What do they do with a problem like Ingrassia?
Chatty Republicans keep ditching the dog whistle to spell out their racism, antisemitism and misogyny
By Sam Bellamy
Much to the dismay of House Speaker Mike Johnson and the rest of the von Claptrap family, the hills are alive with the sound of Nazi sympathizers. Again.
Fresh off the Young Republican chat scandal, Johnson and his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader John Thune, find themselves scrambling yet again to explain away the GOP’s knack for attracting racists, antisemites, misogynists and other reprobates to their ranks.
Mind you, Republicans do little in the day-to-day course of business to rout these people from their midst. But Johnson, Thune and the others would rather avoid big, flashy displays of hatred that distract from the task of quietly incorporating reactionary views into public policy.
Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, is the latest such display.
By the time you read this, the Trump administration is likely to have withdrawn Ingrassia’s name – Thune, Sen. Rick Scott and two other GOP senators have said they’ll oppose him – but at this writing, the Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing Thursday on the nomination.
The opposition arose Monday following a report by POLITICO on a leaked chain of text messages in which Ingrassia allegedly expressed the GOP agenda in terms that were a bit too explicit.
Here’s a sample from the story: “MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his ‘holiday’ should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs,” Ingrassia wrote in January 2024, according to the chat.”
And this: “Using an Italian slur for Black people, Ingrassia wrote a month earlier in the group chat seen by POLITICO: ‘No moulignon holidays … From kwanza [sic] to mlk jr day to black history month to Juneteenth,’ then added: ‘Every single one needs to be eviscerated.’ ”
Ingrassia’s attorneys are disputing that the texts are authentic. Even if they were, according to one of his lawyers, the messages are “self-deprecating and satirical humor making fun of the fact that liberals outlandishly and routinely call MAGA supporters ‘Nazis.’”
Gee, wonder why that happens. In one of the messages he’s said to have written, Ingrassia observed, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” In the follow-up texts from others in the chain, POLITICO reports, no one treats the comment as a joke.
Elsewhere, the texts show Ingrassia offering this opinion on former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy: “Never trust a chinaman or Indian” with an emphasis, “NEVER.”
As noted in the earlier Fight the Fire piece attached below, Ingrassia is also not a fan of Nikki Haley, whom he called “an insufferable bitch.”
According to the leaked texts, he also has lots of opinions about African Americans, including why – in the eyes of some Republicans – Democrats portray black people as victims. “Blacks behave that way because that’s their natural state … You can’t change them,” Ingrassia allegedly wrote, adding, “Proof: all of Africa is a shithole, and will always be that way.”
Anyone hear an echo?
POLITICO said the texts also include this gem: “In February 2024, Ingrassia wrote: ‘We need competent white men in positions of leadership. … The founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal … We need to reject that part of our heritage.’ ”
This, too, is a Trump administration credo, expressed in words and actions since Jan. 20 – with no substantive pushback from congressional Republicans.
Thune told reporters Monday that Ingrassia won’t secure enough votes for confirmation and that the Trump administration should withdraw the nomination.
At last report, though, Ingrassia is currently serving as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. He is unfit to be in that position or in any other government position.
Unfortunately, the same can be said for this entire administration, starting at the top.
The piece below, headlined “Just the fellow to take on ‘the Matrix, the deep state, and the satanic elite’/Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia is fresh out of the barrel bottom and ready to fight,” appeared June 5 at Fight the Fire.
By Sam Bellamy
Vetting candidates for open positions in the Trump administration appears to be a two-person job – one person to hold the ankles of the other as he or she descends upside-down to the bottom of the barrel to scrape up yet another nominee.
Forthwith, the latest: Paul Ingrassia, who has been carefully retrieved from those expansive depths to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
This isn’t the special counsel of Robert Mueller or Ken Starr fame. It’s a lesser-known independent agency created by Congress in the aftermath of Watergate. Its mission is to enforce the Hatch Act barring political activity by government workers and protecting whistleblowers and other federal employees from bosses who might abuse their rights and coerce them into doing unlawful things.
Do we know any such bosses? Well, yes, now that you mention it, we do, and Ingrassia just happens to be big, big fan of the big orange boss, a specialist himself in holding things upside down.
If confirmed by the Senate, Ingrassia would bring his pens and pencils and framed photos of the president from his current job as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. He previously held the same position at the Justice Department, where he boasted that he served as Trump’s “eyes and ears.”
Ingrassia, who graduated from Cornell Law School three years ago, is a former podcaster and a defender and friend of manly man Andrew Tate, who’s facing charges of rape, human trafficking and assault in the UK and an investigation of human trafficking and money laundering in Romania.
According to Ingrassia, the professional misogynist is “an extraordinary human being” and the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence" who offers “a dying West some hope for renewal.”
In a post on Instagram, Ingrassia said Tate “is radically at odds with our grotesquely decadent society, which values security and mediocrity over human excellence among men. It is for this reason that he and his brother have become public enemies number one and two in the eyes of the Matrix, the deep state, and the satanic elite that attempt to systematically program and oppress all men from womb-to-tomb – a form of communism that not even Karl Marx, in his wildest dreams, could have imagined.”
This renewal of the dying West, Tate contends, should not involve women voting.
“I'm saying this as one of the worlds most famous man [sic], girls who are UNKNOWN, not even famous - think the world is all about them on a level I could never. They can't even see ideas outside of themselves,” Tate once wrote. “Nothing exists unless they're in the middle. Like a dog can eat food. But a dog can't imagine another dog eating food.”
This does seem to dovetail with Ingrassia’s view of at least one woman. He has claimed that Nikki Haley – a woman of of Indian descent and born in the United States – is ineligible to become president. Trump reposted that lie on Truth Social, and Ingrassia later followed up by calling Haley “an insufferable bitch.”
Ingrassia also has lavishly praised white supremacist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, calling him “a dissident of authoritarianism.” Trump, who dined with Fuentes and companion Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, gets the same honorific from Ingrassia – and then some.
CNN reported that, after Trump’s loss in 2020, a tweet from Ingrassia’s podcast account stated, “Time for @realDonaldTrump to declare martial law and secure his re-election! It’s the only way.” (The tweet was later deleted.)
Ingrassia knocked fellow wingnut Sebastian Gorka as “soft” for denouncing calls from some MAGA followers to arrest the uncooperative Mike Pence and have him executed by firing squad.
Later, Ingrassia recommended that Jan. 6th be declared a national holiday and that $1 million in damages be paid to each rioter’s family. That’s at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer money that would go to people who beat police officers, urinated and defecated in the Capitol and tried to hunt down Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress.
“The tragedy of Jan. 6, 2021, was not that it was an attack on our democracy, let alone an insurrection," Ingrassia said at a fundraiser for the rioters in January 2024. "But rather, it was an opportunity for the deep state to finally remove its mask and begin prosecuting and jailing innocent American citizens like Tim, like so many of the people here today.”
NPR reported that the “Tim” in question was Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, whose name is familiar to many Fight the Fire readers. He’s the Nazi sympathizer who used to show up at work sporting a Hitler mustache and regale his co-workers and social media followers with antisemitic screeds.
Little Timmie, among the rioters pardoned by Trump in January, now describes himself as a “satirist” and internet troll, which apparently is a job these days.
Now that he’s more in the public eye, Ingrassia is distancing himself from Mr. Hitler Stache as well as Nick Fuentes, saying he doesn’t endorse those views and really wasn’t aware of them.
But – even if you believe that – the fact remains that Ingrassia’s judgment is so lacking that he ever associated with them.
That didn’t work for the equally contemptible Ed Martin, Trump’s failed nominee for U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., who tried belatedly to disavow his connections with little Timmie, including hosting him on his podcast. Martin was forced to withdraw his name from the nomination, which only led to Trump giving him a new job as his “pardon attorney” and handing the interim U.S. attorney job to unhinged Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.
Like Martin, Ingrassia belongs nowhere near a position of responsibility in government and should be rejected swiftly by the Senate if his nomination makes it that far.
Ingrassia will show up in another Trump-chosen post, of course, because once out of that barrel, his awful nominees never really go away.
The best we can hope for, until Democrats muster the courage and succeed at impeaching Trump, is limiting the damage. In Ingrassia’s case, that potential is considerable.