By Jeremy Herb and Sara Murray, CNN
Kristina Karamo, the candidate Donald Trump supports to be Michigan’s next secretary of state, falsely claimed that the former president was Michigan’s real winner in 2020 and propagated the conspiracy theory that left-wing anarchists were the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
“Based on the established evidence and knowing how those conditions work, how those anarchists work, I think it’s absolutely Antifa masquerading as Trump supporters,” Karamo said in an episode of his podcast the day after the Jan. 6 uprising. you can buy a MAGA hat and put on a T-shirt and buy a Trump flag. “
In fact, many federal indictments have since claimed that Trump supporters attacked the U. S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Karamo has never held elected office or had a statewide career before, yet the 36-year-old network school teacher is one of the leading candidates for secretary of state for the Michigan Republican Party after receiving Trump’s approval in September. applicants in primary battlefield states across the country that Trump has subsidized in an effort to choose allies who adopt his lies for the 2020 election. Offices like Michigan’s secretary of state are leading the presidential election as Trump prepares for a possible offer back in 2024 — meaning Trump’s favorite applicants can simply upgrade to the same officials who stopped their attempts to overturn the 2020 election, such as Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
In Michigan, Karamo is one of 3 declared Republican candidates who will oppose Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in 2022, who is expected to stand for re-election.
Karamo gained importance in Michigan after the 2020 election when she claimed to have witnessed fraud as a candidate candidate in the state’s mail-in poll count. The month after the election, Karamo testified before a state Senate committee, signed the Supreme Court’s failed challenge to Biden’s. he won, and gave the impression on Fox News’ conservative opinion screens to publicize his accusations and falsely claim that widespread fraud occurred in the state.
A CNN review of Karamo’s podcast and writings on his now-defunct non-public website, which has not been reported before, gives a window into the worldview of the professor-turned-candidate who will lead Michigan’s election. anti-vaxxer “in 2020, even before the Covid-19 vaccine became a political high point. He opposed evolution training and called public schools “government indoctrination camps. “Republicans to members of the LGBTQ network and even couples living in combination before marriage.
Last month, Karamo made the impression along with other Republican secretary-aspiring ones who echoed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, adding Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem and Jim Marchant of Nevada, on one occasion in Las Vegas with figures connected to the QAnon conspiracy. On the occasion, she claimed in a speech that a statewide race would force her to expand her constituency, while criticizing Republicans who disagreed with her, saying she was “fighting my own people in the state. “
“One of the things I’m looking to be very aware of, you know, is that I’m participating in a statewide race,” Karamo said, according to a video provided to CNN. “And I perceive that I have to win the hearts and minds of other people who don’t necessarily think like me. “
Karamo and his crusade did not respond to several phone calls and emails from CNN requesting an interview, or a list of questions commenting on the positions he expressed.
Karamo, a single mother of two from a Detroit suburb, is no stranger to politics; He was active in the Republican Party from its leadership several years ago when he raised considerations about the public school curriculum and ran unsuccessfully for a county commissioner position in 2018.
Rocky Raczkowski, chairman of the Oakland County Republican Party, said Karamo volunteered as the party’s spokesman and made the impression on local political television shows.
“He has a way of speaking and a point of compassion, perception, intellect and the ability to talk to other people and make them perceive express problems,” Raczkowski told CNN. “When you see someone who can talk to other people and if they talk to them effectively, take a look to encourage that user, and we did. “
Karamo gained greater visibility after running as a Republican challenger in the 2020 election at Detroit’s TCF Center, where the city’s mail-in polls were being processed. Of the parties were right for Democrats and Republicans, but the vote counted for Democrats. In some other poll, he said the votes for Biden and the Green Party’s presidential nominee had been filled, but the vote had been given to Biden.
After the December election, Karamo testified at a Michigan Senate hearing about the fraud he claimed to have witnessed and signed an affidavit as part of a Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to nullify the effects of the election in 4 states. Lou Dobbs of Business Network, where she came forward as a “whistleblower” and criticized her state’s Republican legislature for not doing more.
“The fact that our legislature, our leaders sat here and did nothing about it, they’ve become complicit in fraud,” he said on Dobbs’ Fox Business Network in December 2020. “And they’re sitting here like we’re going to do it. forget, and I’m here to let you know that we may not forget it.
But the allegations of fraud he spread in videos on social media and in television interviews went far beyond his own experiences, falsely claiming on social media that “Donald Trump won Michigan. “
In a December 2020 appearance on a local Fox television station, Karamo claimed that ballots were altered through Dominion voting software in Antrim County, Michigan, where 6,000 votes were first incorrectly allocated to Biden instead of Trump due to human error. an error that was temporarily corrected. . « This software is in 47 counties. I did my calculations, it’s more than 200,000 votes that were potentially compromised,” Karamo said.
However, a Republican-led state Senate investigation in June found that there was “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in the 2020 Michigan election. The report in particular refuted the allegations relating to County Antrim and the Dominion, stating: they advertise County Antrim as the main evidence of a national conspiracy to borrow the scouse in the election and are putting all the other statements and moves they make in a position of zero credibility. “
As Trump’s continued lies about stealing the 2020 election convince more and more Republicans that Biden was illegitimately elected, Karamo announced his candidacy for secretary of state in May.
Karamo continued to pressure Michigan to conduct its own “forensic audit” in the style of Arizona’s partisan vote review conducted earlier this year that showed Biden won the state. He visited the Arizona site in June while the Cyber Ninjas review was underway, and later told the right OAN that Michigan reflects the process.
Karamo’s is in education. She has run as a part-time adjunct professor at Wayne County Community College since 2014, according to a university spokesperson. She teaches public speaking, school guidance and career progression for the school’s dual enrollment program for the fall 2021 semester, the spokesperson said.
Karamo holds a master’s degree in Christian apologetics, protecting Christianity from objections, from Biola University, an evangelical university in Southern California.
Sean McDowell, associate professor of Christian apologetics at Biola University, once taught Karamo and described her as outgoing and generally “a pleasure to have her in class. “
As for the apology, McDowell said Christians make their ideals explicit in other ways and said that even among apologists, other people have a variety of perspectives on the intersection of science and faith, issues of sexuality and how to fight non-believers.
“Even within the branch of apologetics, there are huge differences, even within the Christian world, about how other people perform their task in terms of the positions they defend, in terms of how other people behave and what their goals are. to do it,” McDowell said.
In his comments through his podcasts and writings on his online page in recent years, Kamaro sharpened his interpretation of Christianity with his fierce conservatism. Karamo’s depiction of politics leaves little room for compromise. through the devil.
“They’ve been completely taken over through a satanic agenda,” Karamo said of democrats in a November 2020 podcast episode.
After January 6, Karamo called for the removal of the Republican Party’s “conservative impostors. “”We legally want those traitors,” he said of the Republicans.
Karamo is one of 3 Republicans running for secretary of state to date. The candidate will be selected in a classic primary, but at a congress next year.
So far, Karamo has a significant fundraising advantage over other Republicans, with state Rep. Beau LaFave and City Clef. Cindy Berry raising more than $164,000 in contributions this year, according to financial data from the state crusade. about $450,000 in the last quarter of fundraising and he has over a million dollars in his crusade account.
LaFave has pointed to his crusade so far not in the 2020 election as Karamo, but in the Secretary of State’s closure of the DMV offices in Michigan. “Today, I am uttering my crusade for the opening of the offices!” he wrote on Facebook. when he announced he was running last month.
Gustavo Portela, a spokesman for the Michigan State Republican Party, said he wouldn’t be surprised to see the GOP’s terrain even more crowded, adding that Republicans across the country had been energized since Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia’s run for governor.
“Either way, our party is prepared and in a position to help any candidate who comes out of the nominating convention,” Portela said.
The end results of Michigan’s Republican crusade by the secretary of state, as well as the attorney general, where Trump also subsidized Republican attorney Matthew DePerno, who filed a lawsuit challenging the effects of the 2020 Michigan election that were based on the refuted allegations about Antrim County, may simply point the direction in which the Republican Party is heading toward the midterm elections of 2022 and the 2024 presidential election, where Trump is the favorite for the Republican nomination if he runs.
Karamo’s comments through her podcast, videos and non-public writings focus on issues similar to popular culture, sex and education, and warnings about what she sees as a harmful program being taught to young people in schools.
“This is what our schools have become: government indoctrination camps,” he said in January. “And forced to divulge to their son about the kind of rampant evil that those Democrats and liberals need to teach their child. “
Karamo opposed the instruction that some young people have two mothers or two fathers, saying he invites young people to talk about how homosexuals have sex. “A user with two mothers and two fathers does not exist. It’s just wrong,” Karamo said in January. No, it’s the father and his gay lover. That’s what’s going on,” he said in August 2020.
In an August 2019 blog post, he referred to transgender people who seek to play sports as “adults with intellectual disorders in disguise of gambling. It is also a component of the horribly destructive sexual revolution. “
He opposed evolution training in schools. “Evolution is one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated against us,” he said in a July 2019 video.
And he expressed fear that popular culture is pushing for the “normalization” of pedophilia, adding Michigan law and sex before marriage.
“When we normalize other people who fornicate and normalize other people who live with their boyfriends and girlfriends and all that, we open a door for us to get to the point where we have other people who need to normalize pedophilia,” he said in November.
McDowell, a professor of apologetics, said, “Christians have been largely involved in the conversion of marital and sexual norms for decades,” but added that he doesn’t think the express fear of cohabitation before marriage that paves the way for pedophilia is a widespread fear. among Christians.
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