Evan McMullin Panics After Conservatives Highlight His Claim Republicans Are Racist

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

Never Trumper and Utah independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin rushed out ads defending himself after the Club for Growth highlighted how he has said many Republicans are bigoted and racist.

“Mike Lee’s special interest friends are lying about me because I won’t take their money and unlike Mike Lee, they can’t buy my vote,” McMullin said in an ad.

He made his move after the Club for Growth ran an ad exposing how McMullin said Republicans are racist and bigots on many occasions.

After the conservative activist group ran the ad, McMullin led a tirade in a press conference calling for the ads to be pulled; the ad was exclusively obtained by Breitbart News.

KSL-TV, a local Utah news station, took down the ad At McMullin’s behest.

Here is the ad that McMullin found so controversial:

Even though McMullin has claimed the Club for Growth’s ad amounts to a distortion of what he has said, McMullin has said on many occasions that the Republican base harbors bigots.

During one interview in 2016, Donald Trump told any of his supporters to “stop” any threatening behavior.

In response, McMullin called Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, a “white supremacist:”

“Unlike @realDonaldTrump, I believe in standing up to racists, not mainstreaming them. #DebateNight,” McMullin wrote in September 2016.

The Utah independent Senate candidate wrote in September 2016, “Donald Trump is a racist. Trump is a racist brand. It’s time to call a spade a spade. #TTF“

“.@Toure,@realDonaldTrump openly admires the world’s most brutal dictators and his policies reflect a racist, repressive agenda for America,” McMullin wrote in October 2016. 

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

McMullin said in February 2021 that the Republican Party was “rotten to the core.”

The Never Trumper said in June 2020 that 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 said.

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.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.