After losing every statewide office and full control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years, Michigan Republicans elected Kristina Karamo as their new state party chairwoman and the first Black person to lead the state party.
Karamo has become notorious for the outrageous and inflammatory theories that she has espoused.
She is an election denier who believes the 2020 presidential race was stolen, has also refused to concede her own 2022 race for Michigan Secretary of State, which she lost by 14 percentage points – the most lopsided loss of any statewide candidate last year.
In the past Karamo has claimed that Beyoncé was secretly recruiting Black Americans to Paganism through a new album; that “demonic possession is real” and can be transferred via “intimate relationships”; and that acceptance of gay and transgender Americans will lead to “normalizing” pedophilia.
She has said that the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are “Marxist witches”; that the theory of evolution is “one of the biggest scams ran on us in human history”; and that doing drugs is “witchcraft.” She has compared abortion to pagan child sacrifice.
In the past, Karamo has also compared the media to Nazi Germany, saying media rhetoric about Republicans will lead to them being rounded up, killed and put in concentration camps. She has also compared gun control reform to the Holocaust.
A proud anti-vaxxer, Karamo has also said she doesn’t believe in vaccines – saying she won’t vaccinate her children and has only taken one vaccine herself.
In short, Karamo seems to have collected all the most outlandish theories and ideas propagated by the fringe element of the Republican Party and made them her own.
The GOP has seen fit to reward her by electing her Chair of the Party in Michigan.
