, the cities involved or links to news sources to back up his claims.
Puberty blockers are expensive and generally can’t be accessed without parental consent and multiple doctor’s visits. Schools cannot administer any medication – including over-the-counter meds – without parental consent. The myth that schools are slipping kids hormone pills has become common among Trump supporters and the religious right as the GOP has intensified their attacks on transgender people.
“We need PATRIOTS who will FIGHT for the AMERICAN people, not limp-waisted frauds who never miss an opportunity to stab us in the back,” Kumar’s email concluded.
Last fall, Arkansas Republican Party chairman Jonelle Fulmer called Kumar a “non-recommended candidate”, adding that her party wouldn’t endorse or defend “racist, bigoted, sexist or threatening language by any candidate.”. Kumar called the rejection a badge of honor.
Numerous things suggest Kumar’s white supremacist alignment. He was interviewed on the podcast of the white supremacist group American Renaissance, and his Facebook photo shows him surrounded by the Confederate flag, the flag flown by pro-slavery southerners during the U.S. Civil War. The flag is widely understood as a banner supporting white supremacy.
While it’s tempting to dismiss Kumar as a far-righter who is too kooky for the Republican Party, his rhetoric about pedophilic LGBTQ groomers mutilating and brainwashing school children has become a common talking point among mainstream Republicans and conservative pundits.
It’s also worth noting that conservatives who are so concerned about child “grooming” never seem to ally themselves with any national organizations dedicated to actually stopping child sex abuse or trafficking.
