Kurt Bardella to America: I’m a Democrat Now; America: Who the Hell Is Kurt Bardella?

Kurt Bardella (PBS FRONTLINE/screenshot)
PBS Frontline/screenshot
Rebecca Mansour

In a USA Today op-ed, #NeverTrump Z-list celebrity and Beltway PR consultant Kurt Bardella (who, by the way, would like everyone in America to remember that he once worked for Breitbart News before flouncing off in a cynically self-serving pantomime of political courage during the 2016 election) has finally announced that he has become a Democrat.

Bardella claims that embattled Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore was “the last straw” in his decision to leave the Republican Party.

This news comes as a surprise to the handful of Americans who have actually heard of Kurt Bardella and assumed that he had already left the GOP back in 2016, when he commenced his post-Breitbart media blitz to denounce Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and anyone else Megyn Kelly booked him to shiv on her Fox News show.

Or, at the very least, astute observers assumed Bardella went full blue by the time he was endorsing Hillary Clinton for president and tweeting chummy photos of himself with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Kamala Harris.

However, the political positions and progressive buzzwords Bardella embraces in his latest op-ed might make one wonder if he ever was a Republican to begin with.

But ideological distinctions are probably of little consequence to Bardella now. The former political PR consultant, who cut his teeth working on Capitol Hill for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) until Issa fired him for leaking emails to the New York Times, let slip that he is able to embrace his new woked-ness because he’s “free from any professional loyalties.” That seems like a pretty way of saying no one in politics wants to hire him.

From Bardella’s USA Today op-ed:

For the first time since I was in high school, I was free from any professional loyalties. It was liberating at first, then very sobering and ultimately just disappointing. I couldn’t understand how so many in the GOP could stand by, silently, as Donald Trump and Steve Bannon remade and redefined the Republican Party. An unrelenting assault on the Constitution, the free press and freedom of expression while Republican “leaders” do nothing. Ignoring legitimate issues about race relations in America, environmental policy, gun reform and equality to instead pander to a lunatic fringe that subscribes to an ideology of hate and fear.

…

The more time I spent on my own, with no clients to defend, the more I came to realize that Republican positions on the most pressing challenges facing our society were out of alignment with what I believed. This is a party that constantly buries its head in the sand on climate change, racial profiling, guns, LGBTQ equality, income inequality, food insecurity, paid family leave and the treatment of women.

…

I believe that the Democratic Party will do more to ensure the survival of our planet and its natural resources than the Republican Party ever would.

I am throwing in with the Democratic Party because at the end of the day, I believe its portrait of America is better than the one being painted by today’s Republican Party. And I want to be a part of it.

Read the rest here.

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