(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Lydia Chassaniol- 2023 Update [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-03 On this date in 2017, 2018, 2019, as well as 2020, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” published its first profile of Mississippi State Senator Lydia Chassaniol, a close ally of former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who was first elected to office back in the off-year elections in 2007. She has won re-election twice, in both 2011 and 2015, which is amazing because halfway through her first term in office in 2009, she was a keynote speaker at a meeting of the white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. Of course, when confronted about her membership and appearance at the CCC's conference in 2009 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, she responded by trying to assure them the CCC was a “conservative organization.” She also wrote, “I do not consider myself racist.” Chassaniol's speech back in 2009 had the featured topic of “Cultural Heritage in Mississippi.” where she gave a brief history of the state since 1540, opined that the U.S. was in decline, citing as her evidence tributes to Michael Jackson, a “pedophile who’s being celebrated.” She encouraged members of the CCC present to join Tea Party protests, and warning that the government wanted to “take from those who have and give to those who don’t want to work for it” which sounds a lot like a racial dog whistle from where we're sitting. Chassaniol, after injecting white supremacists directly into the blood stream of the Mississippi Tea Party, continued to praise the movement thereafter. Chassaniol's path to re-election was hardly a sure thing in 2015 after her CCC connections were dragged back to the fore after Dylann Roof's killing spree. Her district is over 27% African American, after all, and she was linked to a group that around election time, was posting eugenics studies to claim that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. And, while that should be more than enough to display she was a terrible candidate, in January 2015, Chassaniol also led a failed effort by the Mississippi state legislature to become a shadow government that could conduct business behind closed doors. And yet... she won, mostly on the benefit of two factors... the vote was split between her Democratic and Libertarian opponents, and that she received over four times the amount of donations that her opponents did, usually from such tiny little donors as corporate giant Monsanto. (Thanks again, Citizens United decision.) As a legislator, Chassionol has supported GOP voter suppression efforts by supporting stricter Voter ID measures, voted to try and create “covenant marriages” to make it mandatory to take a year of marriage counseling before someone could be granted a divorce, and has repeatedly gone all-in on anti-abortion efforts and anti-LGBTQ legislation. In 2018, she voted for legislation to allow the gas chamber, electric chair, and firing squad to be brought back as potential methods of execution in Mississippi, and while she seems opposed to having the LGBTQ community protected by hate crime legislation, she co-sponsored legislation that would deem targeted attacks on law enforcement as a hate crime. At least she’s consistent about being a terrible bigot. Regrettably, Chassaniol was allowed to run for re-election in 2019 unopposed, and thus gets four more years to be a not-so-subtle part of the GOP’s growing build towards being an outright white nationalist party. Since we last checked in on Lydia Chassaniol two years ago, she has co-sponsored legislation to prohibit the teaching of “critical race theory” (which wasn’t being taught anyway), voted for a prohibition on mask and vaccine mandates that would help restrict the spread of Covid-19, and voted for a bill that was a blatant attempt at voter suppression, giving the Mississippi Secretary of State even more power to “purge vote rolls” and “audit election results”. She will be up for re-election in November, and we hope she steps on multiple rakes while walking her path to re-election. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/3/2150847/-Fanatical-Republican-Extremist-of-the-Day-Lydia-Chassaniol-2023-Update Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/