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As the GOP continues to weather widespread fallout after a comedian at Donald Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” the party’s Washington State operation is floating the mendacious claim that Democrats are angling to “eliminate the Spanish language.”
The Spanish-language message was texted to voters on Friday, from a sender calling himself “Matteo from the Washington State Republican Party.” It took aim at a trio of Democratic candidates who are themselves of Latino descent.
“They are deranged to the point of wanting to eliminate the Spanish language,” the text read, arguing, disingenously, that Maria Beltran, Ana Ruiz Kennedy and Chelsea Dimas “reject God’s design of two genders and want to confuse your children about whether they are boys or girls.”
Beltran, who is running for the state Senate, Ruiz Kennedy, who is running for the state House of Representatives, and Dimas, who is also running for a seat in the State House, “hate you, they hate your family, they hate God and they hate the truth,” the text insisted, further claiming, counterfactually, that the three “support chemically castrating your children in school without your knowledge or consent.”
“Don’t let them represent you!” the text concluded.
A spokeswoman for the Washington State Republican Party shared a statement with The Independent from party chairman, Rep. Jim Walsh, which said nothing about the supposed Spanish-elimination issue, but instead railed against Planned Parenthood, the candidates it chooses to endorse, and the organization being an “affront… to God.”
In a phone interview with the Spokane Spokesman-Review, which first reported on the texts, Washington State Republican Party Chairman, Rep. Jim Walsh, doubled down on the message, arguing, “Why is it OK for the left to accuse us of hate speech, but somehow questionable for us to point out that their actions, the actions of these candidates, show a hatred toward conventional families and traditional notions of gender identity?”
Beltran responded with an Instagram post, slamming the GOP for having “crossed the line.”
“[T]oday they sent this text full of blatant lies and fear-mongering out to Spanish-speakers in our community,” Beltran wrote. “They accuse me of awful, flatly untrue things and disrespect my Catholic faith and Mexican heritage.”
She said she has run “an informed, issue-based campaign to get our community the leadership we deserve,” while her opponent, incumbent Republican State Sen. Curtis King and the local GOP machine “have constantly lied, tried to manipulate our community, and personally attacked me rather than engage in real, truthful, debate. This kind of cheap, egregious personal attack is what makes people in our district want to tune out of politics, and the Republican Party should be ashamed of engaging in it.”
Dimas is the daughter of immigrant farmworkers from Mexico, as is Beltran. Ruiz Kennedy was born and raised in Mexico, and moved to Washington in 2009.
Walsh, his legislative assistant, and communications director did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
The GOP’s attack against the three elicited a harsh rebuke from Dr. Raul Garcia, a Republican running to represent Washington in the US Senate. He told The Spokesman-Review that the party’s claims were “not acceptable,” and that “[p]ersonal attacks should have no place and should be condemned from either party.”
GOPer Deanna Martinez, a city councilwoman who chairs a group called the Mainstream Republicans of Washington, told the paper that the messaging “missed badly.”
“It’s outrageous what they said in Spanish,” Martinez said. “There are plenty of Democrats who are Christians and there are plenty of Republicans that are Christian. And if you call yourself Christian, would you really be using that language? You cannot assume that because someone’s a Democrat that they don’t believe in God, that they hate your family. No. No. That’s so wrong.”
