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Georgia Republican primary elections in 2022 are sure to be a white nationalist circus of ultra-MAGA proportions.

David Perdue is still licking his wounds from his U.S. Senate loss last year, but that hasn’t stopped him from gunning for Gov. Brian Kemp’s office—which is basically like Skeletor throwing hands with a low-level Decepticon—and it looks like he’s whipping out old, stale and thoroughly debunked talking points about a 2020 election rigged through absentee ballots despite his claim that he’s “trying to run a campaign not based on the past but on the future.” 

Then you have congresswoman and Anglo-Saxon Gollum Majoriew Taylor Greene, who stays in a perpetual Verzuz battle with slightly more moderate members of the GOP, claiming that QMorons like her represent the base of the Republican party, not the fringe—which she’s probably right about, to be honest. 

But if it’s any consolation at all, the GOP will be down one miserably racist Klan enthusiast next year as Rep. Tommy Benton (R-Jefferson) has announced that he will not be seeking re-election into the state legislature in 2022, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

If you’re unfamiliar with Benton, it’s probably because identifying an extreme racist in the GOP is like staring at a Where’s Waldo book in which everyone is wearing candy stripes. So here’s a little background on the guy who probably hangs nooses above his fireplace on Christmas.

As we previously reported, in 2016, Benton made the media rounds to promote legislation aimed at upholding holidays celebrating prominent members of the Confederacy and permanently protecting the carvings of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Stone Mountain National Park. But it was difficult to tell if he was defending his proposed bills or putting in a KKK grand wizard application because this man was defending the Klan and the institution of slavery like he was in some white supremacist nerd group defending his favorite fandoms.

“The idea that slavery was the cause of the war, it wasn’t,” Benton told  WSB-TV Atlanta. “The Southern states seceded because the North was advocating they do away with slavery, but they offered no idea as to what the South would do with a loss of $2 billion of property, per se.”

So, the Civil War wasn’t fought because southern states wanted to keep their human negroes in captivity and forced labor, it was fought because northerners weren’t providing any financial alternatives to human negroes in captivity and forced labor. This guy is of the party that chides people as being lazy and not wanting to work but look how fast “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” became “pull your bootstraps off and use them to whip your human ‘property’ for free cotton picking.”

Somehow, this arguably wasn’t even the worse thing Benton ever said.

In an interview with AJC the same year, the guy who probably wonders why neither Marvel nor DC Comics ever made Jim Crow into a superhero said the Ku Klux Klan “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order.”

“It made a lot of people straighten up,” he said. “I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”

Nah, it really sounds like he was saying “what they did was right.”

Sure, the Klan “made a lot of people straighten up”—because that’s what tends to happen to a lifeless body when it’s hanging from a tree branch. 

Imagine being so racist that you see the lynchings of thousands of Black people—the same people he reduced to white people’s “property”—as a viable way to uphold law and order.

Anyway, according to the Jackson Herald, Benton said that after nearly two decades representing Jackson County, “it was time” for him to give up his legislative seat andoh, I don’t know—see if he can still fit into his favorite Klan robe maybe.

The only thing to take from this, really, is that for almost 20 years, Benton held office as a representative of the totally-not-racist Republican party.

Georgia, I tell ya’.

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