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The Daily Beast is out with a new report on how Joe Kent – the tin hat conspiracy theorist and right wing extremist once again vying to represent Washington’s 3rd Congressional District – wants to defund the FBI.
Kent, who has displayed a long pattern of white supremacist views and extremist ties, is once again Washington State Republicans’ top choice in the race to take on Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
Read more on Republicans’ latest conspiracy theorist recruit below:
GOP Extremist Joe Kent Is Back—and Now He Wants to Defund the FBI
The Daily Beast | Roger Sollenberger | September 24, 2023
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This time, [Kent] is shoring up his radical credentials by calling to gut the FBI.
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The FBI, Kent suggested in a video last month, is essentially operating “as a secret domestic intelligence agency,” which will “continue to take us down this road towards total authoritarianism.” He has repeatedly called to defund the agency, even as it faces mounting threats from the MAGAsphere, and has pushed the false claim that “deep state” infiltration was to blame for the Jan. 6 attack.
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Kent also saw the FBI itself differently a few years ago, when the target was on the left, arguing that the FBI should be the ones doing the defunding—“tracking the leaders & financiers of antifa, taking away their funds, arresting their leaders on federal charges.”
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But Kent’s right-wing extremism isn’t genuinely in doubt. His 2022 campaign was battered with reports about its connections to the Proud Boys and a number of other white identity extremists, which, combined with his far-right views on issues from vaccines to immigration, contributed to a narrow 2022 loss to Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
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Asked for comment, the campaign did not say Kent would work to defund the FBI. Instead, the campaign replied that if Kent were elected, he would have the FBI reprioritize its domestic threat list, focusing on leftist organizations and cartels.
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Kent, of course, has called to defund the FBI, and he also did so in 2022. And in the wake of the court-sanctioned search of Mar-a-Lago that summer he declared that “we are at war” with some sort of undefined shadowy leftist cabal.
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Kent was back at it after another tragedy this August. After FBI agents shot and killed a 74-year-old MAGA supporter—who had repeatedly made assassination threats against Democratic officials and allegedly pointed a gun at officers during the raid—Kent posted a live feed in which he falsely claimed the man had been killed “for Facebook posts.”
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In response, Kent for the first time personally articulated his defunding platform on video.
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“I really don’t know if we actually can save the FBI,” he said.
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He proposed using “the appropriations process” to gut the agency, “taking away the teeth of the FBI.” The reforms would make the agency a purely investigative body, which could do “investigative heavy lifting” alongside local operations, such as “sheriffs.”
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Notably, the Kent campaign’s comment said the opposite, endorsing the use of the FBI to target domestic threats…Going by some of Kent’s past statements, his view today appears unavoidably political—and hypocritical.
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If Kent survives the primary, he’ll likely face a moderate incumbent in Gluesenkamp Perez, whom he won’t be able to tar as a leftist.
Read more from the Daily Beast’s reporting here.
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