The toxic Mr. Paladino
When you have to explain why expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler isn’t the same as, well, admiring Adolf Hitler, you’ve already lost the argument. In Carl Paladino’s case, it should also cost him his run for Congress.
But the controversy is about more than Mr. Paladino, whose embarrassing political record includes a welldeserved trouncing in his 2010 run for governor against Andrew Cuomo and being removed from the Buffalo school board in 2017 for his behavior. And it’s about more than one congressional race in western New York. It’s about Republican politicians who still support an individual who has no business being in public office — especially one of Mr. Paladino’s most prominent backers, the House Republican chairwoman, Rep. Elise Stefanik of Schuylerville.
Mr. Paladino’s comments lauding the Nazi dictator were reported by the liberal Media Matters this past weekend. In a Feb. 13, 2021, interview on The r-house Radio Show on WBEN in Buffalo, Mr. Paladino held forth on how people in politics can tuletters@timesunion.com
rouse the public:
I was thinking the other day about somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds. And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just — they were hypnotized by him. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today.
This, sadly, isn’t a shock to those familiar with Mr. Paladino. This is the same person who, while serving on the Buffalo Board of Education, told a newspaper that his hopes for 2017 were that Michelle Obama would “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla,” and that President Barack Obama would die of mad cow disease after “being caught having relations with” a cow. He was later removed from the board by the state education commissioner, though the official reason was that he broke the law in leaking confidential information.
The Hitler remark — which he later called “a serious mistake” in a statement that fell short of an apology — isn’t his only incendiary comment of late. Media Matters also reported his sharing of a post on Facebook and through email portraying the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, as “false flag ” attacks intended to help Democrats “revoke the 2nd amendment and take away guns.” The post also claimed that the Texas shooter was under “hypnosis training” apparently connected to the CIA. And he initially claimed he didn’t share the post, only to acknowledge it in the face of clear evidence that he did.
This all leaves Republican primary voters in the 23rd Congressional District with one heck of a choice in the upcoming primary: Mr. Paladino, or Nick Langworthy, who is also the state’s Republican chairman and who has cast his lot with a loathsome figure in his own right — former President Donald Trump, who has flirted with white supremacists, demonized Muslims, vilified and mistreated immigrants, lied to the country and incited the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in a bid to subvert the 2020 election and hold on to power.
And it leaves Republican politicians like Ms. Stefanik with a choice, too: to renounce the likes of Mr. Paladino, or to continue to endorse him. A halfhearted “tsk-tsk” is not an option. And to be silent is to be both cowardly and complicit.