Today Stacey Dash—you remember her as Dionne from Clueless—filed the official paperwork to run for Congress, CNN reports. She’s hoping to unseat Democratic incumbent Nanette Barragán to represent Compton, Watts, San Pedro, and North Long Beach in the U.S. House of Representatives. This is unlikely to go well for Stacey Dash.
After her rise to B-list 1990s screen stardom, Dash’s career took a bit of a turn. She became a conservative cultural critic and was even hired as a pundit for Fox News. She endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 and penned a memoir, There Goes My Social Life: From Clueless to Conservative.
Which, of course, is all fine. Sure, the CA-44th voted Democratic in 2016 by over 83 percent and it’s unlikely any Republican is going to unseat a sitting member who, as it happens, is a glass-ceiling-breaking Latina considered a leader to watch in California politics. But Stacey Dash is entitled to her beliefs and should exercise her right to bring her issues to public debate.
Except, the thing is, some of her issues are a little…yikes.
Here are some things to know about actual Congressional candidate Stacey Dash.
She called the #OscarsSoWhite movement “ludicrous,” placing the blame for lack of diversity in Hollywood on BET. “If we don’t want segregation, then we need to get rid of channels like BET,” she said on Fox & Friends. Dash claimed she found it particularly odd that the move for representation at the Oscars would peak in 2016, while President Obama was still in office, because, as she put it, “Over the past eight years, we’ve had a president who is black, who gets his funding mainly from Hollywood.” (She went on in that same conversation to volunteer that “There shouldn’t be a Black History Month” until a White History Month is also established, even though that wasn’t even really what they were talking about, but she apparently just wanted to make sure the conversation was deeply cringe-worthy.)
Then, after appearing briefly on the Oscars stage in 2016 to be the human the punchline of a Chris Rock joke (it’s unclear if she understood this to be the purpose of her invitation), she wrote an open letter doubling down on her disinterest in #OscarsSoWhite. According to her, “Different colors of skin is an easy kind of diversity. Ideological diversity is much harder, because it forces everyone to come face to face with actual beliefs,” and that, in her mind, the real oppression is the hegemony of Hollywood liberalism.
While appearing on an episode of The Sean Hannity Show (a phrase which, we’ll admit, has probably not often preceded a compliment of anyone’s poise and decorum) she said that African-Americans in Louisiana voting for President Obama was a sign that, “They’re getting money for free. They feel worthless. They’re uneducated,” and that the population suffered from “a plantation mentality.”
On another Fox show, she weighed in on campus sexual assault, describing victims as “bad girls who like to be naughty,” who drink too much and make victims of themselves. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Alcohol doesn’t get you drunk, you get yourself drunk,” she said in a remarkable twofer of offensive comments. She later apologized for the remark, which she described as “a failed attempt at humor.”
She also thinks Al Gore is lying about climate change, apparently because sometimes she feels cold, and has criticized Leonardo DiCaprio for bringing up environmental issues in public because they might “disturb everyone.” Dash thinks environmental protection is a waste of government resources which she would prefer to see spent “securing our borders.”
While running for Congress, Dash is actually also working on a movie, one about what she calls “the infamous Roe vs. Wade ruling.” On her blog, she says it will blow the lid off Planned Parenthood’s secret agenda, claiming that “abortion is the biggest killer of blacks in America.” (The CDC says that would be heart disease, and also that statement doesn’t make sense anyway, but why let facts get in the way of a movie?)
And, well, since this author had to dive into Dash’s blog to write this story and needs someone else to know what’s going on in there, here is another recent gem: “We already deal with ridiculous phrases as Toxic Masculinity. I want to remind all those who believe that idiotic term is a real thing of the toxic masculinity that is helping quell the wildfires that are burning all around me as I write this from Los Angeles. Strange, I don’t hear any feminist rant about the men putting their lives on the line to save property and life. When it comes to that, then masculine men are approved of, I guess.”
It remains to be seen if she’ll tone down the rhetoric now that she’s thrown her hat into the mainstream ring, or if she’ll carry on in the vein that led Julian Kimble to describe her in Complex magazine as “a professional crazy lady, a right wing troll willing to say anything so long as it contradicts some liberal orthodoxy.”
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