For now the second Halloween in a row, Republicans failed to warn voters about the dangers of malevolent actors giving rainbow fentanyl to trick-or-treaters. For example, a Google search turns up just two articles from a Hawaiian news site saying “while there hasn’t been any cases of fentanyl involved in Halloween candies so far, some parents are concerned that it will just take one.”
“I don’t allow my kids to open anything without me looking at all their candy because it’s just much more dangerous. And because poisons or fentanyl, things like that, could be injected or placed inside the candy without anybody even noticing,” said Oahu man David Onerheim, who we guess is still on the kick two years after then-RNC chair Ronna Not-Romney made her infamous warning.
The other article quotes a Honolulu Police Department Sergeant saying to inspect the candy because “What we’re seeing right now these days is actually there’s something called the rainbow fentanyl” and then telling parents to “glove up” before they inspect the kids’ candy and Jesus Christ, lol… Anyway the localized coverage is hardly indicative of the national crisis that was primed to explode two years ago and we place the blame squarely on Republicans for not recycling it to portray a vote for Trump as being a vote to protect your kids from rainbow fentanyl five days before election day even if that never made much sense to begin with. They still fucked this up big time.
And, to be marginally more serious here, is the lack of the “coordinated messaging apparatus” that turned rainbow fentanyl in Halloween candy into an imaginary thing in 2022 a sign of current RNC chair Mike Whatley’s incompetence and fecklessness relative to Ronna’s? Don’t get us wrong, she was full of shit, but you can’t deny that it was provocative and attention-grabbing. It felt true, and that was good enough to win the GOP the House majority amid all their self-inflicted headwinds.
Worth asking whether we’d be seeing a focused scare tactic like that or the caravans or Antifa or Critical Race Theory some either imagined or extremely exaggerated singular-ish threat to the prime suburban-female-family-type demographics the GOP do not seem to be doing too well with this year. Instead it’s all just Trump trying to activate the can’t-afford-a-Cybertruck-but-still-identify-with-Elon douchebags. We’ll never know what would have happened if Charlie Kirk hadn’t gotten Trump to fire her, but it may soon be clear-ish whether Ronna was the weakness everyone said she was, or she was actually a strength that helped prevent bad election days from going worse.