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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Ken Weyler- 2023 Update [1]

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Date: 2023-04-08  

On this date in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” had its original profile to discuss Ken Weyler, a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives who originally served nine terms in that body from 1990-2008, before taking a loss in 2008 and laying low for two years. He returned to office in a 2010 special election, garnered some attention when he argued against insurance covering mental health problems because, as he claims, “mental illness is an elaborate racket” where “by cutting the amount of help we're willing to offer, we'd like them to discover that some of these people can be cured.”



That probably should have alarmed people, as should his voting record, since Weyler has taken the hardest of hard lines on most issues across the board, be it sponsoring the effort by New Hampshire Republicans to sue the federal government over the Affordable Care Act, voting for obviously unconstitutional legislation to force public school students to stand for the pledge of allegiance, opposition to New Hampshire’s SB 390, which would have prevented housing discrimination against victims of domestic violence, and a vote against a bill which was written to establish a buffer zone outside of abortion clinics to keep protesters from getting close enough to bar the door, or attack those going in.



Now, it’s not Ken Weyler’s legislative record that really made him stand out to us. It was when he made the news in February of 2016 as he submitted testimony to a state House committee hearing for a bill he co-sponsored that would prohibit "any member of a foreign terrorist organization from receiving public assistance, medical assistance, or food stamps." That already sounded xenophobic and bigoted, but it got worse during the hearing, as Weyler argued that giving public assistance to Muslims amounts to “treason”. And that quote is most definitely not just the heat of the moment, because the prepared remarks that Weyler had included his opinions that In his written testimony, Weyler said that all "terrorist attacks of the last twenty years have been by Muslim fanatics" (which is false when you have people like Dylann Roof and James Dear running around, to name a few). Weyler then went on to rant about the Tsarnaev brothers, who perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombing and claimed both where not just “raised on public benefits” (reports are their mother did in their youth), but wasn’t satisfied and lied to claim Tamerlan still was because, "one of them married and put his wife on public benefits. If he had to support his family, he might have had more devotion to his job and not to bomb building and radicalizing his brother." Weyler continued in his testimony, admitting that there are "Muslims in our community who are working hard to be economically successful", but calling for an end to any welfare for Muslims because, “if one does not have to be responsible for what all the rest of us do to support ourselves, then ‘The Devil has work for idle hands." Weyler then meandered back into an argument that all Muslims are responsible for terrorism (which would be news to the IRA up in Ireland), charging that Islam is not a real religion.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/8/2162889/-Fanatical-Republican-Extremist-of-the-Day-Ken-Weyler-2023-Update

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