Evan McMullin Whines After Club for Growth Highlights His Claim That Republicans Are Racist

Utah's Evan McMullin speaks during an interview on July 23, 2022, in Provo, Utah. McMullin
AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
Sean Moran

Never Trumper and Utah independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin whined about the Club for Growth’s ads highlighting his repeated claims that Republicans are “racist.”

After the Club for Growth launched an ad last week highlighting McMullin’s repeated claims that Republicans are racist and bigots, McMullin led a tirade in a press conference calling for the ad to be pulled. The ad was exclusively obtained by Breitbart News ahead of its release.

“This election and my campaign are about standing up about the broken politics and extremism that’s plagued our country and also the unhealthy influence of special interest groups in our politics,” McMullin said during the press conference. “The latest example for us was yesterday. An out-of-state special interest group that supports far-right politicians across America, including Mike Lee, started running an ad that deliberately edited my words to deceive and divide our state in order to save Mike Lee and his failing campaign.”

“They’re spending millions of dollars in this campaign to deceive and divide Utahns in order to protect Mike Lee,” McMullin, a former CIA officer, said.

Here is the ad that McMullin has called to cancel:

At McMullin’s behest, KSL took down the ad.

However, even though McMullin has called the ad deceptively edited, McMullin has repeatedly attacked Republicans as bigots.

“There is an element of the Republican base that is racist,” McMullin said during an August 2017 interview.

In a February 2021 interview, McMullin said the Republican party was “rotten to the core.”

In June 2020 McMullin said, “The Republican Party has become so darn un-American.”

“For too long, conservative leaders have been unwilling to confront the bigots and crazies within their base. That has to change,” McMullin wrote in June 2017. He even suggested that “savvy foreign adversaries” could “highjack” Republicans’ vulnerable base if conservative leaders do nothing.

McMullin wrote in June 2020, “The GOP is sick. It invited racist parasites into Lincoln’s party years ago and they’ve sucked the values and patriotism from its body. I haven’t been optimistic that it could change, but I hoped and fought anyway. Now, I don’t see how it ever recovers from Trump’s ‘white power.'”

He also wrote in the same month, “I was raised by anti–racist Republicans. I know there are millions of them still out there, but the party has been overcome by the treacherous cancer of bigotry and it must be defeated until it repents and reforms or dies once and for all.”

McMullin explained in 2016 that he learned the Republican Party allegedly has racist roots after working as a senior staffer in the House of Representatives. “I spent a lot of time in the Republican Party believing that that was something Democrats and liberals would say, [people] who weren’t interested in really understanding who we were,” McMullin said. “But I have to say in the time that I spent in the House of Representatives and leadership and in senior roles there, I realized that no, they’re actually right.”

He continued, “And Donald Trump made it ever more clear that there is a serious problem of racism in the Republican Party. That is the problem. Not conservative ideals. Racism is not conservatism. And that’s what I’m talking about. That’s the problem.”

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

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